August 1986

AUGUST 1986 RUPEES FOUR

....

The Choreography of Paul Taylor

Sounds of Citrus In an exotic research effort at the ~.S. Agricultural Research Service in Gainesville, Florida, scientists are developing technology to help produ~ers and shippers detect disease-causing insects in fruits, nuts and grains. The research is also expected to develop workable systems for state and federal inspectors to check potential insect pests from infiltrating their borders. Here, engineer J.e. Webb, working in a soundproof studio, tests an experimental system that enables him to hear the barely audible sounds of tiny fruit Oy larvae chewing a grapefruit's pulpmuch as physicians use a stethoscope to listen to and diagnose internal disorders in the human body.

SPAN 2 Harvard at 350

6 Remembering Harvard

10 Admissions Guide Going to College in America

by Michael Brush

12 Images of America

15 Forfeiting DI-Gotten Gains

by A.G.

Noorani

16 Citizens Against Drugs

by Dayid Purcell

18 A Scientific Dialogue

22 In Paul Taylor's Footsteps

28 On the Lighter Side

29 White-Water Executives

34 Focus On ...

36 Snakebite-Killing

the Myths

by Louise Riber

39 Ernest Hemingway-Coming

by Raymond

of Age

Carver

40 The Killers

44 The Rishis at Home. in America

48 Seeing Earth: Literary Responses to Space Exploration A Reyiew by D.R. Mohan Raj

Art Director

Nand Katyal

Associate Art Director

Kanti Roy

Assistant Art Director

Bimanesh Roy Choudhury

Chief of Production

Awtar S. Marwaha

Circulation Manager

Y.P. Pandhi

Photographic Service

USIS Photographic Services Unit

Photographs: Front cover-Bill King. 1-Bruce Dale Š National Geographic Society. 2 top left-J.R. Holland; bottom left-Chris Johnson; right-Rick Stafford. 3-J.R. Holland. 4-Ellis Herwig. 5 top-Chris Johnson; bottom-Rick Stafford. 8 left-Rick Stafford; right, bottom-J.R. Holland. 9-Ellis Herwig. 12 top-Abigail Heyman, courtesy Magnum; bottom-Ralph Crane, courtesy Black Star. 13 left-courtesy Imogen Cunningham; right-Charlotte Brooks, courtesy Library of Congress; bottom-Burk Uzzle, courtesy Magnum. 14 left-Charles Harbutt, courtesy Magnum; right-courtesy Joe Monroe; bottom-Dennis Stock, courtesy Magnum. 19,21 top-courtesy The Hindustan Times. 22-27-Bill King.

30-31-----{;ourtesyOutward Bound Inc. 35 top-R.K. Sharma; bottom-Lucien Perkins, The Washington Post. 36-37-----{;ourtesyEco Media. 44-47-Avinash Pasricha. Inside back cover and back cover by Kevin Horan except IBC center courtesy Anchorage News.

Correction: Jacquelin Singh, author of the article, "The Printed Word" in our July 1986 issue, is not a teacher :f, the American Embassy SchooI: The error is regretted.

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 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.

Front cover: Arden Court, a dance about male happiness, is choreographed by Paul Taylor whose style interweaves the experimental and the classical.

See also pages 22-27.

Back cover: Frost from a night on the Yukon River in Alaska in minus 45 degrees C clings to the snow mask of a participant in the Annual Iditarod Trail International Sled Dog Race.

See also inside back cover.

It's August, and that means America is on the move. This summer more than ever, Arr~rican families have piled into the "old family buggy" and headed off down the open highway. The lowest gasoline prices in over a decade, the shrinking u.s. dollar lllakingEuropean travel more expensive and a nervousness over international terrorism have rekindled a love affair drarr~tized in our literature, romanticized in our cinema, and vocalized in our music: as Willie Nelson celebrates "We're On The Road Again."

As literally millions of Americans cross and recross the world's greatest road system, most will pay little attention to an important birthday, the anniversary of an event which changed the face of a continent and, perhaps more impJrtantly, the way Americans think about themselves and their country. It was 30 years ago--on June 29, 1956--that President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the act that created America's greatest peace-time public works project, its fabled interstate highway system.

Legend has it that Eisenhower was only a lieutenant colonel when he led an army convoy 5,000 kilometers from Washington, D.C., to San Francisco in 1919. The two-month trip convinced him that America needed national highways. Others also saw this need, and in 1921 the Federal-Aid Highway Act created an interci ty highway system. 'I'he 1920s roared, the 1930s faltered, as the Great Depression made it difficult to undertake heavy-duty road building. World War II came along and by now Eisenhower was commanding Allied troops in Europe, where he saw the efficiency of the German high-speed autobahn network. Twelve years later, with Eisenhower firmly ensconced in the White House, a law was passed which called for the creation of a 66,000-kilometer interstate system. The 1956 Federal-Aid Highway Act not only created the sinews to bind a continental nation together, but the heart to pump the dollars to pay for it. The Highway Trust Fund was fed by taxes on fuels, tires, trucks ~nd buses. One of history's more astute legislative actions, the federal trust fund was predicated on the idea that those who use-the roads should pay for them.

The roads began rolling, and the country changed. Distances shrank. Space was no longer measured in kilometers but in time.

The journey from Richmond, Virginia, to Washington, D.C., wasn't 200 kilometers now but two hours of easy driving. You could be at grandma's house in an afternoon, to the beach in a day and across the United States in three days. Americans moved out and spread out and ran about, and in the end made their country a place, as well as a State of mind.

However, this transformation wasn't all greeted with applause: there were complaints to be sure. Many said it destroyed the uniqueness of the nation's regions: along the highways New England clam chowder and Louisiana red beans and rice were replaced- by the ubiquitous mass-produced hamburger. It fomented the rapid growth of the suburbs, but destroyed the possibility for effective mass transit. It gobbled up enormous amounts of landfor its interchanges, flyovers and rest areas. In cities, it slashed through traditional neighborhoods and ripped apart established living patterns.

But whatever its faults, the highway s~tem made Americans aware of their country as never before. It took them from their cities to the great open spaces of the West: to Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon and the Rocky Mountains. Like ~~e siren's song, it lured farmers and people from small towns to visit New York and Washington, New Orleans and San Francisco.

It made possible a Disney World, built in the middle of empty central Florida farmland but within a two-day drive for half of America's population. And it brought average Americans face to face with their own history. You can see them there now, standing outside George Washington's home at Mount Vernon, Virginia, walking through the ruins of the historic Alamo in San Antonio, Texas, or marveling at the splendor of publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst's baronial estate in San Simeon, California.

In this our year of birthdays--the 210th anniversary of American independence, 150th of the state of Texas, 100th of the Statue of Liberty, and the 30th of the interstate highway system--I invite you to visit America. And within. but a moment you will be heading South (or East or West or North) to discover the enchantment and lure of America's open roads.

--J.A.M.

The oldest institution of higher learning in the United States, Harvard University began in 1636 with ÂŁ400, a single building, one teacher and four students in Cambridge, Massachusetts, across the Charles _River from Boston. In 1638, John Harvard, an immigrant Puritan minister, bequeathed it ÂŁ780 and 400 books.

(Today the Harvard University Library has 11 million volumes.) The college, quite unorganized till then, was named Harvard in his honor. Today there are almost 17,000 students, including 2,000 from abo'I~1 00 foreign countries, some 7/_'00 faculty members and 17 separate departments administered by 9 faculties.

Less than half of its students are undergraduates at Harvard ~ollege; the rest study in the graduate schools of arts and sciences, business administration, dental medicine, design, divinity, education, law, medicine, public administration and public health. The university is supported by private donations and run by a

board elected by the alumni. Harvard's endowment is over $ 2,000 million, permitting it to offer scholarships to more than a third of its students.

Though its original yards, quadrangles, classrooms and its ambience have remained the same over the years, Harvard has changed with the

times. Over the years it has expanded greatly, become coeducational with a more informal atmosphere and has computers in the classrooms. But the common thread running through three-and-a-half centuries has been an exceptional standard of excellence. Harvard has given the United States its most brilliant scholars, sci-

entists, some 50 Nobel laureates in diverse fields, men of letters and six American Presidents.

On the occasion of Harvard's 350th anniversary, SPAN asked its former editor and Harvard alumnus Mal Oettinger to pen down his reminiscences about his 25th-year reunion at Harvard a few years ago.

oingback to Cambridge, Massachusetts, for the 25th reunion of my Harvard class was like stepping into a science-fiction time machine or like a dream in which the familiar had been disturbingly altered.

Here was a sea of faces, people I felt I should know but looking strangely like fathers or uncles of my former comrades.

A cozy street of shops had become a solid facade of granite with a high-doored glass entrance. Someone I had looked forward to seeing again is dead, I was told.

Harvard College was founded in 1636.

I didn't get there until 1950, and my advent probably didn't mean much to Harvard but it was important to me. It was clear from the time I was admitted that Harvard expected something of its students-nobody specified exactly what.

Plainly Harvard did not care whether I attended its athletic contests and cheered for its teams; rules about personal conduct were generally permissive and not rigidly enforced. The administrators of the college did not seem concerned about whether an individual student studied or not-if he failed to achieve satisfactory grades, he simply was out.

The faculty was distinguished to the point that I found its members unapproachable. Anna Freud lectured on psychological theory and B.F. Skinner used undergraduates (and pigeons) to test his theories of psychology. Arthur Schlesinger taught history, and Clyde Kluckhohn and Ernest Hooten were leading authorities in different schools of anthropology. In my field of English literature alone, there were novelist and playwright Thornton Wilder, poets Archibald MacLeish and Richard Wilbur, critics Alfred Kazin, Harry Levin and Walter Jackson Bates. Even some of the teaching assistants were minor literary celebrities.

While I was a student at Harvard,' I worried about measuring up to the college's standards. I approached the reunion with similar feelings of anxiety mixed with nostalgia. Would I be snubbed by a writer whose post-college work I greatly admire? Would I be patronized by a classmate who is now a senator? When I told people I edited government publications, would they respond, "Oh, that's nice," and turn away? Fortunately, my worst fears were never realized, and I learned that many classmates had similar _apprehensions.

G

The "festive rites" of the 25th Class ate 1,360 liters of ice cream. It was hot Reunion (as a former president of the that day. university called them) seem rather out of On a bright June Sunday afternoon my character for a school as low-key, as wife and I checked in at the Freshman complacent as Harvard. Most colleges Union, a venerable dining and meeting conduct reunions for classes with particuhall I had not set foot in for 28 years. It lar emphasis on five-year anniversaries of 'hadn't changed a bit. I was greeted graduation. Harvard pays a nod to these effusively by classmates I had known interim commemorations, but goes all slightly.

A classmate's daughter escorted us out on the quarter-century mark. It is as if a father paid no attention to his through the registration line and loaded children until they were grown, with us with favors: T-shirts, playing cards, clearly formed personalities, and then frisbees, a wastebasket, class hats, class chartered the lie de France for a round- ties, car bumper stickers-all emblathe-world tour. The university under- zoned with the Harvard crest and the stands, of course, that its previously slogan "The Great Comeback of '54." A unbadgered graduates, near the height of Harvard junior, Tom Bridges of Minnetheir earning powers after 25 years, may be ready to think in terms of grand gestures themselves. The Class of 1954 I responded to Harvard's importunings by donating $2,054,000, a record for any class from any university at that time.

More than 600 classmates, well over half the class, attended the reunion, most of them accompanied by wives and between one and 11 children. The reunion staff arranged separate programs for children by age groups, though some events involved the entire Class of 1954 family, more than 2,000 persons. Two employees of the Harvard Alumni Office are assigned no duties other than the annual 25th reunions. They have the routine down to a science, and one confided that they accept only minor suggestions from the classes' officers. She said she likes to Above: Recent Harvard graduates on specialize in the 25th reunion because "there seems to be a competitive rivalry Commencement Day. Above right: The statue among classmates at the 10th and 15th offounder 10hnHarvard in the Old Yard reunions, a lot of one-upmanship. But by serves as a meeting place, landmark-and a reminder of a centuries-old legacy. Right: The the 25th, they. seem to be more at peace political activity of Harvard students has with themselves and with one another. ranged from nonexistent to violent (in the They know they have become just about 1960s). Today it has taken a more balanced what they are going to be." I found her form, expressed in peaceful demonstrations. appraisal probably accurate, but a bit depressing.

Harvard charged members of the class sota, helped us lug our baggage across minimal fees for the five-day festivities, Harvard Yard to Matthews Hall, an the same amount whether they came 18th-century brick dormitory with Sparalone or with family. I learned from tan accommodations. Bridges said he is unofficial sources that the university laid majoring in medieval history, "not for the out some $26,000 just for liquor for the information, you understand, but to learn class. Caterers report that on the last two a discipline, a way of considering facts days, we classmates and our families that may be helpful in whatever I decide consumed 1,680 kilograms of chicken, to do." He seemed more serious than 1,400 kilograms of potato salad, 3,238 most students of my era, but competition chicken lobsters, 3,000 hamburger pat- to get into and stay at Harvard is much ties, 4,210 hotdogs and 2,450 split broil- tougher today than it was then. Besides, I ers. On Commencement Day alone, we never had to engage in small talk with old

crocks, unlike the young Tom Bridges.

Another change was evident when I met the former occupant of the room we were stayillg in: She was a daughter of a classmate. In the ~nighted era when I attended Harvard, no women were permitted in the freshman dorms and women could visit upperclassmen's suites only during severely restricted hours. Today, of course, women are Harvard students.

The schedule for the five-day reunion was like a menu concocted by a master chef: Solid intellectual meat in the form of symposia on education, government, the press, economics and the arts; a seasoning of nostalgia through events based around individual houses and var-

ious extracurricular activIties; plenty of dessert in the form of parties, a day of sports in the countryside, sightseeing tours and a soupcon of quintessential New England culture-a special concert by the Boston Pops Orchestra.

The first event was a cocktail party in a large administration hall. Family intro-' ductions, "Gee, you look great!" or "You haven't changed at all." The touchstones, sometimes subtle, were: How well have you succeeded in life and how well have you weathered it physically.

At 5:30 we were transported by buses to the university tennis courts for a lavish dinner, crowned by French wine and cigars banded with the Harvard crest.

The guest of honor was Harvard President Derek Bok, 49, who, disconcertingly, is only two years older than I. Bok spoke after dinner and proclaimed the Class of '54 "far and away the most distinguished class that has come through Harvard." I took that as a customary expression of flattering hyperbole. But members of this class were sufficiently prominent to encourage Newsweek, The New York Times, The Washinston Post and other news organizations that ignore similar gatherings to cover'this reunion.

The Times said: "Where else but at Harvard would the 1,130 surviving members of the Class of '54 include Senators Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts and John C. Culver of Iowa; two congressmen, Anthony C. Beilenson of California and David R. Bowen of Mississippi; (novelist) John Updike and such nonfiction writers as (essayist) Edward Hoagland, Christopher Lasch (a historian whose work has reportedly influenced President Carter's views of the United States), and Richard Eder, the theater critic of The New York Times; the heads of the Museum of Modern Art, the National Portrait Gallery, Colgate University, Westinghouse Broadcasting and The Boston Globe; (prominent lawyer) F. Lee Bailey and more than 100 other lawyers; more than 70 professors; more than 80 medical doctors; 95 men, all told, who report earning more than $100,000 a year, and a happy subsistence farmer in Nova Scotia?"

Other noteworthy classmates include: the Aga Khan; the grandsons of Henri Matisse and James Joyce; a surgeon named Randolph Seed, cited twice in the Guinness -Book of World Records for running up 100 flights of stairs in 14 minutes, 29 seconds and for the world's fastest vertical mile (2 hours, 53 minutes, 16 seconds); the man involved in the world's largest personal bankruptcy suit (he now publishes newsletters, notably a collection of jokes).

"I've been wondering about who didn't show up," John Updike mused. "I think the people who dropped out of society don't show up. And those people who are so important they can't be spared by their companies don't show up either. Of ~course, many classmates have become teachers, including most of the people that I knew well at Harvard. They've become teachers and they've not shown up here." Updike was on hand for the graduation of a son from Harvard as well as for the reunion.

A group of 48 classmates who did not show up were remembered in a memorial service the second day of the reunion.

Only one had been killed in battle, in Vietnam; two had died in separate mountain-climbing accidents. Members of the class filled all pews in the cavernous Memorial Church, an austere chapel near Harvard Yard. Four classmates-a rabbi and three Protestant ministers-conducted the service. The ceremony concluded with a recitation of the names of the deceased, each followed by a toll of the ancient church bell as the, classmates stood with bowed heads.

The first of the symposia, "Harvard Today," was held in the new science center, which had been cited by the Institute of American Architects as one of the best-designed buildings of 1977.

The enormous lecture hall was packed, with class members and their wives sitting on steps and tables in the back.

After the symposium, we assembled on the steps of Widener Library for the official class reunion photograph. We had been asked to wear our class hats and class ties, but many classmates grumbled that we have always been individuals, not conformists. The hats were abandoned.

We were invited to lunch at the houses where we had lived as upperclassmen.

Much of college social life revolves around the houses, each of which has 300 to 500 residents. The house I had lived in, Adams House, was known in those days for its superior cuisine, and this tradition

apparently had stood up over the quartercentury. A unit of the Harvard Band played rousing indigestion music while we dined. The band was always considered better than the athletic teams it supports and during the reunion, the band was ubiquitous. Although I remembered that we students used to sneer at musical manifestations of school spirit, I found the rousing tun~s glorifying Harvard had an emotional impact on meeven the fourth or fifth time.

I saw a notice on the house bulletin board warning students to empty their waterbeds before leaving for summer vacation. That had not been a problem in my day.

Despite hearty lunches, classmates dutifully reported to the afternoon symposia, choosing between a session on "Government: What Has It Done For . Me Lately (and Can I Afford It)?" and "Freedom of the Press: Too Much of a Good Thing?" Participants in the government panel were classmates in Congress (minus Senator Kennedy and plus an Ohio state senator and the general counsel of the U.S. Treasury). They tended to be more liberal and idealistic than the bodies they represent.

After the symposia, my wife and I had just enough time to change into party clothes and catch a bus to the dinner-dance at the Park Plaza Hotel, across the Charles River in Boston. A big band played the melodies of the 1940s and 1950s for our dancing pleasure, while a disco band with electronic instruments and flashing lights played for alumni children 18 and older in another ballroom down the hall.

We middle-aged people seemed to energize one another, and the party went on until 2 in the morning, with dancing, drinking, joking, remembering lost times.

Tuesday I was a somnambulist. Another symposium proved a pleasant change of paclt-songs, skits and films produced by talented undergraduates and performed in the new theater center. Then a monster picnic lunch in the Eliot House quadrangle, with balloons and frisbees, bunting and tents, the Harvard Band en masse. A visit to the Harvard radio station where I used to spin jazz records and gab on the air weeknights from 1 to 3.

The station's alumni are called "ghosts" and I felt particularly spectral talking with a female student who now plays jazz records at the station. I told her about going to Boston to .hear Louis Armstrong and Sidney Bechet and Charlie Parker

Pinky Anand (advocate), Masters in Law, 1980-81, Harvard Law School.

Vinay Bharat Ram (industrialist), Program for Management Develppment, 1966, Harvard Business School.

