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Red hot colours. Sizzling designs. Shyam Ahuja makes Santa Fe magic happen: a co-ordinated collection of home furnishings, rugs and knick knacks.

SPANN,wmMd992 Since coming to India in August, U.S. Ambassador Thomas R. Pickering has spoken several times about his interest in strengthening the economic ties between India and America. On a recent visit back to Washington, he told a Georgetown

University audience that "in my contacts at

senior levels in India, I have found a commitment and a determination to continue with economic liberalization. I have also found a real desire to have America, American companies, and Americans themselves participate in these efforts."

The seeds of commercial relations between our two countries were planted some two centuries ago, and they are manifest today in a wide variety of areas, including, well, seeds. This month we take a look at the operations of two seed companies that are sowing stronger commercial ties between India and America, not to mention providing jobs for thousands of farmers and farm laborers.

One is Cargill Seeds India Private Ltd., which just this year began selling to farmers hybrid sunflower and corn oilseeds that it is producing in India. Cargill India is a subsidiary of America's largest privately owned corporation, a multinational with worldwide expertise in producing top-performing hybrids.

Cargill India is headquartered in Bangalore, home also to Indo-American Hybrid Seeds (IAHS), a company whose roots go back to 1965, the year that founder Manmohan Attavar returned to India from advanced horticultural studies in the United States. Armed with a small loan from an American seed company, h~_set up IAHS to produce hybrid flower seeds for export to the United States. IAHS quickly grew into India's premier horticulture company and today is branching out into many related fields. We take a look at its recent move into biotechnology.

Hybrid seeds, and more recently the tissue culture techniques of biotechnology, have vastly improved man's ability to produce high-yielding, disease-resistant plants.

India's own green revolution, sparked by hybrid varieties developed in Mexico by Nobel Peace Prize winner Norman Borlaug, is a perfect example of the former. However, such manipulation of nature is not without its critics who protest that it accelerates the loss of many naturally occurring plant strains. India and the United States recognize this problem and are working together to combat it. See our report on the Plant Genetic Resources Project, a $24millionjoint effort that, among other things, is funding construction of a modern national gene bank in India. A model for the bank is the National Seed Storage Laboratory in Fort Collins, Colorado, which specializes in collecting and preserving crop plants from around the world. It is a leader in the network of gene banks in more than 100 countries that is striving to prevent the extinction of wild plant species that man may need in the future for food and medicinal purposes.

It is gratifying to note that as we cooperate to put more and better food on our tables, we are also showing the foresight to preserve our plant gene heritage for future generations.

2

The Media and U.S. Foreign Policy

6

James Reston-Love

by John Herbers

Letter to America

10

Golden Gail

12 16 17

Rolling Boyle

18

Art in the Woods

22

Patterns in Print

27

Banking on Seeds

33

Joint Savings Account

34 38 42

The Flowering of Cargill India

46

The Man From Iowa

by Tony Kornheiser

by Tad Friend

Focus On ...

On the Lighter Side

by Nandini Bhaskaran

by Jaan Kangilaski

by Ellen Ruppel Shell

by Sharmila

Chandra

by Guy E. Olson

Laboratory Harvest Sinking House

A Short Story by T. Coraghessan

Boyle

by Ashokamitran

Front cover: Novelist T. Coraghessan Boyle isn't satisfied over his popularity with critics and readers. This literary rebel-whose image is partly self-invented-wants to be the greatest writer ever. Story begins on page 12.

Publisher, Stephen F. Dachi; Editor, Guy E. Olson

Krishan Gabrani; Senior Editor, Aruna Dasgupta; Copy Editors, A. Venkata Narayana, Snigdha Goswami; Editorial Assislants, Rocque Fernandes, Rashmi Goel; Photo Editor, Avinash Pasricha; Art Director, Nand KatyaJ; Associate Art Director, Kanti Roy; ArtiST, Hemant Bhatnagar; ProdUCTion Assislant, Sanjay Pokhriyal; Circulation Manager, D.P. Sharma; Photographic Services: USIS Photographic Services Unit; Research Services: USIS Documentation Services, American Center Library, New Delhi.