David Davidar (associate editor, Penguin Books, India), Book Publishing Program, Harvard College, 1985.

Deepak Khosla (industrialist) , Program for Management Development, 1979, Harvard Business School.

Dr. Prabha Malhotra (former head, Preventive and Social Medicine, Maulana Azad Medical College), Masters of Science Hygiene, 1962-63, Harvard School of Public Health.

Ram Sharma (architect, professor), Masters in Landscape Architecture, 1958-59, Harvard Graduate School of Design.

j':c_::-:-:-:============================:;===::;-l

Harvard

Everyone assumes that Harvard has the toughest courses going, that you hardly get time to breathe. But it's not really like that. I had a terrific year.

There was time for fun, for sports, for weekend outings.

Even now I fondly remember our Thank-God-It's-Friday parties. We chatted, saw movies, traveled and, of course, we studied.

The good thing about the courses was that they meant more than just reading textbooks. The Harvard approach is to make you analyze everything.

The Socratic method. You learn to question and never to just depend on what the printed word tells you.

One of the most fantastic parts of Harvard is its library.

It's superb. It's open till midnight and one can be sure of getting everything one wants there. It's possible that one will find things on Indian law there that one may find difficult to get in a university library here.

How does Harvard help me in my career? Well, other things apart, just the name helps. People aSsume I must be someone special!

Vinay Bharat Ram I wouldn't say that the level of studies at Harvard was superior to that of other American universities-say Michigan University in Ann Arbor, where I had got my MBA. But, yes, Harvard is special enough for one to want to get the Harvard label!

HBS prides itself in bringing the real world into the classroom-that's the essence of the case method. I honestly believe that no other institution in the world has mastered the art of case-writing as Harvard has. HBS always does real cases. I think the most interesting one that we did was of the Playboy company and its management style!

In the West this was also the era of nirvana and Ravi Shankar. As a disciple of Punditji's, I was gratified t~ see that he was

I Harvard's Indian alumni are achievers in government, industry, law, academics, management, publishing, medicine and many other fields. Here some members of the Harvard Club of India's Delhi chapter recall what it was like being at one of the world's great centers of learning.

quite extraordinary-of the 85 students that year about 80 got jobs within two weeks of doing the course.

The best thing Harvard does is to give you a sense of confidence in yourself.

It was wonderful to be taught by some of the legendary names, people one had heard the hottest thing in music there. of, authors of famous books: I had taken my sitar along and, Bruce Scott, Anthony Athos, well, occasionally, one played Barry Thomson. And all in such for friends. an informal atmosphere-no The academics were pretty ties, no suits. The professors ruthless, there was nothing would invite themselves out romantic about them. But the with us to chat over meals. And girls across the river were a we got a rare opportunity to meet and exchange ideas with treat! We took every opportunity to go across. I enjoyed it people from all over the world-mia-career people like all tremendously.

What else do I remember oneself. It WaS a' great and about Harvard? The cold! And ewiting experience. living like a stw;knt all over Since it w'!s just a threeagain. Can you imagine-two month course, they plunged us washbasins, two loos and one into it with an intensity that shower for eight people. It helped it sonwwhat match an wasn't like slumming out. Jt was MEA progr;im. We had to read slumming out. . three case stU(ji~s-of real compani~s-a dilY ;ind discuss them in class the n~xt day. It wa.s him) \York. No Saturdays off; can you imagine, not even a For me the best part abollt Thanksgiving weekend?

When I got b,!~k, there was a going to Harvard was that I got lot of skepticism. "Brash young this job right there! Peng~in's chief executive, Peter M;iy~r, man with fancy foreign ideas," came to speak to us and I 'WilS they sa.id. I assured them that given the task of driving him to I wouldn't change anything ... and then, sure enough, slowly Boston. On the way, lie asked me if I was interested in working started bringing in new systems and ideas! . for Penguin in India. Actually, he'd also seen the project that I had prepared as part of the admission material-an argument that India deserved a good-quality publishing house.

It was all so long ago. I was At that time, Penguin was plan- already married, and .'1 mother ning to start its office here, so of two. the two things just coincided.

I had a marvelous year. I I had this very buttoned-up, remember how excited I was to prissy kind of image of Harvard. know that we would be taught This isn't true. Harvard is an by Dr. Hugh Leavell. I had extremely lively place. taught my students from his We spent just six weeks on books. the campus and then went to What impressed and surNew York where the Harvard prised me most was that the Club had organized a reception teachers would ask for selfcenter that could put us in touch criticism. with previous alumni and It was all very hard work-we prospective employers. It was had to read some 200 pages

every night! We were given projects and assignments. Like sending a letter asking for funds for your project; so you had to assess your requirements, the budget and staffing needs. This was 25 years ago but I still remember doing it!

I wasn't keen to go to Harvard. In fact, I wasn't keen to become an architect! My father forced me into both. I was already working in Chandigarh, which was then an exciting place for architects to be, when I got admission.

The first thing that struck me about Harvard was that here a deadline meant a deadline.

When we were asked to give a project on a certain date we just had to-because the jury was called that day to discuss the presentation. That too was a great experience, having ten people give their opinion on YOllr work.

Working on projects was exciting and real. You were even asked to analyze the 'site-its location, its topography, its accessibility-before .working o~t a master plan. In the assignment for the' redevelopmenf of the Boston Wharf area we went there, saw the site, talked to the people living there, asked them if they were keen to move out; some were, some weren't. Then we had to make a program of requirements: Where would the people shift to, what should be built on the area, how it dovetails with the structure of the rest of the city and so on.

Harvard taught me to have an analytical approach.

We had lectures in the morning from 9 to 12. I had a problem. I couldn't get up early.

So I invariably missed most of the lectures, and the teacher who taught us landscape construction would thoughtfully leave the notes on my desk. I topped in that exam!

I am a teacher too today, and I wonder if I would be able to react the same way to a student who didn't attend my ,lectures!

HARVARD AT 350 continued

when I was at Harvard (before she was born). She was awed and I was ancient.

That night Boston police escorted the class buses through the city to Symphony Hall-very different from the subway trips of my student days. Senator Kennedy made his first appearance of the reunion, accompanied by his wife Joan. at the Boston Pops concert, and he turned up at the postconcert open house at Harvard. A few classmates besieged him for autographs. But most of us adopted a becoming reticence, much more Harvard-like.

At what seenfed like dawn of the next day, we piled onto the buses once again to ride to Essex County Club, a private club an hour north of Boston. Some members of the class and their wives played tennis or golf or swam; others went yachting, or took sightseeing trips around the city.

Commencement Day was the climax of the reunion-and for 1,473 Harvard and Radcliffe seniors and 2,918 graduateschool students, the culmination of years of work. Harvard holds the ceremonies outdoors in the Yard. The university

. d' H 8 e1ow: arvar s spraw1mg complex makes bicycles essential for commwmg within the campus.

Right and bouom: The quest for excellence here is compelling; mixing pleasure with business. studems pore over books in the dorms and cafeterias too.

flt

I

expects the weather to cooperate and not discommode the 20,000 persons who attend ; this year the weather was properly docile (17 degrees C). T his was the 328th Harvard commencement. A speaker noted it is "the oldest secular ceremony in usage in the New World. " Those attending included students and their fami lies, faculty, alumni, distinguished guests.

Graduating students and faculty wore traditional mortarboard caps and black gowns. Officers of the various reunion classes were decked out in striped trousers, frock coats, cravats and top hats. A processional beginning with representatives of the Class of 1914 and continuing with reunion classes through 1974 formed amidst the dormitories in Harvard Yard and filed into the large area known as the tercentenary theater. As our class marched past groups of graduating seniors, they applauded without any apparent mockery. Senator Culver, one of the marshals, tipped his top hat to the students.

When the students filed in , some were carrying banners with such slogans as "Don't Support Apartheid" and "Zimbabwe ls Not Free." Students had been urging the university administration to divest itself of any holdings in companies that do business with South Africa. ¡One student had pasted the slogan " Divest Now" in tape on his mortarboard cap.

This would have been unheard of in our day, but ten years ago students had been politically violent, occupying University Hall by force on one occasion. The university was clearly tolerating the re-

Author Mal Dettinger and wife Louise arraT1ge the room where they stayed during the five-day 25th-year reunion of Harvard University's Class of 1954 in 1979.

latively low-keyed political activity on this day.

The ceremony has not changed much over the past three centuries. The Sheriff of Middlesex County called the meeting to order, a student delivered a salutatory dissertation in Latin and students roared with laughter at what may (or. may not) have been appropriate places. After an address and dissertations in E nglish by two members of the graduating class, President Bok conferred degrees en masse and welcomed the graduates "into the company of educated men and women."

He then bestowed 11 honorary degrees on, among others, Helmut Schmidt, Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany; philosopher-historian Isaiah Berlin; economist Milton Friedman; Desmond Mpilo Tutu, general secretary of the South Africa Council of Churches; Georg Solti, conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra; and Jacques-Yves Cousteau, the marine explorer. During

I

The Ambassador and Harvard The 350th anniversary of the founding of Harvard University coincides with the 40th anniversary of my class at Harvard College. As I look back on the years spent at Harvard, I count them as among the most important ones in forming my outlook on life.

The bachelor's degree, the master's degree, and the one-year fellowship I was privileged to receive not only honed my professional skills, but had a decisive influence in forming my values and shaping my conduct throughout my life. For this I am eternally grateful to this outstanding academic institution. Those of us who have had a lengthy exposure to Harvard can never repay adequately what we have gotten from that institution.

Harvard embodies today the great ideas of our nation. It is color blind when it comes to admitting the best our nation , and indeed the world, has to offer when it comes to academic achievement. It is most tolerant in religious views. It is dedicated to helping mankind progress in every area of endeavor in the humanities and sciences. Harvard makes its graduates aware of the responsibility we have as human beings toward each other, toward the Earth we live on, and toward the universe which lies beyond.

Harvard is indeed a national treasure, but it also belongs to the whole world.

- John Gunther Dean American Ambassador to India

the afternoon ceremonies Chancellor Schmidt addressed the alumni, including that morning's graduates, on the need for an international energy policy.

Amidst the bustle of gathering offspring and loading automobiles, the members of my class who had stayed for all events had a brief informal farewell party at the Freshman Union. Promises to write or see one another more frequently were washed down with champagne. Classmates exchanged engraved business cards or jotted addresses and phone numbers on the backs of commencement programs. Common remarks were: " I thought I'd hate the reunion , but I loved it," and "See you at the 50th if I last that long."

Driving back to Washington from Cambridge, I wondered whether Harvard had indeed left some kind of mark on each of us. After all, we were seeing each other again only in the setting where we had first met. W. H. Auden said that after 40, a man is responsible for his own face, but I couldn't go along with the stiffnecked remark of one classmate that those who had aged ungracefully owed their looks to dissipated living. Class members had contributed short autobiographies to a 1,080-page class report in which they recounted triumphs or-just as often-harrowing tales of battles with diseases, betrayals by partners or wives.

According to a survey of the class, 95.5 percent are glad they went to Harvard; only 6.8 percent own pistols; 57 percent work more¡ than 50 hours a week; 95 percent have not lost interest in sex; the divorce rate among the Class of 1954 is very close to the national average (of 5.1 per thousand population in 1977) and 96 percent of the respondents sleep well at night.

We had shared four years at Harvard , following different paths when we were there and traveling¡ farther apart afterward. Reading the autobiographical musings and talking to classmates in the small morning hours when the bands were not playing, I was reminded of what F. Scott Fitzgerald, one of our favori~ authors, had written: "Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter-tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. ... And one fine morning"So we beat on, boats against the current , borne back ceaselessly into the past."

D

SPAN AUGUST 1986 ~

ADMISSIONS GUIDE

ing to College Prob,ably the most exciting-and potentially problematicaspect of selecting a university in the United States is the variety of options available. However, along with the complication of having to select from about 3,000 institutions, comes the freedom of being able to find a program that is right for you.

To find the university that matches your needs, two things are essential. First, begin early-at least .a year to 15 months before you plan to attend. Second, find out as much as you can about the colleges you are considering, so you can make the right choice. "To find the right school," says Marvin Baron, a former president of the National Association for Foreign Student Affairs in Washington, D.C., "you have to be a detective, an investigator, a researcher."

Your detective work will take you to sources in your own country like the U. S. Information Service offices, American libraries and the U.S. Educational Foundation in India (USEFI). Other good sources include people working in the field you wish to join, those who have studied in the United States and the many reference books on U.S. study.

But first you have to understand the country's education system. In the United States, the term "higher education" refers to formal learning that begins after 12 years of elementary and secondary school. A student may study at several kinds of places after secondary school, including community colleges or junior colleges, universities, colleges and professional schools. Often the words "college," "school" and "university" are used interchangeably.

U.S. colleges may be public or private. Public universities are funded partially by state governments and thus are often called "state" universities. State universities tend to be larger than private universities. Both have high-quality programs.

At community or junior colleges, students earn associate degrees, usually after two years of study. These colleges, which offer technical, occupational and academic training, are relatively inexpensive, and since their goal is to offer education to everyone in the community, their admission standards are less demanding. There are about 1,200 community colleges. In1985 more than 40,000 foreign students attended them.

Many students transfer from two-year community colleges to four-year colleges or universities, which often will credit the two years of study toward a four-year program. Four-year colleges offer undergraduate study programs in which students earn bachelor's degrees. Universities also offer four-year undergraduate study programs, but in addition they provide graduate and professional education.

The first two years of undergraduate study toward a bachelor's degree are usually devoted to general learning.

During the third and fourth years, students concentrate on a specialized area known as a "major." At the graduate level, students earn master's and doctoral degrees. Master's degree

programs require one or two years of study. Normally, master's degree candidates must have at least a "B" grade average and write a thesis.

For a doctoral degree, which requires an additional four or five years, candidates attend lectures, complete a major research project, pass comprehensive exams, write an original dissertation and defend it before a committee.

Professional schools in the United States teach medicine, dentistry, veterinary medicine, law, business, engineering and other subjects. In some areas, such as medicine and computer science, schools often have to limit the number of foreign students.

Most advisers recommend that students apply to four to six schools, because, given the variety of colleges, there may be many that might interest you. Besides, you may not be accepted by each school you apply to.

Finding the "best" school means finding the one that best suits your own individual needs. "Sometimes foreign students are somewhat naIve," says Eric Heiberg, who advises foreign students at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. "They think there are only five or six American schools worth trying to get into. But there are many smaller schools that have strong individual programs they ought to consider as well."

Although foreign students enrolled at 2,492 U.S. higher educational institutions in 1984, just 76 institutions with 1,000 or more such students accounted for nearly 40 percent of total foreign student enrollment. Most of these 76 were large universities.

To select a school, first narrow the options to the group with strong programs in your area of interest. This is relatively simple. Use the college guide reference books available in USEFI. Talk with professionals who work in your field of interest. Tap the experience of returned students. Your research should attempt to determine the quality of the department in which you would be studying, not just the overall reputation of the university. Be sure that the colleges or schools you select are fully accredited [recognized] by their regional accrediting bodies.

After you have found schools that meet your academic needs, eliminate some on the basis of other factors. You will, for example, want to consider the cost. That includes both the cost of living in that area of the United States and the tuition.

Also find out about the availability of financial aid, which often is very limited.

Remember that your college will not just be a place to study but also the community you will live in. Urban, rural and suburban campuses offer different advantages and problems.

Talk to students who have had their education in the United States and other sources on the type of student you will typically find at a particular college. Graduates frequently say that they

erlca learned as much from their classmates as they did from classes.

Before making a decision, also try to find out about the availability of housing on campus or in town, the geographic location and the climate.

Also check if the college has a foreign advisory office, for this can be an important guide to learn about the intricacies of American society and campus life. It can also help you integrate into the community so you can discover U.S. culture firsthand.

Once you have narrowed the field to four to six choices, you are ready to begin applying. Remember that American colleges are generally interested in four things when reviewing foreign student applications: academic background, personal characteristics (including leadership ability and extracurricular activities), English language ability and financial resources.

They will use yardsticks such as grades and standardized test scores to assess your academic achievement and potential. Each U.S school sets its own standards, which vary widely. You will find the test-score ranges accepted by each college in college handbook references. Graduate school applicants should have excellent grades.

Most U.S. colleges require applicants to submit results of one or two standardized tests that are conducted by the American Embassy School in New Delhi. (Details available with USEFl.) These are the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT)a three-hour multiple-choice examination of a student's ability to reason verbally and mathematically in English-and Achievement Tests (AT), which focus on particular subjects.

Schools in the West, Midwest and some parts of the South may ask for the American College Test (ACT). Graduate students will have to submit Graduate Record Examination (GRE) scores and most graduate-level business and management schools require the Graduate Management Admissions Test (GMAT). Strong English language skills are required for admission to U.S. colleges. If your native language is not English, you probably will have to take a test of your ability to use English-usually the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL). Universities also request the score from Test of Spoken English (TSE), especially if they are considering the applicant for financial aid in the form of a teaching or research assistantship at the graduate level. You can take these admission tests at established test centers.

TOEFL is a multiple-choice, three-hour exam. Most schools require a score of 550 and above on the TOEFL test for admissions, although some accept lower scores and some require a 6QO or above. Many institutions test English proficiency upon the arrival of foreign students on campus and may require. additional English language training before allowing students to begin full-time academic work.

Financial aid is available, but for foreign students, virtually all of it is at the graduate level. More than two-thirds of all

foreign students in the United States are supported by personal or family funds. Another 15 percent are supported by their home governments, their home universities, or private sponsors outside the United States.

When tuition, room and board are totaled, about 30 percent of U.S. schools cost an average of $9,000 a year, 55 percent cost $12,000 and 15 percent $15,000. Be sure to have your financing in order beforehand.

There are several ways to reduce costs. First, look for financial aid in your own country, since assistance is easier to get from a local source than from international organizations or U.S. sources. Try your government, foundations, religious groups, or schools and universities. You can check with USEFl about grants at the postdoctoral level-they do not handle any graduate level grants.

Financial aid from U.S. sources is especially rare at the undergraduate level. But teaching, research and administrative assistantships-which are cash awards or tuition waivers in exchange for services-are available at the graduate level. So are scholarships and fellowships. Check college guides and reference books in USEFI for more information on these sources.

Some students cut costs by spending their first two years at community or junior colleges, which generally charge less than four-year schools. However, since most community colleges do not have on-campus housing, the cost of transportation to campus may offset savings. Students planning to spend their first two years at a community college should be sure their credits will transfer to the four-year school they plan to attend later.

Those interested in studying in the United States mainly to see the country or to learn about the culture should consider exchange or semester-abroad programs, as well as short-term study opportunities. These can be less costly substitutes for four-year programs.

When you are ready to apply to universities, your first inquiry, via airmail, should include the following information: your name, date of birth, address, citizenship, marital status, a brief outline of previous education, proposed field of study, English language ability, your financial situation, proposed date of enrollment and admissions test scores, if available. This will help the admissions office tell you whether the college can meet your needs. Once you have heard positively from them, get down to the business of trying to get admission, keeping in mind the tips you have just read.

(For any details on this subject write to USEFI, 12 Hailey Road, New Delhi 110001.) .

0 About the Author: Michael Brush is a USIA staff writer and SPAN reporter in Washington, D. C.

Images of .

America Photography "speaks" to the viewer in visual symbols that transcend the barriers of language. The pictures on these pages, part of an American exhibition now touring India, represent some personal statements.

These are the thoughts of all men In all ages and lands-they are not original with me; If they are not yours as much as mine, they are nothing, or next to nothing; If they are not just as close as they are distant, they are nothing.

We live in a world of two realities, the heroic and the everyday.

Our eyes and minds are limited. Only the prominent facets of reality are easily evident. We grasp the more apparent fragments.

Yet, the less-considered pieces of reality, , when fit together, produce a picture of amazing beauty, of a people, not too unlike yourself.

America is a reflection of many peoples, a recollection of many nations as they were in other lands and were and now are in a "new world" These reflections, in this space, for one moment, offer images of that reality-taken-for-granted, of one diverse nation, for 200 years embracing peoples and experiences, feelings and expressions at once different from yours but remarkably similar.

This, this is our land, this is our people,", This that is neither a land nor a race. We must reap The wind here in thE grass f')r our soul's harvest: Here we must eat our salt or our bones starve.

Here we must live or live only as shadows.

This is our race, we that have none, that have had Neither the old walls nor the voices around us, This is our land, this is our ancient groundThe raw earth, the mixed bloods and the strangers, The different eyes, the wind, and the heart's change.

These we will not leave though the old call us.

This is our country-earth, our blood, our kind.

From Colleered Poems, 1917-1982 by Archibald Macl.eish, published by Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston.

Copyright Š 1985 by The Estate of Archibald MacLeish.

Reprinted by permission.

CHARLOITE BROOKS, "Best Friends," Queens, New York City-1965.

BURK UZZLE, "Sharing With Father," Boston, Massachusetts-1968.

"I am not treacherous, callous, jealous, superstitiouS, supercilious, venomous, or absolutely hideous": studying and studying its expression, exasperated desperation though at no real impasse, would gladly break the glass; when love of order, ardour, uncircuitous simplicity, with an expression of inquiry, are all one needs to be!

Certain faces, a few, one or two-or one face photographed by recollectionto my mind, to my sight, must remain a delight.

-Marianne

Moore

Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd., from The Collected Poems of Marianne Moore.

CHARLES HARBUTI, "At Rest," Bowling Green, Missouri-1963.

It is easy to be young. (Everybody is, at first.) It is not easy to be old. It takes time.

Youth is given; age is achieved.

One must work a magic to mix with time in order to become old.

Youth is given. One must put it away like a doll in a closet, take it out and play with it only on holidays. One must have many dresses and dress the doll impeccably (but not to show the doll, to keep it hidden.)

It is necessary to adore the doll, to remember it in the dark on the ordinary days, and every day congratulate one's aging face in the mirror.

In time one win be very old.

In time, one's life will be accomplished.

And in time, in time, the dolllike new, though ancient-will be found.

"How To Be Old" by May Swenson appears by permission of the author. Š 1963 by May Swenson. From her book To Mix With Time.

In its determination to stamp out the menace of drug trafficking, the United States passed a stringent law in 1984 that deprives the criminals of the fruits of their crime. It empowers law enforcement agencies to seize drug peddlers' property and other assets and use the proceeds to finance operations against them.

"Crooks are really afraid of this one," Brad Cates remarked with an understandable feeling of satisfaction. As director of the Assets Forfeiture Office of the United States Department of Justice, he is acutely aware of the many frustrations that law enforcement officers had to experience in the past, as they tried to bring to book the big fish of the underworld-the leaders of organized crime, especially those who deal in illicit drugs.

The profits are enormous. Traditional criminal sanctions of fine and imprisonment had long ceased to be a deterrent. As U.S. Attorney Henry Oncken wryly notes, "You can put these people in jail for ten years, for instance, but does it do any good? With all the millions of dollars they've accumulated in the drug trade, a prison term is a vacation for them. When they get out, they'll still have the fruits of their crime, unless we find it first."

This is exactly what Brad Cates and his colleagues in the Assets Forfeiture Office have been able to achieve. They forfeit the assets of criminals. He claims that "now drug dealers have to spend as much time worrying about how to protect their assets as they do about making the drug deal. It greatly complicates their lives." Forfeiture hits where it hurts most-in the pocketbook.

Nor does it stop there. It serves as booty seized in the war against crime. U.S. law enforcement officials sell the forfeited goods at market prices. The proceeds then go to the Assets Forfeiture Fund which pays the expenses of the operations.

Thus, assets forfeitures are a double-edged weapon. They inflict

crippling losses on the criminals and earn money for the expenses of law enforcers. In Fort Lauderdale, Florida, for example, it has been used to build a new 100-cell jail.

The experiment is highly instructive. Drug peddling is a crime of international dimensions. Any success achieved by one country in the fight against it holds lessons for others, particularly this experiment. In no other democracy does the constitution protect rights to property with the care with which the Constitution of the United States protects them. America is traditionally regarded as a haven of laissez faire, where property enjoys a certain sanctity. To think that the United States Congress has enacted laws for the forfeiture of property of persons who have not even been convicted of crime seems incredible.

But the laws are there clearly inscribed on the statute book.

And they are being enforced so efficiently that cries of "injustice" are heard as the fund is replenished by forfeitures.

How does it work in this constitutional system? For, if it is legal and constitutionally valid there, it serves as a precedent of great persuasive authority for other legal systems. But first, there is another aspect besides legality. It is the innovation in criminal sanctions. Assets forfeiture can be used as a weapon with which to fight grave economic crimes; crimes committed to acquire money and economic power.

The Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984, to which President Ronald Reagan accorded his assent on October 12, 1984, has only sharpened the edge of the weapon and made it

more effective. The weapon had been devised much earlier but was found wanting. Two statutes enacted in 1970 provided for forfeiture of assets. One was the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) and the other, the Comprehensive Drug Prevention and Control Act. Both proved a disappointment. In April 1981, the General Accounting Office published a report, entitled Asset Forfeiture-A Seldom Used Tool in Combating Drug Trafficking." It noted that the results fell far below the expectations of the U. S. Congress. The reasons for the failure were both practical and legal. Federal law enforcement agencies were not aggressive enough. The two statutes contained limitations and ambiguities that robbed them of efficacy. The Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984 amends the two statutes of 1970 and repairs their defects. The federal agencies were prodded, in turn, to pursue forfeiture more aggressively.

Forfeiture proceedings are of two kinds, criminal and civil.

Criminal proceedings are widely known. A person is convicted of a crime and sentenced. Disposition of crime-related property is provided for in the Court's Order. It is in the civil proceedings where we find the innovation. The suspected property is first seized by a federal law enforcement agency even where no criminal proceedings have been taken, let alone a conviction procured. Next, a civil suit is filed for the suspicion to be subjected to a judicial test. If confirmed, the property becomes that of the United States.

What the Act of 1984 does is to perfect these procedures a'nd widen their scope. It is now possible to seize by a mere executive act assets worth up to $100,000 and vehicles worth any amount.

Judicial proceedings can follow later. The earlier limit was $10,000, which was unrealistically low. Pre-indictment as well as pre-conviction transfer of assets, hitherto unaffected, are now roped in. For instance, many Court rulings exempted the ill-gotten profits of the accused though other interests and property were forfeitable. There were limitations on the extent of drug-related property also. Boats and vehicles were forfeitable but not real estate such as secluded estates or apartments used in the business of crime.

An accused person was free to transfer his assets or remove them elsewhere prior to his conviction by the Court. The accused not only had every incentive to defeat a forfeiture order by the Court but was also provided ample opportunity. A criminal who becomes aware of the likelihood of proceedings against him could act swiftly before the filing of criminal charges. Even if a restraining order were obtained from the Court, the criminal could simply pay a fine for contempt of Court and keep the ill-gotten property.

All of these loopholes have been plugged by the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984, which embodies in its Title III the Comprehensive Forfeiture Act, 1984, containing Sections 301 to 323. It is these that have effectively removed the deficiencies in the 1970 Acts.

To begin with, the Comprehensive Forfeiture Act, 1984, provides specifically for the forfeiture of proceeds of prohibited racketeering activity or unlawful debt collection. However, the proceeds will be forfeitable only to the extent that they are derived from such unlawful activity. If only a part of a corporation's affairs were conducted criminally, the proceeds only of that part would be subject to forfeiture. The word '''proceeds'' is advisedly used in preference to "profits" so

that the prosecution is not required to prove what these "net profits" were!

Additionally, the Courts are enjoined mandatorily to order forfeiture in addition to any other penalty that may be imposed.

For the first time real immovable property is also included. The definition of the property liable to forfeiture has also been widened. It is that which is "used, or intended to be used ... to commit, or to facilitate the commission of" the offense; with this almost anything can come in. The "taint" theory is given its fullest logical expression. If the property is tainted with crime, it should logically cease to belong to the criminal the moment he commits the crime. Therefore an order of forfeiture pronounced by the Court "relates back" to the time the act was committed. It belongs to the state at that very moment. Ergo, subsequent transfer by the owner prior to his conviction by the Court cannot defeat the claims of the United States.

Of course, the innocent purchaser's claim is not affected.

An ancillary hearing procedure consequent on a conviction is laid down. The jury is required to render a special verdict of forfeiture with respect to the crime-related property. The

Citizens Against The living room of the small apartment was furnished with eight folding chairs. The only lamp sat on the floor. A small black-and-white TV flashed a fuzzy picture from a corner of the room.

There were no curtains, and the bare walls seemed to magnify the sound. In the bedroom were four canvas cots and an equal number of sleeping bags. The kitchen was all but empty.

Yet for members of Boston's "Drop-a-Dime, Report Crime" [drop a coin in a payphone to report drug dealers] coalition, Apartment 312 was home for several weeks.

Georgette Watson, one of the coalition's founders, explains that the barebones, rent-free apartment in a housing project in Boston's Roxbury section gave coalition members the chance to do something they would like to do all across the city-combat drug abuse.

"We want to make the streets so hot," Watson says, that drug dealers don't have a chance to do any business.

She and other Drop-a-Dime members walked the streets late at night, accompanied by several policemen, gave tours of the neighborhood to newspaper reporters and talked .to drug dealers.

The Drop-a-Dime organization was formed in 1983. The Reverend Bruce Wall, youth minister of the Twelfth Baptist Church in nearby Roxbury, says drug traffic was rampant in certain sections of the city, yet the police claimed they had little information on the problem. They needed specifics, Wall says.

"The community had to break the code of silence and pass the names of drug dealers on to the authorities."

But the police require identification. Reporting openly to Reprinted by permission from The Christian Science Monitor.

1984 The Christian Science Publishing Society.

All rights reserved.

Š

purchaser is entitled to be heard in defense of his claim.

However, the fact that the purchaser's claim is sustained is not of much consolation to the accused. He can be ordered by the Court, in that event, to forfeit substitute assets of equivalent value. Such an order can be made in five circumstances-the property cannot be located; it has been transferred to a third party; has been placed beyond the Court's jurisdiction; has been substantially diminished in value by any act of the accused; or, has been so mingled with other property that it cannot be divided.

The most effective reform is the provision for a preindictment order restraining transfers even prior to the filing of charges. The Court can make such an order if it finds that "there is a substantial probability that the United States will prevail on the issue of forfeiture and that failure to enter the order will result in the property being destroyed, removed from the jurisdiction of the Court, or otherwise made unavailable for forfeiture." The Court must also hold "that the need to preserve the availability of the property through the entry of the requested order outweighs the hardship on any party

Drugs

against whom the order is to be entered."

Ordinarily a pre-indictment order is made only after notice to the accused. But the new statute provides for such orders being made ex-parte without prior notice or hearing. To obtain such an order, it must be established that there is reasonable cause to believe that notice would jeopardize the availability of forfeitable property.

The hearings concerning a restraining order need not conform to the strict statutory rules of evidence. Safety of witnesses is a major consideration. Therefore, at this stage even hearsay evidence is admissible. The advantage of preindictment orders in criminal proceedings is that they can be made regardless of where the property is situated.

In contrast, civil proceedings for forfeiture may be brought in no Court save the one in whose territorial jurisdiction the property is located. Thus multiple suits have to be filed to seize the assets of a single drug dealer. The advantage, however, is that in a civil proceeding the standard of proof is preponderance or balance of probabilities. In criminal trials proof beyond (Text continued on page 38.)

by DAVID PURCELL

the police often brought threats to informants, Wall says. For residents to feel safe in passing along information, they needed a means to do so anonymously. So he and others formed Drop-a-Dime to serve as go-betweens to pass residents' tips along to police.

Wall, who is also a clerk-magistrate in the juvenile court, says the group receives an average of 130 calls a month. Most concern drugs. He says the police have become much more responsive and effective since they began getting tips from Drop-a-Dime.

Watson says the group received so many calls about "massive drug traffic" in the city's public housing projects that members decided the best way to combat the problem was to move right in. They took turns spending nights in Apartment 312, making their presence felt in the community.

One member, Robert Woodson, says he was approached on a street corner one night by someone who wanted to buy drugs.

The clean-cut young man says he certainly does not look like a drug dealer.

But Watson says it's not whether Woodson did or did not look like a drug dealer. Rather, "it's the spot." He was standing on a corner where people know they can buy drugs, she says.

"So we're telling the drug dealers 'to think you own a corner is absurd,'" she says.

Coalition members made no attempt to "dress down" to the neighborhood, Watson says. Some kids idolize the drug dealer and his wealth, she says. But the message the group sent is: "We've got resources, too. And you can walk around [dressed] like this without selling drugs."

Many residents, here and in other neighborhoods, have been under a kind of "house arrest," she says, fearful of the drug trade and the crime it breeds, and concerned for family members. "We are working to turn the neighborhood over to

the residents once again," Watson asserts.

Drop-a-Dime members have continued to work in the community since moving out of the apartment, seeking longrange solutions. They held a meeting with residents of the housing project to discuss how the residents could form a neighborhood organization to fight drug traffic. Watson, who has worked extensively to organize neighborhood crime-watch programs throughout Boston, says, "We want to organize [a program here] so that we'll just be fading out."

Wall says only about ten residents showed up at the community meeting. He explains that it is hard for residents to stand up openly to drug dealers who operate in the community.

To intimidate the residents, a couple of dealers showed up at the meeting, he says.

According to Wall, there is a need to form an "underground group," of people who will "feed us information." He says that the coalition group will continue to work openly in the community and pass information on to the police.

Nathaniel Askia, director of First Incorporated, a drug rehabilitation center, says community involvement has long been the missing link in the fight against drugs. He says the coalition's approach is "an answer to my prayers." .

Police enforcement and -rehabilitation centers help, Askia says. "But in order to cut down on the number of people we see, you need an organization in the community."

The coalition members who camped out in Apartment 312 are both black and white, and come from different parts of the city. One couple, G. Allen Swartz and his wife, Sandy, live in the distant suburb of Milton. Swartz says he participated in the project because of his concern for "my neighbors."

0 About the Author: David Purcell is a staff writer of The Christian

Science Monitor.

A -f'¡ Sclenti IC Dialogue

In this ~ribute to C. V. Raman, the doyen of Indian science, the author dwells on the profound impact Fifteen years after his death, C.V. Raman, the "grand old man" of Indian science, stands as high in the scientific world as he did in his prime-and assuredly more firmly in the wake of the increased importance (If Raman Spectroscopy, through the use of lasers.

Though he first won recognition as a physicist in England, Raman's work was broadened and deepened in America. He is especially important to Indo-U.S. scientific relations for he maintained a continuing dialogue with two great American scientists, physics Nobel Prize winners Robert A. Millikan (1923) and Arthur H. Compton (1927), during an almost forgotten era in the history of Indo-U.S. cooperation in science and technology. America gave Raman such distinctions as were possible during the heroic age of physics. Millikan invited him to join the faculty as a visiting research professor at the Norman Bridge Laboratory of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 1924. It was a prestigious chair; Raman's predecessors at Caltech in Pasadena were Arnold Sommerfeld, Hendrik A. Lorentz and Albert Einstein. The Franklin Institute awarded its highest award-the Franklin Medal-to Raman in 1941, placing him in the company of,Thomas Alva Edison, Guglielmo Marconi, Arthur H. Compton, Niels Bohr, Orville Wright, Albert Einstein and Enrico Fermi. Raman was the first Indian to be given these American distinctions. He also received honorary membership of the Optical Society of America and the Mineralogical Society of America.

To understand the life of C.V. Raman is to recall his own aesthetic moments.

He was inspired by a quest for beauty in his scientific career. His investigations on the blue opalescence of the Mediterranean Sea, the scattering of light, the physics of glaciers in the Rocky Moun-

tains, the optics of the pearl, the diffraction of light by ultrasonic waves, the colors of flowers, the iridescence of a peacock's feather, the whispering gallery phenomenon at St. Paul's Cathedral in London, the structure and properties of the diamond, the sound of the drum, the physiology of vision and hearing as well as his discoveries of new phenomena such as shear waves in liquids and the soft mode phenomenon in crystal transformations, can be perceived as an exquisite symphony of light, color and form; sound, harmony and rhytpm.

Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman was born on November 7, 1888, at Tiruvannaikaval, near Tiruchirapalli in Tamil Nadu, His father was a professor of physics and mathematics at A.V.N. College in Visakhapatnam (Andhra Pradesh). His family is distinguished for its major achievements in the fields of mathematical sciences, experimental physics, education and public service.

(Professor S. Chandrasekhar; U.S. National Science Medalist and the 1983 Nobel Prizewinner in physics, is Raman's nephew. Currently associated with the Enrico Fermi Institute of the University of Chicago, he is internationally celebrated for his fundamental contribution to astrophysics, which not only triggered off such concepts as Chandrasekhar's Limit and the mathematical theory of black holes but has also ushered in a new branch of mathematics known as invariant embedding.)

As a schoolboy, Raman read every book on mathematics and experimental physics that he could lay his hands on. At 14, he won a scholarship to the University of Madras. He was graduated in December 1904 from Presidency College, Madras, where he won the University Gold Medal. At 18, he also received his master's degree there in January 1907, with highest distinctions. His earliest experi-

ments in optics and acoustics were conducted while he was still an undergraduate. In 1906 his first scientific paper, "Unsymmetrical Diffraction Bands Due to a Rectangular Aperture," appeared in The Philosophical Magazine, London. It was a subject he would make uniquely his own in his later career. But at that early stage of his life, Raman, not able to visualize the "possibility of a scientific career," entered the Financial Civil Service and spent ten years as an officer of the Indian Finance Department. However, he utilized his leisure to conduct research on the physics of musical instruments in the laboratory of the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science at Calcutta.

Raman's youthful publications relating to the physics of Indian and Western inusical instruments had contributed to an entirely new area of research-or "The Luminous Melody of Sound," to borrow a line of Wallace Stevens. Raman's work in this field includes detection of musical overtones in the sound of some Indian percussion and stringed instruments, his photographs of the delicate movements of the bow and bowed point of the string, his brilliant experimental verification of the Helmholtz conjecture that the speeds of the bow and bowed point are identical, and the application of modern electroacoustical techniques to the acoustical measurements of violins.