Managing

Editor,

Photographs: Front cover-Š 1990 Alon Reininger, Contact Press Images. 2 bottom leftUnited Press International. lo-Wide World Photos. Il-collage from Sports Illustrated and Newsweek magazines. 12-I4--Gary Isaacs. I6--R.K. Sharma. 22-26--Will Brown, courtesy the Fabric Workshop. 27-32-courtesy Agricultural Research Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture. 41-Š 1987Pablo Campos. 47 right-courtesy Hualing Nieh.

The

and U.SI

The Gulf War in 1991, the first ever brought live into millions of homes around the world by CNN, demonstrated the electronic media's power and reach.

"The relationship between government and the media in the United States is a turbulent, ever-changing one, usually adversarial, often antagonistic but more often than not cooperative."

ne of the best-known stories in the United States about the role of the news media in the formation of American foreign policy concerns William Randolph Hearst, a leading newspaper publisher at the turn of the century.

Hearst's New York Journal was in a fierce circulation struggle with other newspapers, and he believed thathe could sell more copies if the United States should intervene ~gainst Spain ,on behalf of rebels in Cuba struggling for their independence. A photographer Hearst sent to Cuba wired him that not much was happening and he wished to come home. Hearst wired back, "Please remain. You furnish pictures. I will furnish war."

Whether the story, repeated in books and movies, is true in every detail does not much matter. While the Journal photographer was still in Cuba, the American battleship Maine was blown up in the Havana harbor. Without proof, Hearst blamed Spain despite that country's denial. The Journal along with other newspapers whipped up so much frenzy among American readers through exaggerated accounts and inflammatory headlines that Hearst indeed became the leading protagonist for the Spanish-American War of 1898.

As in any open, democratic society with a constitutional guarantee of a free press, the news media from the beginning of the nation in 1776until the present have had a profound impact on American foreign policy. A more recent example involves television news broadcasts following the war in the Persian Gulf. After the coalition of nations led by the United States won the war in the spring of 1991, President Bush let it be known that he would bring home American troops and not interfere with internal affairs in Iraq-thus leaving President Saddam Hussein free to attack Iraqis who resisted his rule.

The White House stuck by that policy even as Saddam put down internal rebellions by using armed force against civilian populations. As thousands of Kurds fled into Turkey to escape Iraqi troops, television cameras brought graphic accounts and

O

Forei nPolicy

by JOHN HERBERS

pictures of their suffering into millions of homes in America and Europe. A brutalized people were seen pleading to the United States for help. According to Daniel Schorr, senior news analyst for National Public Radio, both Americans and Europeans were so moved by the pictures and accounts of human suffering that it became apparent that "military victory over Iraq was threatening to turn into political and moral defeat."

"The polls that had shown Americans overwhelminglywanting troops home in a hurry were now showing that Americans did not want to abandon the Kurds, even if that meant using American forces to protect them," Schorr wrote in Columbia Journalism Review. In a reversal of policy, President Bush not only sent aid to the Kurds in Turkey, he ordered troops in northern Iraq to help set up protected camps for them. Walter Goodman, the New York Times television critic, wrote that television news, combined with similar reports from the print media, had "compelled the White House to act despite its initial reluctance."

Yet the manner in which foreign policy is often shaped by the media is much more complicated and ambiguous than the examples cited above would indicate. Although the media can cause the government to alter its policies, the government can, and often does, control how news and opinion are treated in the media, freedom of the press notwithstanding. the White House, for example, can control coverage of what occurs there by deciding which events the media are permitted to cover. And in foreign policy, much more than in domestic policy, many decisions and actions are carried out in secret. The media cannot alter that which they do not know. They can, however, press for more disclosure of official actions and policy.

The relationship between government and the media in the United States is a turbulent, ever-changing one, usually adversarial, often antagonistic but more often than not cooperative. This is because each has its own separate purposes but each is dependent on the other in some degree. The government, operating under elected officials, sees its role as representing the people by governing and establishing policies in what it judges to be their best interest. But to win public approval, it needs the media to publicize its goals and actions. It hires media experts to put the best face on what the government is doing. The media, on the other hand, see themselves as watchdogs of the public interest whose role is to disclose, explain, and judge government actions and policies. But to do this, they do need some measure of cooperation from the government.

In recent years, there has been a decided change in the relationship between the government and the media regarding foreign policy. Twenty-five years ago, the norm was one of close cooperation, even though the media often were critical of certain government policies and actions. For example, The New York Times, which carried more foreign news and commentary than any other paper and set the standard for foreign reporting, maintained close and friendly ties with the U.S. Department of State and the White House, so much so that the paper was accused by its critics of being an arm Ofthe State Department.

American foreign correspondents generally relied heavily on

U.S. diplomats and other government officials for their reporting from abroad. In 1961, the Times learned of the forthcoming invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs but killed the story at the request of President Kennedy. The invasion plan remained secret until it was carried out, unsuccessfully, leaving the communist Castro government, the target of the operation, more entrenched in power than ever.

Several events brought about an estrangement between the government and the press that makes that kind of cooperation highly unlikely at the present time. One was publication of "The Pentagon Papers," a lengthy, official assessment of the Vietnam War, by the Times and other newspapers in 1971. The Nixon Administration took the newspapers to court asking that publication of the Papers, which concluded that the Vietnam War was a failure on the part of the United States, be halted on grounds that the disclosure endangered national security. The Papers bore a top secret government classification and were leaked to the Times by an official who had helped prepare them.

The U.S. Supreme Court, however, sided with the newspapers, ruling in a split decision that publication of the Papers, although not authorized by the government, did not endanger national security. The widely publicized and debated case drove a wedge between the government and the media.

Watergate, following close on the heels of the Pentagon Papers, had even more impact. Men working for the reelection of President Nixon in 1972 burglarized the offices of the Democratic National Committee [in the Watergate apartment building in Washington, D.C.], presumably looking for information that would enhance the President's chance of winning a second term. They were caught. Evidence from tape recordings indicated that the President ordered hush money paid to the burglars so they would not implicate White House officials. Several Nixon aides served prison terms for their role in the scandal. And Nixon, faced with certain impeachment, was forced to resign as President.

Although the scandal did not directly relate to foreign policy, it brought about changes in the government and the media that have had lasting effects in the shaping of both domestic and foreign policy. For example, it caused Congress to enact a freedom of information act that makes it easier for journalists to obtain government documents, although they still have to go . through a long, difficult procedure to obtain information the government does not want released. And it caused journalists to be more suspicious of official actions and for officials to be more suspicious of the motives of journalists. It is a rift that continues to this day.

The estrangement has caused public officials to go to greater lengths to withhold information they do not want released. One example is restrictions that have been put on reporting wars. In Grenada, Panama, and the Persian Gulf, reporters and cameras were not allowed on the battlefields until most of the fighting was over, unlike previous wars when correspondents, often at their own peril, roamed among the troops and described the sounds, smells, and human tragedy of armed conflict. One

The media see themselves as watchdogs of the public interest whose role is to disclose, explain, and judge government actions and policies. reason the Vietnam War became unpopular in the United States at the time when the government was committed to it was that the carnage of civilians as well as soldiers, freely reported by the media, was shown in graphic detail on television screens from coast to coast. There are a number of reasons for the new restrictions, including the fact that the press corps, with its squads of technicians and equipment, has become cumbersome and difficult to move around. But the military also feels that it cannot trust the press to report the story from the American military's point of view, as most American journalists did in the past. In the process the media's power to shape American policy abroad has been diminished.

Part of the decline in the ability of the media to influence foreign policy, however, stems from changes within the media.