Raman's work on the physical theory of musical instruments resulted in three fortunate circumstances. First, Sir Asutosh Mookerjee-a distinguished mathematician, judge of the Calcutta High Court and vice-chancellor of Calcutta University-invited him to join the newly created Department of Physics (as Palit Professor) in July 1917. Second, Raman's monograph on The Physical Theory of Musical Instruments was published in the Handbuch Der Physik, 1927-the first

time that the work of a non-German scientist had been published in this prestigious series. Finally, Raman was made an honorary member of the Catgut Acoustical Society, the New Jersey-based American scientific organization which continues to this day the tradition of research in violin acoustics initiated by Helmholtz, Rayleigh and Raman in the pre-electronic era . . "In the history of science," observed Raman in his 1930 Nobel address, "we often find that the study of some natural phenomenon has been the starting point in the development of a new branch of knowledge." Indeed, while enjoying the sublime scenery of Mount Everest from the terrace of his Darjeeling hotel in 1899, the English mathematician and physicist Lord Rayleigh had correctly conjectured that the blue color of the sky was due to the scattering by the mole- (I. cules in the atmosphere. However, I the validity of the subsequent Rayleigh conjecture-that "the muchadmired dark blue of the deep sea .. .is simply the color of the sky

seen by reflection"-was questioned by Raman while voyaging through the Mediterranean and Red seas in 1921.

After seeing the surface-reflections of the sky in the sea through a polarizing Nicol Prism that was set at the Brewsterian angle; Raman observed that the color of the sea was spectacularly improved. It struck Raman that "the wonderful blue opalescence of the Mediterranean Sea" was due to the scattering of the sunlight by the molecules of the water. This resulted in his celebrated paper "On the Molecular Scattering of Light in Water and the Color of the Sea." This paper, published in the proceedings of the Royal Society of London in 1922, not only led Raman to the discovery named after him, but is also as much a fundamental contribution to optics as it is to aesthetics.

In 1924, Raman was invited to open a symposium on mathematical physics at the Toronto meeting of the International Congress of Mathematicians as well as to preside over an international seminar on the scattering of light at the Toronto session of the British Association. He also visited the United States to represent India at the centenary of the Franklin Institute in September 1924. At the invitation of Professor R.A. Millikan, Raman spent four months at the Norman Bridge Laboratory of Caltech in Pasadena. He gave a series of memorable lectures on Thermodynamics, Wave Theory and Compton Scattering at Caltech. In addition to his academic work there, he was an honored guest at several scientific and technological institutions in America-academic centers in Washington, D.C., Chicago, Iowa and Palo Alto, California; the research laboratories of the General Electric Company and the Western Electric Company; the Lowell Observatory at Flagstaff, Arizona, and the Mount Wilson Observatory in California. No account of Raman's tour of the United States would be complete without reference-in his own words-to his "sightseeing" at Mount Wilson. "I remember ... vividly, the two nights I spent at the Mount Wilson Observatory in California," he said. "I came away tremendously impressed with the marvelous light-gathering power of the great 60-inch [152cm] and 100-inch [254cm] reflectors. The great nebula in Orion, for instance, which in ordinary instruments appears as a shapeless area of great luminosity, appeared in the 60-inch reflector

as a luminous patch of variegated color, determined by the light-emission of the gases of which it is composed."

Four years later, in 1928, Raman won international accolades for the discovery of the Raman Effect by using light of a single frequency from a mercury arc.

Raman found that the new frequencies in the scattered radiation were characteristic of the scattering medium. In other words, the Raman Effect may be described as the scattering of light from a solid, liquid or gas with a shift in wavelength from that of the usually monochromatic incident radiation. This great discovery announced on February 29, 1928 (modestly described as a new type of Secondary Radiation by Raman and happily christened the Raman Effect by the famous German physicist Pringsheim), won for Raman the Matteucci Medal of the Italian Academy of Sciences the same year, British India's Knighthood in 1929, the Hughes Medal of the Royal Society and the Nobel Prize in physics in 1930.

The universality of the Raman Effect was marked by unanimous affirmation from Professor R.W. Wood (United States), Lord Rutherford (England) and Albert Einstein (Germany). Almost immediately after Raman's announcement of his discovery, Professor Wood, the distinguished optical physicist from Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore, Maryland), despatched a cable to the British periodical, Nature, stating: "It appears to me that this very beautiful discovery, which resulted from Raman's long and patient study of light scattering, is one of the most convincing proofs of the quantum theory of light we have at present."

Lord Rutherford remarked that "The Raman Effect must rank among the best three or four discoveries in experimental physics of the last decade" -a decade during which men like Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, R.A. Millikan and A.H. Compton won Nobel Prizes in physics.

Several years later Einstein recalled: "C.V. Raman was the first to recognize and demonstrate that the energy of a photon can undergo a partial transformation within matter. I still vividly recall the deep impression this discovery made on all of us who at that time attended the physics colloquium in Berlin."

The discovery of the Raman Effect inaugurated an era of scientific research during the 1930s that paralleled the early

scientific history of X-rays and radioactivity. The universal interest in the applications of the Raman Effect is reflected in the publication of several works on Raman Spectroscopy over the decades. The first publication, .The Raman Effect and its Chemical Applications, brought out by the American Chemical Society in 1939, contains a brilliant theoretical discussion of the Raman Effect by James H. Hibben (of the Geophysical Laboratory, Washington, D.C.) and Edward Teller (the great mathematical physicist who is also celebrated as the father of the hydrogen bomb).

It was fortunate that Raman lived long enough to witness a renaissance in the entire field of Raman Spectroscopy owing to the use of lasers which constitute scientifically ideal and aesthetically satisfying sources for observing the Raman Effect. (LASER is an acronym for light amplification by the stimulated emission of radiation.) The light emitted by the laser is characterized by a pure frequency and high directionality. In the beginning, the spontaneous scattering of the Raman Effect had danced to the rhy~hms of molecular physics and analytical chemistry. However, in the wake of the discovery of the laser, the Raman Effect has waltzed its way into the regions of biochemistry, biology, medicine, the environmental sciences and technology. In this process, the India-born Raman Effect has emigrated to the United States. Enriched with such fringe benefits as HORSES (High-Order Raman Spectral Excitation Studies) and CARS (Coherent Anti-Stokes Raman Spectra), the Raman Effect has found a new home in the laser-producing laboratories of Harvard and Caltech.

Raman was not only one of the greatest discoverers of our age in the field of experimental physics, but also made distinguished contributions to theoretical physics. For instance, he and Dr. N.S. Nagendra Nath made theoretical predictions concerning the behavior of ultrasonic waves in 1935-36. These predictions were based on the theory (the currently celebrated Raman-Nath theory) that when a plane wave of light passes through an ultrasonic wave field it is speeded up in the regions of rarefaction and slowed down in the regions of compression in order to emerge as a corrugated wave front.

This mathematically elegant theory, which made Professor Max Born

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Above: The genius of Raman lay in improvising makeshift instruments to establish great scientific truths. Of his Raman Effect, Einstein said, "I still vividly recall the deep impression this discovery made on all of us. "Among Raman's many American admirers were physics Nobel laureates Arthur Compton (far left) and Robert Millikan (left).

On his 1924 U.S. tour, Raman lectured at Caltech, visited research centers and Mount Wilson Observatory (right).

excitedly affirm that "Raman's quick mind leaps over mathematics," was experimentally verified by a group of American scientists (using laser techniques) at the Columbia Radiation Laboratory in February 1963. The theory has been used in various high-speed information processing systems and in experimental television systems.

In 1948, Raman visited the United States to address the First International Congress of Crystallographers at Harvard. During that visit, he also attended the meetings of the Advisory Council of the World Bank in Washington, D.C. When he was awarded the Franklin Medal in May 1941, it was "in recognition . of his many brilliant contributions to physical science and of his leadership in the renaissance of scientific work and scientific education that has occurred in India during the last 30 years." Dr. T.D.

Cope of the Franklin Institute remarked that Raman's "study of light scattering in crystals is a gateway to fundamental knowledge of the highest value."

Raman's achievements go beyond the Raman Effect. As did Sir Arthur Eddington, Sir James Jeans, Sir Lawrence Bragg and Steven Weinberg, Raman made science fascinating to the layman. Listening to him, one could perceive the rhythm of modern physics. Indeed, his innumerable writings, radio talks, scientific essays and reviews and lectures are at once sensitive prose and elegant pieces of scientific exposition.

The establishment of the Raman Research Institute in Bangalore is his memorial, as are his many fundamental contributions to optics, ultrasonics, crystal physics and musical acoustics. Speaking to a New York Times reporter in 1948, Professor Raman expressed the

hope that the institute might become "an international cultural center" that would reveal "India's greatness in the field of the exact sciences."

Great as the contributions of Nobel Prizewinners like Raman, Compton and Millikan are to the technical side of modern physics, their steadfast adherence to the ideal of international scientific cooperation is perhaps an even greater and more significant contribution to modern civilization.

In professor Raman's death (November 21, 1970), the world lost "one of the truly seminal minds in the history of modern physics," as the McGraw-Hill Encyclopaedia of World Biography described him.

0 About the Author: A. Ranganathan is a Madras-based writer whose articles have appeared in Indian and foreign journals.

In Pau.1Taylors Footsteps

One of America's premier choreographers, Paul Taylor (above) has developed a style that weaves the experimental with the classical, winning world recognition for himself and his dance company.

H

istoric evenings of dance exist in the imaginationNijinsky's L'Apres-midi d'un faune, the premiere of Le Sacre du printemps. Were they really as breathtaking, as scandalous as legend would have us believe? I attended one such occasion on the evening of May 14, 1959, when Martha Graham and George Balanchine "collaborated" for the first and only time. The work was Episodes, set to all the music Anton Webern ever wrote, and collaborated is a strong word for what actually went on. Webern's scores were divided in half like two parcels, and Graham tied up the first and Balanchine the second. Beyond a mutual composer, if there was any connection between the first and second halves of the program, it escaped me. But something odd and important happened that evening: Graham and Balanchine exchanged positions, almost as if by deliberation. It became clear that the ballet had taken over the avant-garde, and that modern dance was presenting its audience with a "story ballet" in the old-fashioned sense, complete with magic scenic effects (a throne that turned around of its own accord), fancy costumes (all black and glitter) and even a game of battledore, in which Queen Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots traded shots over an imaginary net.

But the evening was historic for another reason: each

choreographer, by agreement, could pick one dancer from the other's company, and Balanchine chose Paul Taylor. Taylor¡ could do anything on stage, from twisting himself into a ball of worms to flying across the air with the speed of a radio wave.

Balanchine exploited all of Taylor's talents, save one-the main one, but invisible at the time. How could he know that this Graham dancer was going to turn into a choreographer of the first rank?

Taylor's troupe is now one of the few modern dance companies that can spend a month at the New York City Center and fill the theater. Watching his company during its most recent season, one sensed something completely new to dance and peculiarly A-merican: the playing field hovering at a discreet distance behind the scrim. Taylor's use of sports is never thematic, like the semiliteral tennis match of Nijinsky's leux, or openly suggested, like the football scrimmage line one occasionally sees in Jerome Robbins's work. It exists in the nature of how he conceives a dance, in .the quality of the movement, the kind of energy expended. It is kinetic and daring and its impact is direct and visual. The strength of the football player, the speed and swerve of the hockey forward, the individual competitive grace of the tennis champion are present on Taylor's stage. Swimming movements appear often: the stroke, the dive, the plunge. Taylor choreographs as naturally for the male body as Balanchine did for the female, and his is the only big dance company in which the male dancers are pre-eminent.

They are a different kind of dancer than we have seen before.

They come across as people who might have walked in off the street and are merely performing by some lucky accident for the moment and for our benefit.

This illusory effect of a natural style is one of the company's great achievements. The male dancers have a physical prowess and musculature we don't always associate with dance, where bodies, well-built as they may be, are not apt to be those of musclemen or candidates for magazine-cover pinups. The Taylor company consists mainly of big men modeled after the choreographer. Part of the excitement of Taylor's virtuosity as a dancer arose from wonder-how could anything so big move so fast?

The women in the company are just as good and bear the same athletic stance, but we are not quite as conscious of them at first because the focus has shifted. Our eyes are used to following women in big dance companies. The change of emphasis seems initially peculiar. We become aware of the women slowly, just as in a Fred Astaire film it is difficult, at the beginning, to watch his partner except at isolated moments.

The look of the Taylor company has changed recently with the performances of Kate Johnson, and particularly in the new Equinox, set to the Brahms Quintet in F major. The solo Taylor has devised for Johnson is spectacular, and she dances it spectacularly; it is followed by a pas de deux for her and Kenneth Tosti almost as arresting. Johnson has swiveled the eye back to the women in the company.

Equinox has the aura of the tennis court, if tennis were a game played around a maypole. The circle is one of its important elements; both its first and second movements end in About the Author: Howard Moss is poetry editor of The New Yorker and author of several plays, books of criticism and poetry. His most recent publication is a collection of poems, Rules of Sleep.

rounds, and the bravura solo for Johnson has a great deal to do with running around in circles. It is a romantic ballet, but fast, and often its swiftest passages occur within the phrasings of slow music, as if parantheses were slowly to fall in place from the sky while the words between them were being typed or uttered at great speed. More ~han any other Taylor dance it displays the Balanchine aptitude for cutting away from quartets into duos, of expanding duos into sudden trios and so on. We are, after all, listening to chamber music. .

Taylor isn't a natural romantic, and if Equinox lacks the authority of sentiment, the exact pitch of Brahmsian tidal waves and languors, it has the soaring and buoyant virtues of Taylor's Bach Esplanade and the Handel Airs transplanted into the Edwardian era. The exuberance and churchly sadness of the classical and the baroque are more native to Taylor. The romantic requires a certain undercurrent of amorous longing or nostalgia to make itself felt. Though Taylor's range is huge, relationships in the Balanchine or Graham sense are not his forte. Intimacy and its usual opposing counterweights, loneliness and isolation, fall outside his main areas of interest. His two big subjects are resurrection and jubilation, and one often has to pass through nightmare to get from the passive worlds of sleep or death to renewal and the affirmation of joy. But when it comes, no one is more joyous than Taylor.

Of the nightmare dances, Runes may be the most extended, with its blue moonlight, its speCtral qualities, its sexual doubling, as if Eve were literally to materialize out of Adam's body, as if the sexes-under the spell of what was once a single physical unity or of sexual union-were still trying to get free of each other. Marine and insect images-the crab, the spider¡appear in it often.

Set to a perfectly matching piano score by the young American composer Gerald Busby, Runes is a long wake, its figures more spirit than human. Not one of Taylor's engaging works, it delves into and beyond distorted memories of encounters, otherworldly, sexual and primitive. At one point, a woman races across the stage and leaps into a man's arms with an audible thud. Runes has true moments of mystery and is full of meetings and partings of bodies-even dead bodies, it seems-being moved from one place to another, of experiences barely remembered, of random evolutionary messages not clearly understood or meant to be. It is a difficult piece to end, and I'm not sure it actually does; it could go on longer or stop earlier, a weakness not characteristic of Taylor's finest ~ork.

Arden Court, for instance (to music by the 18th-century composer William Boyce), is glorious from start to finish, its invention open, constantly refreshing itself by its own audacity, as if the high spirits of the six male dancers who enter so vigorously at its beginning only suggest the further possibilities that develop. It is often literally thrilling-a word one doesn't use much anymore to describe the goings-on in a theater.

Romance stirs more easily in Sunset, where the Edward Elgar score seems to provide a little imperial scenario of its own: soldiers, girls, perhaps a port town?-the commonplaces of war, but in another country. A fence suggests a boundary (a barracks?) with the deeper irllplications of a border; two men stand behind it, stabled like horses, inwardly racing to get free.

A duet for two men has qualities friendly, hostile and sensuous, a kind of macho bravado interrupted by a gentleness surprising even, it seems, to its performers. And the woman who dances

with each of the men in turn manages to be playful and melancholy at the same time.

The mood of Sunset, like Runes, is elegiac, as if the soldiers in their innocence suddenly discovered that death was their true business. Because feeling is in conflict with energy in Sunset there is a strange tenderness when a body is lifted from the ground; the floor is not only the center of gravity but that level on which love is made and from which the grave opens. When the bereft girl picks the red tam up from the stage floor, we know that someone has not only departed but disappeared forever. Sunset, starting out as gaily as Jerome Robbins's Fancy Free, ends up with the tragic overcast of a Mahler song cycle.

Like Taylor's Big Bertha with its small-town, macabre, Hitchcock-movie murder acted out to American band and calliope music, Sunset is a story ballet if one is willing to stretch the notion of narrative to subliminal action-the story, half guesswork, told by suggestion.

In Equinox and Airs and Esplanade, the girls sometimes walk up the steps of the men's backs, pivot on the trampolines of their tensed stomachs or leap off their backs. Men's bodies are

ingeniously used as living props-a slow male plie allows a thigh to be conveniently offered as a stepping stone for a girl casually crossing the stage; a leg is lifted just in time to make room for someone to emerge from under its arc. Taylor's stage sometimes has the appearance of Orson Welles's sensational Japanese circus turn in the stage version of Around the World in Eighty Days, with loops, turns, wide swings of both the arms and the legs, and jumping lifts.

Byzantium, along with Equinox one of the two works introduced in the 1984 season, gets its title froII1 Yeats's poem "Sailing to Byzantium," whose last line-"Of what is past, or passing, or to come"-was quoted in the program. The first two sections reverse Yeats's order: "Passing" precedes "Or Past': which is followed by "Or to Come." The curtain rises on a low horizontal wall, possibly mosaic-a row of stars at the top, stripes below. The stage is foreshortened, the dancers close to the stage apron to increase the sense of oppression and crowding. The dance begins with a fast, contorted man's solo, and then the stage suddenly swarms with street people: punks, half-clothed urchins, after-hour addicts dressed in the junk regalia of New York's East Village. They move frenetically, without direction. Chaos is come again-and again and again.

The second section is a dramatic surprise-four serene figures, tall in the gorgeous raiments of the East-golds, silvers and whites splashed with peacock colors-move in a stately manner. They open and close their mouths, but whether in prayer, an act of communion or ingestion isn't clear. Behind them, a Byzantine mosaic square forms the setting. The effect is rich, sacramental; the figures, ancient and traditional, dance with a formal elegance matching their appearance. We are in the presence of the ecclesiastical and the opulent.

In the third section, the dancers of the first two sections meet. One of the priestlike figures seems to have grown top-heavy, become taller, as if on stilts. Bodies, in insectlike. pileups, accumulate and roll across the back of the stage in a jumble. Tradition, projected into the future, has become oversized, out of scale, but whether the process rejuvenates or corrupts remains moot. One doesn't know how to take these figures as they walk among the street people, now dressed in futuristic metallic costumes of burnished copper and bronze.

Have the great ideas of the past been misinterpreted or misapplied? Have the street people (representing the community at large?) become slaves to tradition? False tradition?

Distorted the messages of history? Only one thing is clear: what was once authority has turned into the authoritarianism of regimentation.