For most of American history, newspapers were the chief vehicle for reporting the news. In recent years, however, television has assumed that role, with polls showing that most Americans get their news from commercial television broadcasts, which carry only a small fraction of the information, particularly from abroad, that is to be found in most daily newspapers. Television is a powerful instrument for bringing events up close, as it did with the Kurdish refugees. But on a day-to-day basis television does not take the place of the printed word in informing the public on important issues, as Walter Cronkite, for many years the most prominent U.S. broadcast journalist, said on several occasions.

Television has had the further effect of shortening the attention span of Americans. Commercial television news is often presented as entertainment and, due to time constraints, is broadcast in condensed form. Both newspaper executives and broadcasters have found that Americans, accustomed to the short form, are bored by a long rendition, even though such length may be necessary to explain a complicated foreign story.

To hold the attention of readers and listeners, commercial news organizations are choosing more local news, sports, and entertainment. There is not much time or space left for serious foreign news.

There is, of course, a positive side to the new order. It is not unusual for a single home to have 60 or 70 television channels to choose from, and some of these offer information that would never be available in print. The C-Span channel, for example, carries daily debates in Congress and even takes viewers abroad for a close-up look at major international events. National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service for television carry long, detailed news programs and documentaries.

But even as the world has shrunk through rapid communications and transportation and as the international economy has spread around the world, it is difficult for people to keep up with all the events and developments that command attention.

Most Americans have scant knowledge of major changes taking place beyond their borders. A crisis in a faraway country is reported one day and forgotten the next.

A Time magazine essayist, William A. Henry III, decrying the sparsity of foreign news, wrote, "One of the first axioms American reporters learn is that a [local] fender bender [minor traffic accident] on Main Street is bigger news than a train wreck in Pakistan." Interestingly, about the same time, Newsweek columnist George F. Will noted an increase in domestic problems such as crime and infant mortality and called for the media to focus less on foreign concerns and more on American ones.

In any event, coverage of the world in the American media is always spotty. Cleveland, Ohio, is a metropolitan area with a large concentration of peoples from Eastern Europe. A few years ago, it was said with little exaggeration that a major paper there reported everything from Eastern Europe and Cleveland but nothing in between.

In the vacuum of public knowledge about other parts of the world, American policy about most nations is made by Washington officials and the foreign policy "establishment," as it is known, without the knowledge or input of either the popular media or the general population. The "establishment" is a network of people in and out of government, in the universities, in corporations having business abroad, and others interested in foreign events. They express their views largely through serious journals such as Foreign Affairs, publications that have a limited circulation.

Once an issue gains some popular support, however, grassroots organizing with the cooperation of the media may raise it to national importance, however obscure or highly technical it may have seemed. One example involves the proliferation of nuclear weapons. For years, the majority of people were content to leave this issue to the experts, because of its technical nature and the perceived hostility of the Soviet Union. But in the early 1980s, concern spread from a few activists to the population at large. The media spread the concern with editorials. City councils, county commissions, state legislatures, and other public bodies by the hundreds adopted resolutions calling for a nuclear freeze. Many who supported the move did not know the practicality of a freeze, or how it would work, but their action was interpreted as a signal that the American people had grown tired of the buildup of nuclear weapons and wanted appropriate action to reverse it. The message reached the White House, and President Reagan late in his administration moved forcefully for a reduction, even before the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union.

While the media are not as influential in shaping foreign policy as in domestic policy, the people when aroused still retain through the media a strong voice in deciding how the United States conducts itself abroad.

0 About the Author: John Herbers is aformer

The New York Times.

editor and correspondent of

JAMES RESTON

Love Letter to AInerica

"The most brilliant, competent, and trustworthy of diplomatic correspondents." The late Professor Hans J. Morgenthau, one of the most original and influential thinkers in this century on the enduring verities of the international order, was not given to hyperbole. But he characterized James Reston in these glowing terms in his classic In Defense of the National Interest, published four decades ago. The book itself opened for me a vista I had never seen before. It dispelled many illusions and ripped apart the veils. with which statesmen and publicists alike cover the stark realities of power politics.

I read Morgenthau avidly, and r made it a point to read the reports and later the column of the one person of whom he spoke in such high and unqualified praise.

What is one to say of a columnist who could write as far back as August 21, 1983: "I think we have won the Cold War and don't know it." That was well before Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary of the CPSU and years before the collapse of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe and the breakup of the Soviet Union in December 1991.

It was not a rhetorical flourish. The reasons were clearly set out: "The Soviets are the most spectacular failure of the century. The Russian people don't believe in them. The communist parties of Western Europe no longer regard Moscow's economic theories as a model for their societies. Every year in this advancing computerized world, they fall farther behind and try to keep up by borrowing and stealing Western technology."

So sure was Reston ofthe accuracy of his perception that he repeated it in a column he wrote in August 1987 on his retirement from The New York Times. It ended with

Deadline by James Reston,

"probably the best newspaperman the 20th century[has]produced,"reflects on the state of the world, American society, and the press in modern times. these words: "And finally, if I'm lucky, I'm going to write a long love letter to America." His Deadline: A Memoir (Random House; New York; $25; pp. 525) is a fulfillment of that wish and promise.

James Reston belongs to the golden age of American journalism, a period he shared with, among others, Walter Lippmann, a columnist, an authentic philosopher, and, as Ronald Steel's biography revealed, no small operator in the political arena as well; the Alsop brothers, Joseph and Stewart, household names; the legendary I.F. Stone whose I.F. Stone's Weekly flourished for 19 years.

They were all widely read by Indians who were interested in world affairs.

Reston had some of the qualities of all of them and other qualities distinctly his own. He was as dogged a reporter as either of the Alsop brothers but was vastly more sensible than they were, particularly Joseph. He was never guilty of the excesses of Stone but was no less intrepid. Reston was no philosopher but none could read him without being struck by the reflective bent of his mind. To all

these are added a profound morality and deep humanity, which is why Henry A. Kissinger has called him "an invaluable public conscience."

Deadline reflects these qualities, and, because the book is such an honest chronicle of the life he has lived, it explains how he came to acquire them. His childhood was spent in poverty in a Glasgow slum in a home in which his mother, a stern moralist, instilled in him relentlessly the eternal truths that she held dear. His father infected him, unconsciously, with his endearing traits of forbearance and cheerfulness. A perfect marriage did the rest. He has been married to his wife Sally for 56 years.

"Scotty," as friends call him, emigrated from Scotland to America in 1920. "The more I live, the more I respect the teachings of my parents, not only as ideals but also as practical guides to life ... but it was Sally who banished my early fears of being alien and alone, and gave me a life oflove and thought beyond my dreams."

The memoir is unique for the complete absence of the corrosive emotion of rancor that blights so many lives and ruins memOirs.

Reston delights in sketching vignettes of the high and mighty he met. The portraiture is done with a mischievous wit but is never tinged with malice. He contributed a very sensible idea to Arthur Vandenberg's famous speech in January 1945-a postwar alliance of the Big Four-which transformed the partisan Republican senator into a statesman and won him fame.

Reston was not too flattered. His profile of the man is hilarious: "It gave him immense pleasure to receive letters from Churchill and other leaders, who encouraged him in the belief that he was one

of the leading statesmen of the world. His written statements were masterpieces of confusion. He couldn't spell, but he could split more infinitives than a college freshman, and he seldom missed an opportunity to do so. He never used one word if three or four would do. He had an old battered portable typewriter, which he kept on his lap and pounded on for emphasis, capitalizing his main points and scattering superfluous exclamation marks and underlinings all over the page. Pity the poor copyreaders and biog-' raphers who had. to decipher and give continuity to his mystifying clarifications and make sense out of his diaries, which flowed in torrents, often without dates, and then would go blank for weeks."

Two men Reston admires most are Dean Acheson and Adlai Stevenson.