One of the troubles may be that the Yeats poem is about one thing and the dance another. In the poem, the narrator yearns to be a work of art rather than the creator of one, for a simple reason: art outlasts its makers. "Sailing to Byzantium," by being one of the great poems of the English language, and meant to last, is unwittingly ironic; it is itself the very thing its creator wants to be. The thrust of Taylor's dance is social commentary, its relation to art and immortality tangential, and it is just possible the Yeats poem was the wrong jumping-off place to begin with. And then the Varese score with its sharp, rhythmic effects, its distinctive percussive sound, has an insistent tonal coloration; there's no chance for a contrasting lyrical outburst.

Taylor is not an obscure choreographer; none of his

dances, even at their most mysterious, is enigmatic .... Byzantium was trying to say more than actually got said. The burden of the strangled message is rare for Taylor because almost everything he does has an intuitive sense of rightness, a built-in way of getting meaningfully from here to there.

The difficulty of categorizing Taylor is part of his genius, for he eludes captivity in a phrase. He is one of those sophisticated nalfs who thrive on contradiction, a private man practicing a public art. He has a vaudevillian's sense of repertory and a classical style to go with it. Yet his work remains markedly personal. His comic sense is risky: The Rite of Spring is witty, Snow White, in which two of the dwarfs are missing in action, merely whimsical. It dangerously skirts the edge of cuteness. But could one ever get enough of Arden Court? Or Esplanade? Of the many kinds of dances he does I like the big group works best, where he seems freest, objectified, geared up to respond to larger meanings, more breathtaking exaltations. And second, the dark, hallucinatory pieces like Profiles and Runes. If he doesn't have what Balanchine had, he comes close. Airs has touches of the Master; its speed-and it is very fast indeed-is contained within larger andante movements, its clockwork action finely edited to fit the phrasing of individual measures of music. Taylor has something we rarely see combined: innocence and intelligence. And he provides what only a handful of choreographers provide: moments that go on living in the minds.

One of the triumphs of his company is to have made an unexpected marriage between the ordinary and the Italian

Renaissance, as if the people one passes every day on the street and Piero delIa Francesca saints were embodied in the same physical space and time. His dancers arrive on stage with the tipsy, elated air of angels. The energy is contemporary, the preoccupation with order ancient. Taylor is one of the few choreographers influenced by a world of subways, lunch counters, crowds, TV, airports, outer space, movies and cars who also respond to the great structures of the past, to Bach, Handel and Boyce. He was a Martha Graham dancer for eight years, and he is the only dancer ever to perform the solo Balanchine choreographed for him in. Episodes. Out of those two facts one could launch several mythologies. But even if we can't put the genes on a slide, I think it would be fair to say that the Paul Taylor Dance Company, without losing any of its singular edge, weaves the two great American strands of dance in our time into an original fabric of its own. Like Graham, Taylor has a feeling for the floor, and his dancers seem actually to hurl themselves into the ground, rising at almost the same moment with the energy of lightning, to bring Esplanade to its whiz-bang conclusion. And he has Balanchine's feeling for the air, for the off-balanced chanciness of heights.

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ON THE LIGHTER SIDE

"And to my nephew, Willis, who never failed to surprise me with a practical joke at every occasion .... " Reprinted with permission from The Saturday Evening Post Society, a division of BFL and MS, Inc. Š 1984.

"They just don't seem to understand that we're the good guys and they're the bad guys, "

The Arnolds feign death until the Wagners, sensing the sudden awkwardness are compelled to leave.

EXECUTIVES The first wave hit broadside ..It curled The River Seminar gives over my head and slammed down beside executives an opportunity me, tilting the raft 45 degrees. The four men on the other side of the raft reared to assess and improve the so high that to see them I had to glance quality of their personal almost straight up. Leaning forward, and professional lives. their faces contorted into grimaces, they seemed to be flying single file down the river. Their paddles scooped air.

The three of us on my side of the raft part of a national organization that runs were almost parallel to the river. Our left wilderness trips. Five were from the shoulders skimmed the water's surface. Menninger Foundation, a national Ahead of the raft was a "sleeper," a mental-health center. The rest of us were hidden rock. The water surging over it participants in a leadership program, formed a waterfall with a 60-centimeter designed to improve executives' underdrop. If the raft went into that hole, we'd standing of themselves both personally and professionally. I attended in a dual probably flip.

"Back paddle," I shouted.¡ role, as participant and reporter.

In the second before the next wave hit, The program, "Toward Understanding the raft slapped back down into a normal Human Behavior and Motivation," is run position, our bow aimed to the right of by the foundation's Center for Applied ,Behavioral Sciences. It mixes psychiatry, the rock.

I was negotiating this rapid, called psychology, organizational theory, cultur"Moonshine,;' toward the end of a week- al anthropology, political science, hislong white-water rafting trip on the Yam- tory and economics. It consists of lecpa and Green Rivers in Utah and Colora- tures, group discussions and individual do, a 11O-kilometer run from one end of consultations with the center's staff the Dinosaur National Monument to the members. The seminar meets from 12 to other. We were not merely weekend 15 times a year on the Menninger Founrafters, but a group that included some of dation's campus in Topeka, Kansas, about the most ambitious executives in the the same number of times in other United States. And the run down the locations, and, since 1975, on the Yampa river was no pleasure trip. Not only were and Green Rivers. The River Seminarwe running rapids, we were also under- which adds a physical trial to the psychogoing rigorous psychological evaluations logical ordeal-has become so popular of our performance. There were 24 of us, that it is now offered three times, twice 20 men and 4 women. Four were guides on the Yampa and Green Rivers and from Colorado Outward Bound, which is once on the Salmon River in Idaho.

"We expect people to step out of their usual environment and think about the basic questions in their lives," Dr. Glenn Swogger, the director of the center, has said about the program. "They should be prepared to be challenged intellectually and emotionally, to absorb material that may be new to them and to work hard to develop new perspectives on being a boss,¡ a manager, a parent, a spouse."

"Chase uses the River Seminar for people who are hard-driving-work and achievement oriented," said Karen Brethower, a vice-president in charge of manpower development at Chase Manhattan. "It's for people who are leading an unbalanced life or are leading a balanced life but running so fast they don't notice what's happening." Chase sends about 20 executives a year to the program.

"We see people functioning with too much stress every day," said Jerry Johnson, the center's director of administration. "The program is designed to answer the question: 'How can you get a better quality of life without dropping out?'''

The evening our group arrived in Vernal, a town of about 7,000 in northeast Utah, four participants said that friends or associates who had gone on the seminar had called it "the best experience" they had ever had. The more I heard about how wonderful the River Seminar was, the more skepticaJ I became.

By the time we had gone through the orientation-the kind of hearty and jocu-

lar welcome I associate with summer camp-I found myself seconding every cynical or irreverent aside. When John Gibson, the operations manager of the construction division of Koontz-Wagner Electric Company in South Bend, Indiana, found out at dinner that we all were expected to take turns cooking, he said: "Oh, no. I'll handle the hard stuff for Susan, and she'll cook for me." Susan Carlson is the wife of an executive who had already taken a seminar.

"I hope you're on my raft," said Marilyn Guy, one of the four guides from Colorado Outward Bound, which was running the rafting part of the seminar.

"By the end of the week, I'll have you cooking."

Marilyn Guy and two other Outward Bound guides, Joe Barnes, the river leader, and Robert Pena, would each be the captain of one of the rafts we would be riding. A fourth guide, Scott Williams, would be on a support raft.

Each raft group, which was made up of four or five seminar participants, one or two staff members from the center and a guide from Outward Bound, was also a cooking and camping team. Five participants drawn from all three rafts and a center staff member, unthreateni~gly called a "facilitator," made up each discussion group.

During the first evening, the seminar. participants scrutinized the center's staff members, who had been designated small-group leaders: Rich Porter, a social worker; Anne Francis, a social worker and sex therapist; and Jack Fitzpatrick, a psychoanalyst and the center's director of consultation services.

"I imagine there's going to be lots of jealousy," said Jack Frankenberger, the director of training and development of the Western Company of North America, an oil company in Fort Worth. "Lots of hidden agendas." Frankenberger had been through one of the center's other seminars.

The next morning, we took a bus from Vernal to Deerlodge Park, Colorado, the eastern end of the Dinosaur National Monument. Out of the window, looking as fake as a diorama in a natural-history museum, was the desert. The land, with its rolling hills, lOOKed overstuffed, quilte~.

We arrived before lunch and were divided into raft groups. I was in group one. Joe Barnes was our raft guide. Rich

Porter and Jerry Johnson, an authority on executive stress as well as an administrator, were our Menninger representatives. The rest of the crew was made up of seminar participants: Al Russell, a division manager of the Southern California Gas Company in Los Angeles; Lynn Anderson, a vice-president at Chase Manhattan Bank in New York; and John Krueger, the supervisor of employee services at the Otter Tail Power Company of Fergus Falls, Minnesota. Although Russell was the only participant who had white-water rafted before, it seemed like a competent group.

We spent two hours preparing and loading the rafts, an exercise in team building: to learn how to organize ourselves into a unit, consciously or unconsciously to choose a leader, to resolve any conflicts among group members, to distribute responsibility and to function harmoniously-all of which can be applied in the office as well as on the river.

We were the first raft packed, and when we finished, we felt like a team, a sensation that took me by surprise. I wasn't sure I liked such solidarity.

Over the years, every time I had faced the possibility of joining an organization, I had automatically turned it downeven when joining seemed appealing, morally necessary or personally satisfying. What began as an attempt to exercise my independence had become an antisocial reflex.

Virtually everyone in the program started out as I did, clanking around inside a suit of emotional and professional armor-as impractical and ridiculous as if we intended to go rafting in real armor.

After lunch, Marilyn Guy lectured about water safety and paddle signals, and Barnes went over our route through the monument.

"Shall we go rafting?" he asked.

The floor of the raft, a membrane of rubber, sank under our feet. We sat on the sides: two men in front, the "bowsers," whose job it was to push us off from shore and pull us in when we landed; three in the middle and two in back, one of whom was the captain.

The sky was clear, the thick blue of a child's finger painting. The canyon walls towered above us on either side. Every time we turned a bend in the river, a new section of canyon wall swung into view. If the River Seminar was designed in part to

shock us out of our petty concerns, to make us recognize the distinction Chekhov made between tragedy and burned potatoes, this was the appropriate landscape. It put things in perspective.

The cynical comments I had been jotting in my notebook no longer seemed worldly, but petty, snide-as if they were spray-painted across the canyon wall.

Barnes rehearsed us in our strokes, which were similar to canoe paddling.

The hardest part of steering the raft was overcoming the temptation to compare it to a car. You don't always point the bow of the raft the way you're heading. The direction the raft is pointing is called its attitude. In psychological sessions, we would also analyze attitude, our way of behaving and thinking. Often, parallels between what happened during rafting and what happened _psychologically were used to illuminate how we deal with habit and stress-physical and mental":-in our jobs, our friendships and our families.

One by one, we tried each position on the raft. Like virtually everything in the program, this experience on the river reflected our ways of dealing with colleagues, how well we gave and took commands, to what extent we would go along with orders-even if they were bad orders-and to what extent we would rebel for what was perceived as the good of the group. Even the casual jokes revealed how hostility and tension were

ore and more, it became clear that what was happening on the river was an external, objectified version of what happens inside our heads. dealt with by members of the group.

Above the first rapid, we stopped so Barnes could teach us how to re~d the water. The waves were as high as at the seashore on a windy day. But unlike ocean waves, river waves don't move, making a rapid a map of itself.

A rapid occurs because the riverbed becomes steep, because the flow of water is increased or becomes constricted by narrow banks or because of obstacles like boulders that partially block the water's flow. In reading the water, you first identify the current, the downstream flow and the various eddies, those places where the downstream flow is disrupted.

At the start of the rapid is a tongue, a "V" pointing downstream, which often marks the deepest current. Unless this maincurrent is blocked, it offers the best route through the rapid. Usually, however, the main current flows over rocks or

other obstacles, around which the raft must maneuver. Hidden rocks, the sleepers, can be the most treacherous; the water may be relatively smooth on top, so you at first don't see the abrupt drop on the down-river side.

The process of reading a rapid, we were infor{ned, can also be adapted to psychology: dealing with stress. Before plunging into a stressful situation, stop and analyze it. Identify the main flow of events and the obstacles; make a plan and some alternatives. More and more, it became clear that what was happening on the river was an external, objectified version of what happens inside our heads.

We went through the rapids the first day, whooping and hollering, waves as high as our heads. At Anderson Hole, we camped among the juniper and pinon.

We gathered in a natural amphitheater for the first lecture, which was given by Jerry Johnson. I sat next to a rock covered with such vividly colored lichen-red, orange, yellow, green and white-it looked like a half-buried Tiffany lampshade.

Johnson's topic, "Basic Principles of Personality Functioning," was an introduction to the psychological models the Menninger staff would be using to frame our experience.

He described some basic concepts, such as immature, neurotic and mature adaptive mechanisms-from the child-

like use of fantasy to deny or withdraw from reality to the integrated adult's use of sublimation as a way of dealing with conflict. "For us to be successful, we may cap many drives-sexual, creative and competitive-at an early age," he said. ':We tend to do few things that bring us pleasure."

Yes, I thought, I do tend to be a workaholic. But in my notebook¡ I scrawled a question: "Am I buying his line because it is based on a compliment?"

He had called us pleasure deniers, but he also said we were "a group of successful people."

My notebook was my last line of defense.

As Johnson strode back and forth in his boots, jeans, red T-shirt and red bandanna, he looked like a bandit chief preparing his gang for its next raid. A raid on the unconscious.

Two of my boat crew-Russell and Krueger-were in my small group, along with Tom Hayne, a senior vice-president at Chase Manhattan in New York, and Lincoln Hoffman, a vice-president and head of the Illinois-Wisconsin Department of Citicorp.

Fitzpatrick, our group leader, asked each of us to give a short biographyhow we presented ourselves to the world, and the mask the trip was meant to remove.

I went into my spiel about being a loner-about how my father had been a rogue socialist who hated Soviet Russia because he believed Lenin had betrayed the principles of Marx. A gang of older kids in my neighborhood apparently felt any Red-communist or socialist, adult or child-was fair game and often beat me up. Once I was chain-whipped so badly I left a trail of blood on the snow.

I'd told this story in one version or another-including in a novel published eight years ago-so often that I'd come to believe it was a sufficient, if not complete, explanation of who I was.

But this time, as I told it, I heard something false in the tale. There was nothing untrue about it, it was just no longer central to my life. I had, as I suspect we all do, made a legend of my past. By offering up the legend, I was able to avoid revealing anything truly important about myself. However the seminar worked, it seemed to be doing what it was advertised as doing-and

fairly fast. I was less of a skeptic than I'd been the night before.

The next morning, the lecture was in another natural amphitheater. The sun was barely up. Gibson gazed at the canyon wall and said: "Can you imagine a condominium there?"

"Sure," said Hayne, "Lynn and I will do the financing. " He and Anderson were bankers.

People were clinging to their business identities, finding ways of smuggling them into conversation, a reaction to being cut off from the normal world.

Fitzpatrick lectured on "Early Growth and Development." He quoted Maurice Sendak, the children's book writer and illustrator: "To be a healthy person you have to be sympathetic to the child you once were."

As with Johnson, much of what he said may have sounded banal in a lecture hall, but out here it seemed surprisingly relevant.

That night, after a lecture on "Mid-Life Crisis," we had our small group. Earlier that.morning, Fitzpatrick had accused us of ali being cautious, distant from each other. So now we sat in a circle so tight it burlesqued intimacy-and also excluded Fitzpatrick. When he arrived, we grinned at each other like naughty schoolboys.

I found the camaraderie enjoyable. I had the illusion that I knew the other group members better than I did. What made me trust them? I wondered. Was it the way the seminar was organized? The shared work on the river? The forced interdependence?

After the small group, Fitzpatrick commented on my continual note-taking.

"Why don't you try forgetting the notebook for a while?" he asked.

As he walked away, I jotted down a note of that conversation, realizing I was holding the notebook between my chest and his retreating figure as if it were a shield.

We gathered around the campfire, our faces reddened by the flames. A lot of the casual conversation was prompted by what had happened in the various small groups. One man discussed how alienated he felt from his children. Another talked about the pattern he had noticed in his fights with his wife.

People had stopped talking about their jobs. We were shedding our irrelevant psychological baggage, traveling light so we could cover a lot of emotional ground.

For the first half of the trip, the pressure-both psychological and physical-kept increasing. The lectures swamped us with concepts. The small groups became more candid; people were unpacking their hearts as if their hearts were equipment bags. And the rapids we were negotiating on the river were increasing in difficulty.

Each of us had to be captain in a rapid.

How well or how poorly, how readily or how unwillingly we handled that responsibility might be a measure of how successful we would be as we were given more power on the job. It mattered if one felt more comfortable being right bowser and setting the pace than being captainin total control. A middle-level executive might not like being chief executive officer. And being captain of the raft was

e finished the River Seminar with a clearer understanding of how trapped we had been by our own myths-and how much power we have to change them. a way of learning about your own aptitudes and ambitions.

Russell, as captain, seemed evenhanded, calling on the rest of us when he needed extra power. Krueger never seemed eager to do it, but handled the job superbly. Anderson was playful: in the midst of a lazy stretch, he suddenly shouted, "Right turn. Back paddle. Left turn," startling us out of our lethargy, as his laughter boomed out over the water.

But his playfulness had a purpose. He was making sure we were prepared-as a crew must be-for an emergency; he also was pushing us to our limits and doing it in a way we all found enjoyable. He was proving that he would make a superior chief executive.

I had never been in a position of leading a group in my adult life. I found myself eager for the challenge; bjlt I had a tendency to do too much of the work myself. When I had to give an order, I shouted it too loudly, too aggressively, as if I felt the crew were adversaries.

On the fourth day, the middle of the

trip, the pressure was most intense. In the psychological part of the seminar, we had moved from the general to the specific.

More and more often people were applying what seemed relevant in the lectures to their lives and thinking about their priorities: work versus family; their relationships with their spouses and children; mortality-how much time they might have left to live and how they wanted to spend that time. The river had become our lives.

During the time on the river that day, I'd forgotten to take notes for the first time ever on any assignment in 12 years of journalism. It wasn't until I got to shore that I remembered my notebook. I had stuck it in my back pocket, and it was soaked.

By the time I had finished reconstructing my notes, I had a headache. I almost never get headaches. But, having-temporarily at least-put down one shield, I was constructing another: a shield of pain.

The fourth day also provided the most physically demanding part of the trip, Warm Springs. This rapid, the most treacherous we would encounter, had killed a river guide years earliet.

Appropriately, the lecture that morning was on stress.

The river guides were captains. Barnes shouted and swore at us: "Back, forward.

Forward, I said .... " The waves reared over us. The raft bucked. The water frothing around the rocks looked as if 10,000 goose-down pillows had burst.

I paddled, concentrating on the pain behind my eyes. The headache was functioning like a magician's misdirection, keeping my attention away from the most important thing that was happening: shooting Warm Springs.

All three rafts got through in fine shape. We regrouped downstream, everyone checking to make sure everyone else was all right. This general concern was unique in my experience in such a large group. Caring had become our most valued and most negotiable emotion.

After Warm Springs, everyone seemed more relaxed, more comfortable, more candid. I found I was able to talk unselfconsciously in the small group about all the subjects I had been avoiding. Perhaps, more important, I was able to bear the others' concern for me and what I was saying, their friendliness.