Stevenson was "the darling of the intellectuals, but he wasn't all that intellectual himself. He had a sound grasp of American and world history, but he didn't really read books; he gutted them and squirreled away every good story or historical analogy he could find, to use on the platform."

Secretary of State John Foster Dulles receives little praise; Nixon, least of the lot.

Kissinger is admired, but not uncritically.

"He wanted to 'do something' but sometimes his insistence on 'being somebody' minimized his influence at a time when his brilliant talents were most needed."

Reston could not have reached the highest positions in The New York Times

without receiving and inflicting injuries, slight or serious. He joined the paper in London on September I, 1939, two days before World War II broke out. He had begun his career as a sports correspondent for the Dayton Daily News. He lists the Times among the "three things" that "dominated my life"-the stern teachings of his parents; the love and intelligence of his wife; and "the influence of the integrity of The New York Times."

He rose to be its diplomatic correspondent, Washington bureau chief (1953}succeeding Arthur Krock, who was none too helpful initially-associate editor (1964), and executive editor (1968). Reston's nationally syndicated column appeared regularly in the Times from 1953 till his retirement in 1987 at the age of 78.

Deadline is more than a chronicle of a career in journalism that spanned half a

century. It is only in part "an old-fashioned love letter to his wife, to his family, and to America" by "probably the best newspaperman the 20th century [has] produced," as Russell Baker characterizes it.

The memoir is, in truth, one long column in which the writer reflects on the state of the world today, of American society, and of the press in modern times. Looming prominently in the last are his comments on the agonizing dilemmas that face every sensitive journalist of moral commitment in his encounters with men in authority. Reston knew ten Presidents and mingled with the famous and the mighty. He does not conceal the times when he, in a manner of speaking, collaborated with President John F. Kennedy on one occasion and with Secretary of State Dulles on another. Nor does he suppress his doubts.

Deadline should be compulsory reading in schools of journalism. It is written with remarkable felicity of expression and an engaging self-deprecatory humor.

Reston won his first Pulitzer Prize for publishing the proposals being discussed by the American, British, Soviet, and Chinese delegations at the Dumbarton Oaks Conference in 1945 for establishing the United Nations. The scoop was a stroke of sheer luck. Some years before World War II, a young Chinese student had begun to serve as an apprentice on the news staff of The New York Times. Reston took a liking to him and gave him a hand. But after the training, Joseph Ku

went back to China and surfaced in the meeting. The possibility of a political setUnited States only as member of the tlement was not fully discussed. The chief Chinese (Nationalist) delegation at the decision-maker, the President, was not conference. It did not require much effort "presented with a full consideration of on Reston's part to persuade him to hand all the plausible alternatives and options." over a copy of the prized documents.

To Reston went the credit for the Predictably, "there was a big explosion publication in the Times of the entire set at Dumbarton Oaks." Each complained of the Yalta Papers-383,000 words long in his own style. Andrei Gromyko spread over 50 pages. Senator Joseph charged the Times with being involved in McCarthy had got hold of parts of the "a conspiracy to divide the Allies." Sec- official record and used them in support retary of State Edward Stettinius accused of his absurd charge that Roosevelt had the British delegation of "this outrageous sold out to Stalin at Yalta. breach of security." Reston went to the Dulles thought of providing 24 copies of British Ambassador, Lord Halifax, with a the full record to top legislative leaders. copy of his letter to Stettinius, acknowl- Reston learnt of this and saw his chance. edging that the British were, indeed, not Twenty-four men make too large a circle the source bf the information. Halifax to ensure secrecy. The administration did accepted the letter as true but added that not wish to publish the record itself for fear henceforth he could have nothing to do of offending the Allies. Would Dulles give with "a man implicated in this affair." it to the Times to publish it "on its own Reston was to win his second Pulitzer responsibility"? Dulles declined-for the Prize in 1956 for his reporting of the record. "He replied," writes Reston, "that presidential election. he was not in charge of the calculated leak Deadline provides in an appendix the department; this, he said, with a smileand a unpublished memoir of John J. McCloy, nod to McCardle who was in the room, '.is adviser to several Presidents. It reveals Carl's business.'" No sooner he said this why, when, and how it was decided to use than Reston left the room. The deal was the atom bomb in the last stages of the closed. Carl McCardle, assistant secretary war against Japan. The decision was of state for public affairs, took the hint and taken at the White House on June 18, . did the job.

1945, just before President Truman left The papers of the Dumbarton Oaks and for the Potsdam Conference with Chur- Yaha conferences, although of abiding relechill and Stalin. McCloy was the sole vance, pale in importance to a leak that dissenter; not because he was against its Reston got directly from a President; a leak use altogether, but because, in his view, it that, for aught we know, helped to preserve should be used only as a last resort after world peace. It is a story with a moral. two conditions had been met. One was Reston was alive to the delicacy of the that the U.S. demand for unconditional situation and to the moral ambiguity of his surrender should be amended by promis- action. He conceals neither from the reader. ing to allow the Emperor to remain, albeit The passage bears quotation: as a constitutional monarch. The other ...while officials complain that reportwas notification to the Japanese "of our ers-to use their mildest term-are not possession of a weapon of revolutionary "helpful" to the conduct of public polproportions and so devastating in its effect icy, they occasionally (and usually in that it could destroy a city at one blow." times of crisis) turn to reporters for The communication sent to Japan help. For example, I went to see Presimentioned neither condition. McCloy dent Kennedy at his house in Hyannis never ceased to regret that the DepartPort, Massachusetts, at the beginning of ment of State was unrepresented at the September of 1961,when he felt that the

Soviet Union underestimated his willingness to go to war, if necessary, to maintain the U.S. military garrison and political headquarters in Berlin. He assured me that he would not be forced out of there by Soviet pressure, but did not want to make the crisis worse by making a personal declaration to this effect.

It would, however, be "helpful," he said mildly, if I wrote in the Times on my own authority that this was his clear intention. Accordingly, with the knowledge of the Times' responsible editors, I wrote: "Any action that closes U.S. access to Berlin will certainly lead to counteraction by the West, first in the UN, then in the field of economic countermeasures, then, if necessary, with an airlift or conventional military action on the ground to force the passage of supplies." These words were approved by Kennedy, and so were the following in a column I published: "Any assumption that the United States would acquiesce in the defeat of its command on the ground without resorting to the ultimate weapons of nuclear power would be highly reckless.

For nuclear war in such circumstances is not unthinkable. It is, in cold fact, being thought about and planned, and Mr. Khrushchev, unless he wishes to preside over a Soviet wasteland next door to 800 million Chinese, would be well advised to take this into account."

Frankly, I am not happy with this selective cooperation between officials and reporters, but the days of the old secret diplomacy are obviously over, and besides, the old diplomacy of secret arrangements secretly negotiated did not prevent, and may even have contributed to, the outbreak of the two world wars.

The book is rich in Reston's reflections on such moral dilemmas. They beset every journalist in his tasks. He criticizes Walter Lippmann, a lifelong friend whom he admired, for his double standards. "He was always lecturing me on the virtues of detachment-of avoiding personal involvement with influential officials or politicians, 'Cronyism is the curse of journalism,' he would say. But actually,

"I have come to believe that blaming the press is really the last refuge of a scoundrel, and in saying so 1 am amazed at my moderation."

he was more involved with them than any other major commentator I knew."

Reston had discovered the dangers of such associations early in his career as a reporter. Roosevelt's bonhomie concealed a marked reluctance to answer questions.

His Secretary of State Cordell Hull used reporters to plant stories against Under Secretary Sumner Welles. "I never thought there was much mileage in confidential relationships between reporters and Presidents," Reston concluded.

In October 1963 John F. Kennedy saw nothing wrong in asking Times' Publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger and Managing Editor Turner Catledge to remove their correspondent, David Halberstam, from Saigon: "Don~t you think he's too close to the story?" They refused and continued to back Halberstam.