The trip was a parabola. During the second half, the intensity decreased at the same rate it had increased in the first half.

We were less tense because we had been through the worst-the worst rapid and the worst part of the psychological seminar, which was learning to trust the other participants enough to be frank about our feelings.

On Thursday, the fifth day of the trip, after entering the Green River, we camped at Jones Hole, a peaceful grove of trees cut by a creek. Anne Francis asked us to lie down, close our eyes and breathe deeply. She played music on a tape recorder and led us through a series of relaxation exercises, which included conjuring up an imaginary place, "your favorite place," and populating it first with yourself as a child of 7, then with yourself as someone very old, and, lastly, with anyone who came to mind. We were instructed to have conversations with these phantoms.

I thought the exercise seemed a bit silly, but I trusted the seminar now enough to go along. I stretched out in the afternoon sun, closed my eyes and breathed deeply. After the tensions of the week, this seemed luxurious.

The room I saw was a bare chamber.

The bed was covered with a white spread.

A window opened onto the sea. Myself at 7 looked like a picture from an old family album-only animated.

"Why did you leave me with all the pain?" this child asked.

I answered that I hadn't left him; he was part of me; and, although I remembered my past as painful, this child could experience the pleasures I now took in my adult life.

Myself at 7S was a contented-looking gentleman. "How come you look so peaceful?" I asked him.

"Because during the next 40 years, you will struggle to solve those problems that still cause you anxiety," he said.

I'm going to keep the third conversation, the most intimate, to myself. There is a limit to candor.

Part of me, the prompter in the wings, was astounded at how much sense these ghosts seemed to make. And I was touched by an eerie tenderness that suffused the scenes.

I realized I was weeping.

That night, after dinner, we were each dropped off in the woods by ourselves.

We would spend the night alone. I awoke

twice during the night. The land, silvery in the moonlight, looked like a mezzotint. All the experiences of the past half-dozen days were forming an intelligible pattern, which, I suppose, was the psychological reason for the solo.

I realized that my feeling of being separate-the myth of the loner-was not unique. Despite their work in corporations, many of the other participants felt as I did.

In the morning, I felt as happy and as energetic as I've ever been. Back at the camp, everyone seemed thoughtful and almost painfully aware of how close we were to the seminar's end. The creeping elegiac mood of the rest of the day was fraught with hilarity. There was a constant retailing of jokes about how monastic we all had been. Irony and cynicism edged back into our voices. We began trying out our old roles to check the fit, as if they were the business clothes we had left behind.

The afternoon lecture was about "The Crisis of the Later Years." Appropriate.

The seminar was giving us a synoptic view of our lives-a trial run for middle and old age.

Around the campfire the last night, Gibson and Hayne traded affectionate insults. "Tom," Gibson said, "you'll go home and your wife won't know you. She sent out an office man, and she'll get back a mammoth of a man."

Half a dozen of the participants were comparing salaries, seeing who "priced out" at a higher per-hour rate. The old competitiveness was returning.

All the joking, insults and competitiveness were efforts to deny the sad fact that an experience everyone, without exception, valued as one of "the best things" he or she had ever done was coming to an end.

By midmorning, our rafts lashed together, we were floating the last couple of kilometers downstream, listening to our last lecture: a summary of what we'd been through.

On the bus back to Vernal, Line Hoffman said: "How can I explain this to people when I get back home?"

"We've seen both dramatic and subtle 'changes' in the executives who have gone through the program," said Keith Bailey, the president of the Williams Pipe Line Company of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Williams sends every key executive to one of the seminars-either on the river or

off-when he is promoted to the seniormanagement group.

"I thought I'd go and learn techniques to motivate those who work for me," said Wes Watkins, a Williams executive, who was on the river with me. "I was completely surprised by what-and how-I learned."

Two months after the seminar was over, he said he still felt its effects. What he learned is helping to make him a better executive. He is more sensitive to his coworkers' psychology and motives.

But he places greater value on the personal part of the experience, which he described as "the element of bonding" that occurred among those on the trip.

"I didn't expect it to be so luxuriously selfish," said Lynn Anderson.

"I expected group dynamics, talks on the nature of leadership, how you deal with other people. And there was that. But there was also a great deal I didn't expect. How you make psychological contracts with coworkers. How you never do anything by accident. How there's always a psychological driver behind all the innocent or accidental things you do.

Since the seminar, I've been watching that in me and in others."

My own reaction to the trip was more personal. Never before had a journalistic assignment affected me so profoundly.

Frequently, something I learned while working on an article would change an opinion. And I have occasionally used a personal anecdote to illustrate a theme.

But during the seminar, I realized that certain events in my past no longer chiefly defined me. I will never cease to be affected by the ostracism I felt as the son of "a Red." And I'll certainly never forget being chain whipped. But I have finally forgiven my father for trying to make me a socialist martyr.

While we were on the trip, it' seemed increasingly mythic, as if we were sailing up some interior Nile, searching for our own source. But the effect of the seminar was just the opposite. We finished it with a clearer understanding of how trapped we had been by our own myths-and how much power we have to change them.

0 About the Author: David Black is author of Murder at the Met, The Happy Crow, Like Father, Minds and Medicine Man: A Young Doctor on the Brink of the Twenty-First Century.

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Writer Ved Mehta and conductor Zubin Mehta, two Indians who have reached the top echelons of their professions in the United States, were among the 86 achievers from 48 countries who were honored with the New York City Mayor's Liberty Awards last \ month. The awards were given to men and women who, though born in other countries, have contributed greatly to the city and to the United States. The presentation of the awards marked the inauguration of New York's Liberty Weekend July 1 to 4.

The four-day event was a colorful celebration of the 1Oath anniversary of the Statue of Liberty and America's 210th birthday.

Mayor Edward Koch said that New York had been made a great city by the" many sons and daughters of many countries"; the city has almost 200 racial, religious and ethnic communities.

Being a gateway has given New York "a diversity and competitiveness that continue to be prime sources of our city's economic, social, cultural and intellectual vitality," Koch added. "To award such excellence, to say thank you to so many who have come here both to do their best and to make this city the best, is what these Liberty Medals are all about."

Ved Mehta was cited for excellence in literature, journalism and broadcasting. A staff writer for The New Yorker since 1961, he has authored ten novels and is also an acclaimed translator, television commentator and critic.

Zubin Mehta, one of the most famous music conductors in the world today, is now in his eighth season as director of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. As part of the celebrations, the orchestra, under Mehta's baton, gave a free concert for 800,000 music lovers in Central Park.

Liberty Weekend drew millions of New Yorkers and visitors to a veritable international food, craft and entertainment fair. Food and souvenir stands lined the streets; artists from allover the world (including Kathak dancer Anjani Am oegaokar) presented the dances and songs of their countries.

One of the highlights of the celebrations was Operation Sail; 22 tall sailing ships from 19 countries led a flotilla of 30,000 boats and ships in this dramatic parade. The graceful old vessels had an impressive military escortmore than 35 navy ships from the United States and 30 other nations that were part of the International Naval Review, a maritime salute to the Statue of Liberty. India's INS Godavari was part of the Naval Review.

Aditya Ranjan Das of Bombay walked off with the maximum number of honors at the recent annual awards ceremony of the College of Engineering and Physical Sciences, University of New Hampshire in Durham. Twenty-one-yearold Das won this year's American Institute for Chemical Engineers award for the highest scholastic standing of any member of the institute's student chapter. He also won the Winchester R. Wood Memodal Scholarship and the Technical

Alumni Achievement Award.

Otis Sproul, dean of the college, said the awards were made "in recognition of outstanding academic achievement." A member of the university faculty specially wrote to the undergraduate's parents in Bombay to congratulate them and say: "We are proud of him."

An alumnus of Bombay's Cathedral and John Connon School and St. Xavier's College, Das went to the United States in 1984.

Bangalore, Bedford and Dallas are soon to be linked in a novel tie-up that envisages Indian software for American computers. Under the project, the Dallas-based computer firm Texas Instrumentation (TI) will install an Earth station linking Bangalore, via satellite, with TI researchers in Dallas. Software engineers in the Indian city will develop programs for the American firm's computer chip design and transmit them via satellite to Bedford, England, from where a second satellite will relay them to TI's mainframes in Dallas.

Other American computer firms too are collaborating with Indian companies, attracted by India's vast brain pool and th~ liberal computer-related policies of the Indian Government. which has slashed duties on computers and made it easier for foreign high-tech firms to set up subsidiaries here.

"There's little the Indian engineers can't do as well or as fast as American engineers here," says Allan May, vice-president of the California-based Fortune Systems that has signed a deal to buy software developed by Kirloskar Computer Services for worldwide distribution. .

In another project, 25 Indian engineers are generating financial software programs (such as for cost accounting) for the American firm, Citibank, at Citibank Overseas Software Limited, set up in a free-trade zone near Bombay airport. Hinditron Services, Bombay, will be developing programs for American firms Tektronix, Inc., Digital Equipment Corporation, Data General and Hewlett-Packard.

Young Scholars on U.S. Educational Tour Five young Indian students left for the United States last month to participate in a Summer Science Institute program organized by the American Center for Excellence in Education.

The Indian students, top performers in science and mathematics in the 1985 Central Board of Secondary Education examination, will join American youth and students from several other countries in a six-week study program followed by an educational tour of the United States.

Each student participating in the Summer Institute will work for two weeks with a leading scientist from an American university, a private corporation or a governmental agency to get exposure to the practice and ethics of scientific research and development. The remaining period of the program will be spent in internship in the student's special subject. The students will stay with American families.

The Center for Excellence in Education, formerly known as The Admiral H.G. Rickover Foundation, is a private, nonprofit organization with programs aimed at fostering the development of intellectual and practical skills of gifted youth in mathematics and science.

The Indian students are: Punit Jain, Springdales School, Pusa Road, New Delhi; Bonnie Singh, Delhi Public School, Mathura Road, New Delhi; Himanshu Sharma, Kendriya Vidyalaya, Tagore Garden, New Delhi; Bhawna Malhotra, Government Girls Higher Secondary School, Janakpuri, New Delhi; and Prashant M. Chavarkar, Atomic Energy Central School, Bombay.

Recently, more than 200 amateur artists assembled in Washington, D.C., to paint what was perhaps the world's biggest murat Their canvas was a vast expanse of land-some 185 meters-stretching along Pennsylvania Avenue. The event was organized by a federal agency to promote real estate development in the area . ....;.-:"'~ \,

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Snakebite Killing the Myths Since time immemorial, snakes have been looked upon with fear and revulsion. At the sight of a snake, the first instinct is to kill it. In India, there are many frightening tales even about the harmless snakes-the rat snake gives a deathly sting with its tail; the vine snake pecks at your eyes; the common sand boa causes leprosy. All these are mere superstitions, which only reinforce people's fear of snakes. Whether it is that people are misinformed by myth, or simply uninformed, most people know very little about the snakes that share their environment. One unfortunate result of this ignorance is a high incidence of snakebite deaths. In India, as many as 10,000 people die from snakebite each year.

Rom Whitaker and his wife, Zai, have dedicated 15 years to educating the public about snakes and snakebite. Rom, the "snake man" of India, is founder of both the Madras Snake Park and the hula Snake Catchers' Cooperative. Both, open to the public, are doing useful work in spreading awarenessabout snakes.

Snakebite! starts with a farmer accidentally stepping on a cobra's tail. During the shooting of the scene (top) Rajendran, a young tribal, was the stand-in actor while Rom Whitaker distracted the snake to avoid a real accident. The next scene (above) showed the farmer's son attacking the cobra (in a close-up at right) which then bites him. As John Riber looked through the . camera (far right) and an anxious Louise watched, Shekar Dattatri tried to entice the cobra into giving a photogenic strike.

My husband, John, and I have been making films in the Indian subcontinent for the past¡ eight years. Although we are Americans, both of us were born and raised in India, and have a deep attachment to this country. Our interest is to make educational films for Indian audiences. Too many of the films made in India by foreigners are never seen by the Indian people. Ever since we met the Whitakers back in 1981, we've been intrigued and fascinated with their work, and very much wanted to make a film on snakes. And, luckily, we found the Whitakers most enthusiastic. For they also felt that the film medium would be much more effective to get their message across to the Indian public.

A film has the potential of reaching millions of people in just one national TV screening! So, together with the Whitakers and their colleagues, Shekar Dattatri and Revati Mukerjee, we formed an environmental film production company, ECO MEDIA. It was decided that our first film should be Snakebite!

It was important that the film be tailored to rural audiences, who are most susceptible to being bitten. Snakebite is a complex issue, yet it must be made simple enough for illiterate people to understand. The message of the film had to be straightforward-after the snakebite, stay calm, immobile and be carried straight to the hospital for antivenom serum,

the only sure cure. A key ingredient of any successful film in India is drama. The Indian audience will not stand for a dry, fact-filled documentary when their normal experience with cinema is one of melodramatic excitement. So, Snakebite! was designed in a way that blends drama with informative documentation.

The film opens at dusk. A cobra emerges from a rodent's hole. A farmer and his son, Gopal, are walking home through the rice fields. A sense of the inevitable is created as the music crescendos. On cue, the father steps on the cobra's tail. The cobra hoods, then, instinctively, starts to retreat.

Threatened by the mere sight of a cobra, Gopal tries to kill the snake. Defenseless, the cobra bites him. Gopal panics and runs to the local mantra man for treatment. The final scene depicts his funeral.

This dramatic sequence is then used as a tool of learning. The film stresses the importance of learning to identify the "Big Four" venomous snakes of India-the saw-scaled viper, Russell's viper, the krait and the cobra. By learning where they live and how they behave, snakebite can often be prevented. Of the more than 50 venomous snakes in India, only the Big Four are of any threat to the average person. These four snakes are responsible for 90 percent of all snakebite deaths in this country. The other venomous snakes either

are not toxic enough to be dangerous to man, or live in the sea or jungle where man rarely goes. The Big Four, however, live in cohabitation with man.

They share his fields, his gardens or the scrub and rubble near his home. The snakes are clearly shown in the film for identification, with their patterns and coloring demonstrated and described. Snakes are most active at dusk, and are specially active in the rainy season. They are basically shy by nature, and bite people only when trapped or provoked.

One should never attack a snake-it is a sure way to get bitten.

The film also explores man's relationship to snakes-his fear, his reverence and his dependence on them. Snakes help control the immense rodent population, which destroys 30 to 50 percent of India's grain each year. They are part. of nature's balance, and need to be protected.

Using Gopal as a negative example, and a case study of a survivor of snakebite as a positive example, the film teaches about the correct way to deal with snakebite. It is extremely important to keep calm. Panic speeds up the effects of the venom. Instead of screaming and running about, as Gopal did, the positive example shows the man immediately tying a piece of cloth around his upper arm, just tight enough to insert two fingers under the band.

Then, he calmly heads straight

to the closest government hospital for anti venom serum and is cured. The message is that mantras do not cure snakebite, antivenom serum does. Those who have survived under the magical chants of the mantra are simply lucky; they did not get enough venom into their system to kill them. Although snakebite is often not fatal, all snakebites should be treated as medical emergencies, just in case a lethal dose of venom has been injected by the snake.

Antivenom serum is stocked by all government hospitals, and should be administered intravenously by experienced medical personnel.

During the shooting of the film, John and I soon learned that snakes are not the terrifying creatures they are made out to be. With Rom and Shekar just out of frame coaching their pets, there was never any real danger filming the snakes at close range. John was able to get right down on the ground with the camera only 30 centimeters from the snake. As long as he was still and unthreatening the snake would never become frightened and strike.

The filming of the confrontation between the men and the snake called for some tricky snake work. Our stand-in actor for these shots was Rajendran, a member of the Irula snake catchers' tribe. To get the perfect shot of him stepping on the snake -we had to try several times, as the snake's reaction had to be just right. Even so,

The film focuses on what actually happens when a snake bites a villager-and what should be done; on myths and reality; on superstitions andfacts. In the opening sequences, the victim is shown going to a mantra man (left) for treatment-and dying; the film then tells the viewer that it is not mantras but antivenom serum (available at government hospitals) that can cure snakebite. Right, Rom Whitaker gives a snake show at a school in an effort to educate children about snakes.

not once did the cobra strike at him. On the contrary, it was difficult to get a really dramatic response from the snake. Dramatizing the attack on the snake was more dangerouswe had to have a strike to effectively create the illusion of a bite in the editing. But as an experienced snake handler, Rajendran was always one step ahead of the snake.

Snakes are vulnerable not only to man but also to various, sometimes surprising, creatures. One evening, John set up 'the camera to catch the sunset. In the foreground, only a meter and a half away was the star-a glistening cobra. Shekar was keeping the snake in place so that it would move across the frame just as the setting sun became a red ball.

Suddenly, from out of nowhere, a tiny owlet swooped down, striking his knuckles against the cobra's head. A few minutes later, the cobra was dead. Yes, working with snakes is certainly unpredictable! You cannot simply tell a cobra to come out of a rodent's hole and move frame right-it goes whichever way it pleases. But with his intuitive knowledge of snakes and their natural behavior, Rom always found a way to get the snake to do what we wanted.

Snakebite! is now ready for rele:lse. Now our next challenge is to see that the film reaches the people in villages, the people who are most often the victims of snakebite.

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reasonable doubt is necessary to obtain a convIction.

Civil proceedings are against the property itself, not against the property holders. The title of the action could be as quaint as, say, "United States v. one Rolls-Royce Car." Where the accused is a fugitive or the evidence is not foolproof, civil proceedings are regarded as the better course.

But where the issues relating to civil forfeiture are identical or similar to those in a prosecution, it is considered best to consolidate the forfeiture suit with the criminal prosecution.

The new law provides a detailed mechanism for such a consolidation. The civil proceedings are stayed on the launching of a prosecution.

It goes a step further by amending the law of evidence to enable forfeitability to be presumed from certain facts.

Inference is permitted-the Court may draw it-and is rebuttable by the accused. This provision is made because direct evidence of drug trafficking is hard to obtain and even more so is the evidence of use of the property for the crime.

But the state is bound to establish, first, that the accused must have acquired the property during, or within a reasonable time after, the period when he was engaged in drug trafficking.

'Secondly, that there was no likely source for the property other than proceeds from the crime.

The attorney general is invested with considerable powers.

He can grant equitable relief by way of remission of forfeiture to innocent purchasers; compromise claims; award compensation and direct disposition of forfeited property. Indeed, he can also transfer forfeited property to any federal agency or to an assisting state or local agency. In one case, in February 1985, the Department of Justice announced that when a 13-hectare farm in Montgomery County, Maryland, is sold, the proceeds will be split three ways among the federal government, the country's Organized Crime Control Unit and the Texas Department of Public Safety.

The law sets up for a trial four-year period a Drug Assets Forfeiture Fund from which moneys can be appropriated to defray the mounting cost of forfeiture proceedings. This includes rewards to informants and disbursements to innocent persons.

During 1985 about $400 million in cash, land and personal possessions were seized. This is exclusive of customs' seizures.

"The volume of [seizure] activity is clearly up," Brad Cates noted. He added, "The Comprehensive Crime Control Act, 1984, is the major advance in criminal justice law in this country in decades."

The seizures testify to the expensive tastes of drug traffickers. They include such goods as Persian carpets, Beechcraft single-engine aircraft, Mercedes Benz 380 SLs, a condominium in the Virgin Islands, race horses and ranches. One of the early catches of the new law was Howard Jay Brody's walled two-hectare estate by the sea in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

Accused of importing marijuana, before long a small sign was

put up on his lawns: "Auction: U.S. Government Property."

On January 15, 1985, the Justice Department announced that a U.S. District Court grand jury in Alexandria had indicted 26 persons in a drug ring. They had allegedly distributed 293 tons of marijuana and hashish throughout the country over a decade. The operation was estimated to have assets exceeding $100 million. The government sought forfeiture of a 400hectare estate, cars, gems, carpets and bank accounts. The carpets alone were worth $5 million. Their sales were used to launder the alleged drug money.

In July 1985, the U.S. Attorney's Office in Chicago and the U.S. Marshals Service seized 47 pieces of property in the city including stores, taverns, homes, apartments-all allegedly the scenes of heroin and cocaine trafficking.

On December 11, 1985, Attorney General Edwin Meese III announced that a federal grand jury had indicted 44 persons, a bank and two corporations in the operations of a drug ring that had allegedly imported an estimated 114 tons of marijuana from Mexico into the United States. The value of the assets seized was estimated at $30 million. They included a jet airplane, ranches and jewelry.

But as Howard Kurtz reported in The Washington Post: "What has some of the nation's toniest and highest-priced defense lawyers up in arms is several recent attempts by the Justice Department to move toward seizing their fees on the grounds that the money may have come from illicit drug and racketeering profits. The lawyers say the government is intruding on their clients' constitutional right to legal counsel and putting a chill on the attorney-client relationship. But prosecutors say that some defense attorneys are more worried about their financial health."

The American Bar Association has protested. But Deputy Assistant Attorney General James I.K. Knapp assured lawyers that "as a practical matter, we would not proceed unless we could establish that. .. the attorney had knowledge that he was receiving the proceeds of illegal trafficking." Knapp added, "It will be a very rare and unusual situation where we'll actually seek forfeiture of attorneys' fees. This type of thing is always difficult to prove." New guidelines have since been drawn up to reassure the legal profession.

The law is sure to be emulated by other countries. A network of laws can ensure "international forfeitability" of drug peddlers' assets regardless of where the crime was committed.

The duty of seizure would fallon the state in whose territory the assets are. Already Venezuela has proposed a new international convention on drug abuse law.

It is a sound suggestion. The convention should enjoin the duty of forfeiture. For, as one lawyer put it, "Forfeiture is the law of the 1980s."

0 About the Author: A. G. Noorani, a frequent contributor to SPAN, is a Bombay-based lawyer and constitutional expert.

was strengthened by seeing Hemingway's picture on the front page. So I was indebted to him even then, if for the wrong reasons.

Soon after the accidents in Africa, Hemingway, musing on his life, wrote, "The most complicated subject that I know, since I am a man, is a man's life." The search for Ernest Hemingway goes on. It's 25 years since the writer, seriously ill, paranoid and despondent, suffering from loss of memory brought about by electroshock treatments during two successive confinements at the Mayo Clinic, blew his head away with a shotgun. Mary Welsh Hemingway, his fourth wife, asleep in the upstairs master bedroom of the Hemingway residence in Ketchum, Idaho, was awakened on the morning of July 2, 1961, by what she thought were the sounds of "a ~ouple of

ERNEST HEMINGWTPS .·

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In 1954, after surviving two plane crashes in Africa and being reported dead, Ernest Hemingway had the unique experience of being able to read his own obituaries. I was in my teens, barely old enough to have a driver's license, but I can remember seeing his picture on the front page of our evening newspaper, grinning as he held a copy of a paper with his picture and a banner headline announcing his death. I'd heard his name in my high school English class, and I had a friend who, like me, wanted to write and who managed to work Hemingway's name into just about every conversation we had. But at the time I'd never read anything the man had written.

(I was busy reading Thomas B. Costain, among others.) Seeing Hemingway on the front page, reading about his exploits and accomplishments, and his recent brush with death, was heady and glamorous stuff. But there were no wars I could get to even if I'd wanted to, and Africa, not to mention Paris, Pamplona, Key West, Cuba, even New York City, seemed as far away as the moon to me. Still, I think my resolve to be a writer

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expressed the gener~l sense of shock and dIminishment after his death: "It is as if a whole corner of my generation had suddenly and horribly collapsed."

In the years since 1961 Hemingway's reputation as "the outstanding author since the death of Shakespeare" (John O'Hara's wildly extravagant assessment in praise of Across the River and Into the Trees) shrank to the extent that many critics, as well as some fellow writers, felt obliged to go on record that they, and the literary world at large, had been bamboozled somehow: Hemingway was not nearly as good as had been originally thought. They agreed that at least one, maybe two, of the novels (The Sun Also Rises and, possibly, A Farewell to Arms) might make it into the 21st century, along with a handful, five or six, perhaps, of his short stories. Death had finally removed the author from center stage, and deadly "reappraisals" began taking place.

It is not entirely coincidental, either, that soon after his death a particular kind of writing began to appear in America, writing that stressed the irrational and fabulous, the antirealist against the realist tradition. In this context, it might be worthwhile to remind ourselves what Hemingway believed good writing should do. He felt fiction must be based on actual experience. "A writer's job is to tell the truth," he wrote in his introduction to Men at War. "His standard of fidelity to the truth should be so high that his invention, out of his experience, should produce a truer account than anything factual can be."

And Hemingway also wrote: "Find what

gave you the emotion, what the action was that gave you the excitement. Then write it down making it so clear that ... it can become a part of the experience of the person who reads it."

Given his stature and influence, maybe the sharp reaction after his death was inevitable. But gradually, especially within the last decade, critics have been better able to separate the celebrity big-game hunter and deep-sea fisherman, the heavy-drinking bully and brawler, from the disciplined craftsman and artist whose work seems to me, with each passing year, to become more durable.

"The great thing is to last and get your work done," Hemingway said in Death in the Afternoon. And that, essentially, is what he did. Who was this man-by his own admission, "a son of a bitch"-whose novels and books of short stories changed forever the way fiction was written and, for a time, even the way people thought about themselves?

Peter Griffin's wonderful and intimate book, Along With Youth: Hemingway, the Early Years (the title is from one of Hemingway's early poems), supplies some of the answers. Griffin was a young PhD student at Brown University whcn he wrote a short letter to Mary Hemingway· telling her how important Hemingway's work had been to him at a difficult time in his life. She invited him to visit and promised full cooperation in writing this book, the first of three biographical volumes. Working a territory where a regiment of literary scholars and specialists have gone before, Griffin has uncovered a significant amount of new and revealing information. (Five previously uncollected short stories are also included.)

Several chapters deal with Hemingway's early family life and relationships. His mother was an overbearing woman with pretensions to being a singer; his father was a prominent doctor who taught Hemingway to hunt and fish and gave him his first pair of boxing gloves. .

But by far the larger and more important part of the book is devoted to Hemingway's coming-of-age as reporter for The Kansas City Star, then as an ambulance driver for the Red Cross in Italy, where he was seriously injured by an Austrian mortar shell and machine-gun bullets. There is a long section devoted to his convalescence in a military hospital in Milan. While there he fell in love with a nurse from Pennsylvania named Agnes Kurowsky, who became the model for Catherine Barkley in A Farewell

to Arms. (She left him for an Italian count.)

In 1919 he returned home to Oak Park, Illinois, wearing "a cock-feathered Bersaglieri hat, a knee-length officer's cape lined with red satin, and a British tunic decorated with ribbons of the Valor Medal and the War Cross." He had to use a cane to walk.

He was a hero, and he signed up with a lecture agency to talk to civic groups about his experiences in the war. When he was finally asked to leave home by his angry and bewildered parents (Hemingway didn't want to work at a job, liked to sleep in late and spend his afternoons shooting pool), he went to the peninsula country in upper Michigan and then to Toronto, where he accepted room and board and $80 a month from a wealthy family to tutor and "make a man out of" the family's retarded son.

From Toronto he moved to Chicago, where he shared rooms and a bohemian life with a friend named Bill Horne. He worked at a magazine called Commonwealth Cooperative, for which he wrote, in his words, "Boy's Personals, The Country Division, Miss Congress's fiction, bank editorials, children's stories, etc."

At this time, Hemingway began meeting literary people like Sherwood Anderson and Carl Sandburg. He liked to read aloud and explain the poems of Keats and Shelley and once, in the company of Sandburg, who praised his "sensitive interpretation," he read from The Rubaiyat of Gmar Khayyam. He was crazy about dancing and won a dance contest with a woman friend named Kate Smith. (She later married John Dos Passos; SPAN October 1985.) In October 1920, he met another woman, eight years older than he, who would become his first wife-the remarkable Elizabeth Hadley Richardson.

In the nine months of their courtshipshe was living in St. Louis while Hemingway was living and working in Chicago-they each wrote over 1,000 pages of letters, (Hadley's correspondence was made available to Griffin by Jack Hemingway, the son of Ernest and Hadley, who has also provided a foreword to this vol ume.) The passages Griffin quotes are intelligent, witty, often moving, and show her offering a shrewd and perceptive response to the stories, sketches and poems that the 21year-old Hemingway was sending her every week.

In one of the letters, she contrasts her own writing with his. She knew, she said, that her writing was filled with abstractions, whereas his was not. But there was something more. In all of Ernest's sentences,

"the accents fell naturally on the correct quantitative place .... I have to scratch lines under important words." She praised his intuitive sense: "It is a most lovely thingintuition-inside dead sure of stuff. A very' obvious example of it is ideas just appearing in your mind that make you understand the way things are." It was, she felt, the basis for his work. She encouraged their plan to go to Europe and felt it would be just the thing for his writing: "Why, you will write like a great wonderful breeze bringing strong whiffs from all sorts of interior places. You'll give birth before I will, and for you Paris is the place to do it."

At the end of April 1921, Hemingway told her he was beginning his first novel, a book with "real people, talking and saying what they think." The young man who was the hero of the novel would be called Nick Adams. Hadley wrote back: "Thank the Lord some young one is gonna write something young and beautiful: someone with the clean, muscular freshness of young things right in him at the moment of writing.

You go ahead. I'm wild over the idea." His style, she observed, "eliminated everything except what is necessary and strengthening.

[It] is the outcome of a deep feeling and not just intellection .... You've got a good ear for rhythm and tones and lines. Do you realize how many important threads you're weaving your life with these days? Honey, you're doing some of the best things you've ever done in your life .... I'm completely under its power. Simple, but as fine as the finest chain mail." But she warned him too: "It takes a lot ... to hold yourself down to truthfulness in art. And up to the day of your death you'll probably find yourself slipping with technical ease into poor psychology. But no one has a better chance to be honest than you because you've the will to be. Honest," she wrote, "you're doing marvels of stirring, potent stuff. ... Don't let's ever die. Let's go on together."

Griffin's biography closes just as the newly married couple, armed with letters of introduction to Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound, are about to sail for France. It brings to life the young Hemingway with all his charm, vitality, good looks, passionate dedication to writing, like nothing else I've ever read about the man.

D About the Author: Raymond Carver's published collections of poetry and short stories include Put Yourself in My Shoes, Cathedral, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? and If It Please You.

T

he door of Henry's lunchroom opened and two men came in.

They sat down at the counter.

"What's yours?" George asked them.

"I don't know," one of the men said. "What do you want to eat, AI?" "I don't know," said Al "I don't know what I want to eat."

Outside it was getting dark. The streetlight came on outside the window.' The two men at the counter read the menu .. From the other end of the counter Nick Adams watched them. He had been talking to George when they came in.

"I'll have a roast pork tenderloin with apple sauce and mashed potatoes," the first man said.

"I t isn't ready yet."

"What the hell do you put it on the card for?"

"That's the dinner," George explained. "You can get that at six o'clock."

George looked at the clock on "The

Killers"

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the wall behind the counter.

"It's five o'clock."

"The clock says 20 minutes past five," the second man said.

"It's 20 minutes fast."

"Oh, to hell with the clock," the first man said. "What have you got to eat?"

"I can give you any kind of sandwiches," George said. "You can have ham and eggs, bacon and eggs, liver and bacon, or a steak."

"Give me chicken croquettes with green peas and cream sauce and mashed potatoes."

"That's the dinner."¡ "Everything we want's the dinner, eh? That's the way you work it."

"I can give you ham and eggs, bacon and eggs, liver-" "I'll take ham and eggs," the man called Al said. He wore a derby hat and a black overcoat buttoned across the chest. His face was small and white and he had tight lips. He wore a silk muffler and gloves.

"Give me bacon and eggs," said the other man. He was about the same size as AI. Their faces were different, but they were dressed

like twins. Both wore overcoats too tight for them. They sat leaning forward, their elbows on the counter.

"Got anything to drink?" Al asked.

"Silver beer, bevo, ginger-ale," George said.

"I mean you got anything to drink?"

"Just those I said."

"This is a hot town," said the other. "What do they call it?"

"Summit."

"Ever hear of it?" Al asked his friend.

"No," said the friend.

"What do you do here nights?"

Al asked.

"They eat the dinner," his friend said. "They all come here and eat the big dinner."

"That's right," George said.

"So you think that's right?" Al asked George.

"Sure."

"You're a pretty bright boy, aren't you?"

"Sure," said George.

"Well, you're not," said the other little man. "Is he, AI?" "He's dumb," said AI. He turned

to Nick. "What's your name?"

"Adams."

"Another bright boy," Al said.

"Ain't he a bright boy, Max?" "The town's full of bright boys," Max said.

George put the two platters, one of ham and eggs, the other of bacon and eggs, on the counter. He set down two side-dishes of fried potatoes and closed the wicket into the kitchen.

"Which is yours?" he asked AI. "Don't you remember?"

"Ham and eggs."

"Just a bright boy," Max said.

He leaned forward and took the ham and eggs. Both men ate with their gloves on. George watched them eat.

"What are you looking at?" Max looked at George.

"Nothing."

"The hell you were. You were looking at me."

"Maybe the boy meant it for a joke, Max," Al said.

George laughed.

"You don't have to laugh," Max said to him. "You don't have to laugh at all, see?"

"All right," said George.

,

"I was up at Henry's," Nick said, "and two fellows came in and tied "So he thinks it's all right." Max turned to AI. "He thinks it's all right. That's a good one."

"Oh, he's a thinker," Al said.

They went on eating.

"What's the bright boy's name down the counter?" Al asked Max. "Hey, bright boy," Max said to Nick. "You go around on the other side of the counter with your boy friend."

"What's the idea?" Nick asked.

"There isn't any idea."

"You better go around, bright boy," Al said. Nick went around behind the counter.

"What's the idea?" George asked.

"None of your damn business," Al said. "Who's out in the kitchen?"

"The nigger."

"What do you mean the nigger?"

"The nigger that cooks."

"Tell him to come in."

"What's the idea?"

"Tell him to come in."

"Where do you think you are?"

"We know damn well where we are," the man called Max said. "Do we look silly?"

"You talk silly," Al said to him.

"What the hell do you argue with this kid for? Listen," he said to George, "tell the nigger to come out here."

"What are you going to do to him?"

"Nothing. Use your head, bright boy. What would we do to a nigger?"

George opened the slit that opened back into the kitchen.

"Sam," he called. "Come in here a minute."

The door to the kitchen opened and the nigger came in. "What was it?" he asked. The two men at the counter took a look at him.

"All right, nigger. You stand right there," Al said.

Sam, the nigger, standing in his apron, looked at the two men sitting at the counter. "Yes, sir," he said. Al got down from his stool.

"I'm going back to the kitchen with the nigger and bright boy," he

said. "Go on back to the kitchen, nigger. You go with him, bright boy." The little man walked after Nick and Sam, the cook, back into the kitchen. The dOQr shut after them. The man called Max sat at the counter opposite George. He didn't look at George but looked in the mirror that ran along back of the counter. Henry's had been made over from a saloon into a lunch counter.

"Well, bright boy," Max said, looking into the mirror, "why don't you say something?"

"What's it all about?"

"Hey, AI," Max called, "bright boy wants to know what it's all about."

"Why don't you tell him?" AI's voice came from the kitchen.

"What do you think it's all about?"

"I don't know."

"What do you think?"

Max looked into the mirror all the time he was talking.

"I wouldn't say."

"Hey, AI, bright boy says he wouldn't say what he thinks it's all about."

"I can hear you, all right," Al said from the kitchen. He had propped open the slit that dishes passed through into the kitchen with a catsup bottle. "Listen, bright boy," he said from the kitchen to George.

"Stand a little further along the bar. You move a little to the left, Max." He was like a photographer arranging for a group picture.

"Talk to me, bright boy," Max said. "What do you think's going to happen?"

George did not say anything.

"I'll tell you," Max said. "We're going to kill a Swede. Do you know a big Swede named Ole Andreson?"

"Yes."

"He comes here to eat every night, don't he?"

"Sometimes he comes here."

"He comes here at six o'clock, don't he?"

"If he comes."

"We know all that, bright boy," Max said. "Talk about something

else. Ever go to the movies?"

"Once in a while."

"Y ou ought to go to the movies more. The movies are fine for a bright boy like you."

"What are you going to kill Ole Andreson for? What did he ever do to you?"

"He never had a chance to do anything to us. He never even seen us."

"And he's only going to see us once," Al said from the kitchen.

"What are you going to kill him for, then?" George asked.

"We're killing him for a friend.

Just to oblige a friend, bright boy."

"Shut up," said Al from the kitchen. "You talk too goddam much."

"Well, I got to keep bright boy amused. Don't I, bright boy?"

"You talk too damn much," Al said. "The nigger and my bright boy are amused by themselves. I got them tied up like a couple of girl friends in the convent."

"I suppose you were in a convent?"

"Y ou never know."

"Y ou were in a kosher convent.

That's where you were."

George looked up at the clock.

"If anybody comes in you tell them the cook is off, and if they keep after it, you tell them you'll go back and cook yourself. Do yOu get that, bright boy?"

"All right," George said. "What you going to do with us afterward?"

"That'll depend," Max said.

"That's one of those things you never know at the time."

George looked up at the clock. It was a quarter past six. The door from the street opened. A streetcar motorman came in.

"Hello, George," he said, "Can I get supper?"

"Sam's gone out," George said.

"He'll be back in about half an hour."

"I'd better go up the street," the motorman said. George looked at the clock. It was 20 minutes past six.

"That was nice, bright boy," Max said. "You're a regular little gentleman. " "He knew I'd blow his head off," Al said from the kitchen.

"No," said Max. "It ain't that.

Bright boy is nice. He's a nice boy.

1 like him."

At 6:55 George said: "He's not coming."

Two other people had been in the lunchroom. Once George had gone out to the kitchen and made a ham-and-egg sandwich "to go" that a man wanted to take with him.

Inside the kitchen he saw AI, his derby hat tipped back, sitting on a stool beside the wicket with the muzzle of a sawed-off shotgun resting on the ledge. Nick and the cook were back¡ to back in the corner, a towel tied in each of their mouths.

George had cooked the sandwich, wrapped it up in oiled paper, put it in a bag, brought it in, and the man had paid for it and gone out.

"Bright boy can do everything," Max said. "He can cook and everything. You'd make some girl a nice wife, bright boy."

"Yes?" George said. "Your friend, Ole Andreson, isn't going to come."

"We'll give him ten minutes," Max said.

Max watched the mirror and the clock. The hands of the clock marked seven o'clock, and then five minutes past seven.

"Come on, AI," said Max. "We better go. He's not coming."

Better give him five minutes," Al said from the kitchen.

In the five minutes a man came in, and George explained that the cook was sick.

"Why the he)1 don't you get another cook?" the man asked.

"Aren't you running a lunch counter?" He went out.

"Come on, AI," Max said.

"What about the two bright boys and the nigger?"

"They're all right."

"You think so?"

"Sure. We're through with it."

"I don't like it," said AI. "It's

up me and the cook, and they said they were going to kill you."

sloppy. You talk too much."

"Oh, what the hell," said Max. "We got to keep amused, haven't we?"

"You talk too much, all the same," Al said. He came out from the kitchen. The cut-off barrels of the shotgun made a slight bulge under the waist of his too tightfitting overcoat. He straightened his coat with his gloved hands.

"So long, bright boy," he said to George. "You got a lot of luck."

"That's the truth," Max said.

"You ought to play the races, bright boy."

The two of them went out the door. George watched them, through the window, pass under the arc light and cross the street. In their tight overcoats and derby hats they looked like a vaudeville team.

George went back through the swingingdoor into the kitchen and untied Nick and the cook.

"I don't want any more of that," said Sam, the cook. "I don't want any more of that."

Nick stood up. He had never had a towel in his mouth before.

"Say," he said. "What the hell?"

He was trying to swagger it off.

"They were going to kill Ole Andreson," George said. "They were going to shoot him when he came in to eat."

"Ole Andreson?"

The cook felt the corners of his mouth with his thumbs.

"They all gone?" he asked.

"Yeah," said George. "They're gone now."

"I don't like it," said the cook. "I don't like any of it at all."

"Listen," George said to Nick.

"You better go see Ole Andreson."

"All right."

"You better not have anything to do with it at all," Sam, the cook, said. "You better stay way out of it."

"Don't go if you don't want to," George said.

"Mixing up in this ain't going to get you anywhere," the cook said.

"You stay out of it."

"I'll go see him," Nick said to George. "Where does he live?"

The cook turned away.

"Little boys always know what they want to do," he said.

"He lives up at Hirsch's rooming house," George said to Nick.

"I'll go up there."

Outside the arc light shone through the bare branches of a tree. Nick walked up the street beside the car-tracks and turned at the next arc light down a sidestreet. Three houses up the street was Hirsch's rooming house. Nick walked up the two steps and pushed the bell. A woman came to the door.

"Is Ole Andreson here?"

"Do you want to see him?"

"Yes, if he's in."

Nick followed the woman up a flight of stairs and back to the end of a corridor. She knocked on the door.

"Who is it?"

"It's somebody to see you, Mr. Andreson," the woman said.

"It's Nick Adams."

"Come in."

Nick opened the door and went into the room. Ole Andreson was lying on the bed with all his clothes on. He had been a heavyweight prizefighter and he was too long for the bed. He lay with his head on two pillows. He did not look at Nick.

"What was it?" he asked.

"I was up at Henry's," Nick said) "and two fellows came in and tied up me and the cook, and they said they were going to kill you."

It sounded silly when he said it.

Ole Andreson said nothing.

"They put us out in the kitchen," Nick went on. "They were going to shoot you when you came in to supper."

Ole Andreson looked at the wall and did not say anything.

"George thought I better come and tell you about it."

"There isn't anything I can do about it," Ole Andreson said.

"I'll tell you what they were like."

"I don't want to know what they were like," Ole Andreson said. He looked at _the wall. "Thanks for coming to tell me about it."

"That's all right."

Nick looked at the big man lying on the bed.

"Don't you want me to go and see the police?"

"No," Ole Andreson said. "That wouldn't do any good."

"Isn't there something I could do?"

"No. There ain't anything to do."

"Maybe it was just a bluff."

"No. It ain't just a bluff."

Ole Andreson rolled over toward the wall.

"The only thing is," he said, talking toward the wall, "I just can't make up my mind to go out. I been in here all day."

"Couldn't you get out of town?"

"No," Ole Andreson said. "I'm through with all that running around."

He looked at the wall.

"There ain't anything to do now."

"Couldn't you fix it up some way?"

"No. I got in wrong." He talked in the same flat voice. "There ain't anything to do. After a while I'll make up my mind to go out."

"I better go back and see George," Nick said.

"So long," said Ole Andreson.

He did not look toward Nick.

"Thanks for coming around."

Nick went out. As he shut the door he saw Ole Andreson with all his clothes on, lying. on the bed looking at the wall.

"He's been in his room all day," the landlady said downstairs. "I guess he don't feel well. I said to him: 'Mr. Andreson, you ought to go out and take a walk on a nice fall day like this,' but he didn't feel like it."

"He doesn't want to go out."

"I'm sorry he don't feel well," the woman said. "He's an awfully nice man. He was in the ring, you know."

"I know it."

"You'd never know it except from the way his face is," the woman said. They stood talking just inside the street door. "He's just as gentle."

"Well, good night, Mrs. Hirsch," Nick said.

"I'm not Mrs. Hirsch," the woman said. "She owns the place.

I just look after it for her. I'm Mrs. Bell."

"Well, good night, Mrs. Bell," Nick said.

"Good-night," the woman said.

Nick walked up the dark street to. the corner under the arc light, and then along the car-tracks to Henry's eating-house. George was inside, back of the counter.

"Did you see Ole?" "Yes," said Nick. "He's in his room and he won't go out."

The cook opened the door from the kitchen when he heard Nick's voice.

"I don't even listen to it," he said and shut the door.

"Did you tell him about it?"

George asked.

"Sure. I told him but he knows what it's all about."

"What's he going to do?"

"Nothing."

"They'll kill him."

"I guess they will."

"He must have got mixed up in something in Chicago."

"I guess so," said Nick.

"It's a hell of a thing."

"It's an awful thing," Nick said.

They did not say anything.

George reached down for a towel and wiped the counter.

"I wonder what he did,?" Nick said.

"Double-crossed somebody.

That's what they kill them for."

"I'm going to get out of this town," Nick said.

"Yes," said George. "That's a good thing to do."

"I can't stand to think about him waiting in the room and knowing he's going to get it. It's too damned awful."

"Well," said Georg~, "you better not think about it."

0

On graduation day, Shanta Rishi chats with her friends (above) and her father (right) before entering the convocation hall where she received her diploma. Top, Shanta (center) eagarly awaits her turn.

une 7, 1985. Graduation day dawned bright for Shanta Surendra Rishi. She woke up at 7:30 feeling nervous and excited. This morning she was to receive her diploma, signifying the successful completion of her studies at Paint Branch High School in Silver Spring, Maryland. But she still could not believe that her school days were over. Memories of school kept flashing through her mind as she prepared for the day: The class trip to Daytona Beach, Florida; the senior banquet; the fun and games with her many friends; the studies and exams. The reflected gold of her graduation cap and gown in the mirror brought Shanta back to the present. There was a moment of panic when she just didn't seem to be able to get the hat to sit at the proper angle on her head.

Finally, hat in place along with everything else, Shanta was ready. Still in somewhat of a daze, she walked up the ramp to receive her diploma. As she turned toward the audience and saw her parents beaming with pride, the significance of the ceremony struck her.

It was also an emotional moment for Dr. Surendra Rishi, an endocrinologist with the Group Health Association in Washington, D.C., and his wife, Shakuntala, a Hindi teacher in the American capital. Their youngest child was taking her first steps into adulthood.

Surendra Rishi went to the United States, along with his wife,in 1964 on a training fellowship. He followed that with a stint of residency at a Veterans Administration's Hospital.

Shantawas born toward the end of his residency program-and became the reason for the Rishis staying on in America. At birth she had an allergic eczema that made it impossible for her to receive the smallpox vaccination, essential for her to be allowed to enter India. The Rishis decided to remain in America. They filed for immigration.

Now, more than a decade later, the school hall echoed with applause as Shanta and her classmates received their diplomas and a congratulatory handshake from a local member of the Board of Education. U.S. Congressman Michael Barnes spoke

J

of what a "big step" this was for the students.

After the pomp and circumstance of the ceremony, there was a more informal celebration at home. And more congratulations and words of advice. There were, in true American tradition, gifts (pens, pencils, jewelry, purses) and cards from friends and relatives. Her parents' present was a 1982 Mazda GLC four-door orange sedan. "It was the happiest day of my life," said Shanta at the end of it all.

Shanta's eldest sister, Shobha, her' husband William O'Brien and their two children, Adam and Samir, came from Charlottesville, Virginia, to join the family for the celebration feast, combining Indian vegetarian dishes with American style seafood. The special treat for the day was home-made rasagullas.

Shanta's second sister, Padmaja, who lives in Atlanta, Georgia, with her husband Allen Cohen, could not join the celebrations. She sent a congratulatory letter, sprinkled with sisterly advice. She cautioned Shanta not to rush through experiences; she had her entire life ahead of her and time enough for everything. "Life," Padmaja told her, "begins after high school."

Shanta, who hopes to follow in her father's footsteps, is now a premedical student at the University of Maryland, in the town of College Park, commuting there daily in her car. As a freshman, she has been studying integral calculus, inorganic chemistry and zoology. She is also taking an American studies course focusing on popular music from the 1940s to the present.

She says that her high school classes were not sufficient preparation for college. Although her senior-year course selection of physics and calculus has been a help, the college work load has been heavier than she anticipated. But she is enthusiastic about college and her new friends: "I have to be around people who have the same expectations, the same high goals, as I have."

Shanta has wanted to be a doctor ever since she can remember. Just before graduating from high school she 'worked

The Rishis at

Home in America

as an intern in a local laboratory, studying the effects of smoking on hormones. "I'm not interested in anything else," she says. "I'm determined to get into medical school even if I have to stay at the university for six or seven years."

Asked who is harder on her, her parents or herself, Shanta replies, "I am." Her mother says she would be quite happy if her youngest daughter just "marries a nice doctor husband."

Dr. Rishi's expectations for her focus less on her medical career than oil her becoming "reasonably well educated and adjusted, and a productive person."

If that sounds like an attitude more Indian than American, it is because the Rishis have retained many of their earlier values, even as they successfully melded into the mainstream of American life. Shakuntala observes most Hindu religious rites and fasts every Friday; like many unmarried girls in India, Shanta keeps an annual fast that, tradition says, will help her get a good husband. The Rishis periodically have pujas; they had one for Shanta's graduation. On those days, the doorways are decorated with garlands of marigolds.

Shakuntala continues to be a vegetarian, though she cooks meat for the family. Shanta occasionally helps her mother when an Indian meal is being prepared. Their backyard garden has, apart from a hundred roses nurtured by Dr. Rishi, a vegetable patch that boasts of "Indian specialties like chick peas and white and yellow pumpkins."

As with most Indian parents in America, the Rishis consciously try to inculcate some of the ethos of the Indian culture in the children, supported to\some extent by organizations such as the Marathi Society, which often brings Indians and Indian-Americans in Virginia, Maryland and Washington, D.C., together; Shanta sometimes plays the piano at their get-togethers.

Seeing herself as an American first, but with very strong Indian ties, Shanta says, "I am very proud of my Indian blood.

My parents let me be me and I really respect them for that."

Along ~ith many other American and Indian-American families, the Rishis enjoyed. the Festival of India's Aditi exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution, which opened within days of Shanta's graduation. "It expressed Indian culture better than anything else could," says Shanta.

This year, she plans to make her fourth trip to India, the first by herself. Apart from visiting her ailing grandfather in Indore, she will travel to New Delhi, Bombay and Pune. Her parents have no objection to her setting off alone. For, as they realized on her graduation day, Shanta has now come of age.

0 About the Author: Jacquelyn S. Porth is a SPAN correspondent in Washington, D. C.

1. Shanta practices the piano at home-in Silver Spring, Maryland-' while her mother Shakuntala (extreme left), sister Shobha and brother-in-law William O'Brien (a professor at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville) play with 2-year-old Samir O'Brien. 2. The Rishis in the family's large kitchen. 3. Dr. Surendra Rishi in his clinic with patients. 4. Shanta checks her car, a graduation gift from herparents. 5. Shakuntala offers her daily puja. 6. Dr. Rishi spends a holiday gardening, in the company of his 5-year-old grandson Adam O'Brien. 7. Lending a helping hand in the housework, Shanta puts the garbage out. 8. Achievement certificates decorate a wall of Shanta's room in the basement of the house.

Mr. Sammler's planet, in Saul Bellow's well-known novel by the same name, is still the Earth. That is not a surprise, considering the oldfashioned gentlemen both Mr. Sammler and his creator were. What Ronald Weber's study of writings on space reveals, however, is that the preference for the familiar comfort of the Earth over the daunting mysteries of other planets is much more generally shared.

Astronauts, journalists, poets, novelists and sundry other writers all seem to return their focus to the Earth, even when they are fascinated by the probes beyond to go along for a while.

Weber quotes some striking responses. One view is that of astronomer Carl Sagan, seeing man as forever seeking greater expansion of mind and spirit. In this view, the space effort is "a liberating leap into the mysterious future." Historian Daniel Boorstin concurs, but puts that quest within the cultural perspective of America, the New World possessed by the frontier spirit, seeing in it the "symbol of man's unfulfilled possibilities."

Into that heady visionary scene enters writer Norman Cousins, with this salutary comment on the Apollo 11 moon landing: "The most significant achievement of that lunar. voyage was not that man set foot on the moon, but that he set eyes on the Earth."

But from either perspective, Weber argues, the experience has been "liberating," whether it is seen as an escape from confinement on Earth or as the discovery of a fresh connection with it. For, once we have been up there, we see ourselves differently forever thereafter. Even the dullest prose of the most staid astronaut indicates this. n.R. Mohan Raj was Professor Ronald Weber's doctoral smdent at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. His PhD thesis considers some literary aspects of contemporary American nonfiction.

Seeing Earth: Literary Responses to Space Exploration

by Ronald Weber, Ohio University Press, 138 pp., Price $19.95, paperback.

For a number of writers, the return-to-Earth theme is a way of expressing a deep distrust of technology, of the programming of man to perform tasks set for him in advance. In this view, the astronauts are anything but heroic, voiceless men obeying a faceless technobureaucratic machine.

The moon landing, in particular, inspired much derisive comment. And not all of it issued from a suspicion of science as a form of black magic or modem witchcraft.

"I am puzzled," Bruce Mazlish wrote in a 1980 article, "by the disparity between the greatness of the deed and the meanness of the result .... Scientists may profess delight.

But there is not much to nourish the public's imagination." Or, as Tom Wolfe put it, the scientists and engineers "may have accomplished a feat-but the feat was worthless." That point of view also led scientists in the program to be suspicious of and secretive with journalists, leading to a credibility gap.

Weber sees the interest of writers in the space effort as a continuation of their interests in the theme of the journey in American culture.

And much of their disillusionment stems from the "closed" nature of this particular journey, men encapsulated and programmed to struggle with mechanical malfunctions rather than with hostile environments, all moves and surprises precisely calculated, the only surprise left to chance being ultimate catastrophe.

Whether such an effort can ever bring about an expansion of human consciousness has seemed dubious to many writers. As Hannah Arendt asked: "Has man's conquest

of space increased or diminished his stature?"

Yet others continue to see in the effort an affirmation of American and human values, sometimes with ironic effect.

Novelist Norman Mailer is perhaps the best representative of the speculative skeptics. Beginning his Of a Fire on the Moon with the lament that only when men "who spoke like Shakespeare" rode the rockets would we get an adequate response to the space effort, Mailer observes that that prospect is certainly "many eons" away. For the astronauts, whatever may be said of their physical fitness and techDological skills, were "philosophically naIve, jargon-ridden and resolutely divorced from any language with [the] grandeur to match the proportions of [their] endeavor."

Edwin S. Aldrin gives the astronaut's rationale in his Return to Earth. "I wanted to stand up and be counted," he says simply.

Tom Wolfe, ever the supreme ironist, manages, nevertheless, to be affirmative of the effort. Focusing in The Right Stuff on the era of test flying that preceded the space launches, Wolfe talks of it mainly in terms of the status war he considers characteristic of American society. But he zooms in also on the sort of stuff the heroes were made of, their passion and their coolness. The test pilots were seeking so hard and so impassively to reach the stage where "a man should have the ability to go up in a hurtling piece of machinery and put his hide on the line and then have the moxie, the reflexes, the experience, the coolness, to pull it back in the last yawning moment-and then to go up again the next day, and the next day, and every next day." Even if Wolfe is merely trying to show what a meaningless farce the space launch must have been to men trained in such daily adventure, the affirmation of their spirit, of the human spirit forever striving to push

the horizon a little farther, is unmistakable.

In Wolfe's view, the novelty of the first manned space flight could not be felt because the programming had destroyed all sense of novelty.

Ronald Weber must now be reckoned among the major historians of contemporary American culture. His two earlier books, The Reporter as Artist (1974) and The Literature of Fact (1980), gave us glimpses of razzle-dazzle journalists charged with a mission to annex-to paraphrase Tom Wolfe-the literary throne in America.

In Seeing Earth, he draws a step away 'to give us a more comprehensive survey of his chosen theme. Not only does this book consider literary experiments in response to journeys in space; it also takes into account scholarly and expository prose, as well as memoirs of astronauts.

Among the litterateurs, novelists, poets, magazine writers and journalists are all those considered above. The reader may choose differently, but Weber seems to prefer-as does this reviewer-the bravura of Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe.

Weber's voyage into the prose of those probing the space voyage is sometimes as dense, ambivalent and complex as the writers or subthemes he dissects. At times, he sheds copious light on their discoveries; at others, his prose seems to assume the tortuous density of the original, a trait not always of help to the reader. Perhaps Weber, too, needed to distance himself from their prose just as writers need to distance themselves from the events they describe.

In sum, the lunar landscape is seen as desolate; the return to Earth offers greater promise. But that is not to deny the value of the space effort in expanding human horizons. And the writers who come off best in describing the effort are those who extend the literary horizon to match the ventures into 0 space.

S

ince 1973, the annual Iditarod Trail International Sled Dog Race has pitted men and women and their dogsled teams against one another in a grueling two- to three-week race over a 1,nO-kilometer course in Alaska.

In 1985, 61 dog teams, driven by 57 men and four women, experienced the worst conditions ever, including a record snowfall and temperatures of 40 degrees below zero Celsius. Thirteen contestants dropped out. Despite the conditions, the race was won by a 28-year-old Libby Riddles (center right) in 18days, 20 minutes and 17 seconds.

Not only was she the first woman to win but also came in three hours before the next contender by taking a risk and crossing the frozen Norton Sound in a blizzard-a risk the others declined to take. "I kept telling myself it was the stupidest thing I've ever done," she said.

"But I'm kind of stubborn, and once I got started, I wasn't going to turn back." She had been racing and training dogs since she was 16.

In addition to winning $50,000 and a place in Alaskan folklore, Riddles was named United States Sportswoman of the Year.

ByDogsled Across Alaska