But Reston had his anxieties on other occasions. "Occasionally I felt the Times was too inclined to cooperate with the government....Sometimes during the Vietnam War, when U.S. officialswere putting out information our own correspondents knew to be false, the Times tended to display the official version more prominently than our own."

Reston disclaims the role of a crusader.

In his view the job of a managing editor was "to manage and edit, and that of a publisher was not to influence the President but to protect the paper's reputation for accuracy and responsibility."

What makes the memoir a work of lasting value is that Reston's reflections, whether on moral dilemmas or on the problems. facing American society, are relevant to journalists and societies everywhere. He and his paper "drew a clear line between military security and diplomatic and political security." Reston was all for the publication of the Pentagon Papers

but he "moderated" a news story on the imminence of the Bay of Pigs operation.

Concepts of security vary. Some define it so narrowly as to make it synonymous with military defense. To Reston "the lamentable condition of our schools was a threat to the national security." Security, properly understood, is compromised as much by the misconduct of authority as by the misbehavior of the press. "Everybody denounced the trickery of the Cold War, its lies and deceptions and broken promises, but when it was over I could think of no greater threat to the national security than the atmosphere of distrust that increased during and after the Vietnam War, for if a people loses confidence in the truthfulness of its leaders, nobody can feel secure." This is a warning no one in the seat of power or in the editor's chair should ever forget.

During the heyday of the Cold War James Reston's was a voice of moderation and hope. He is no knee-jerk liberal, but realistic to the core. He knew that the Soviet power structure could not endure for very long. He never underestimated Soviet military power nor overestimated the capacity of the Soviet Union to overcome its domestic problems.

His is a quintessentially sane outlook on world affairs and on the problems of his country. Above all, Reston is an optimist and a man of faith. Pessimists need to be reminded of the successes he lists; successes in meeting global challenges as well as in tackling domestic problems. No less realistically, he draws attention to the new challenges confronting the world and the ones facing American society today.

In a passage that will appeal to thoughtful persons in every country he writes: " ...the threats to the nation's security after the Cold War are coming not from abroad but from the neglected problems at home."

Comments on the problems of a plural society that is the United States today will strike a chord in moderates in other plural societies. The plea here, as on other issues,

is for reconciliation of diverse interests in a spirit of compromise.

Yet, Reston does not muffle his warnings at all. He is worried about the rise of crime, internationally and at home, about the state of the economy, and the steep decline in the quality of the political process.

Particularly sharp are his criticisms of the press. It has had its face lifted, thanks to advanced technology. But there has been no elevation in the thinking. "In these 50 years, I feel that the balance of power has shifted in favor of the government and against the efforts of the press to report what the government is doing."

Generally, the press is not blind to problems of security. It does not necessarily have an adversary relationship with the State. The relationship sours only when officials and politicians abuse official secrecy to cover up their mistakes or try to mislead the press and put the blame on the press for alleged misreporting. "I have come to believe that blaming the press is really the last refuge of a scoundrel, and in saying so I am amazed at my moderation. " The threat from within is even more insidious. Reston fears that the newspapers may become too complacent, "too influenced by their prominent political and social friends" and too tolerant of corruption on the ground that "everybody does it."

It is rare to come across a memoir that packs sound sense on a whole range of issuesof the moment, surveys the last hectic half century with a sure touch, and evaluates the eminent and the powerful with such remarkable insight. And these gifts belong to a man whom not even his worst critics have ever accused of arrogance.

A man of compassion and wisdom, Reston's has been more than a life of achievement. It has been a life of sheer happiness.

0 About the Author: A.G. Noorani is a Bombaybased lawyer, constitutional

expert, and writer.

"Use me as an example."

GoldenGail

Every successful athlete has a story to tell about how far he or she has come to get to this moment. The stories are about pain and perseverance and overcoming injury-a shin splint or a chronic muscle tear or some other such cross to bear. Every athlete has a good story.

Gail Devers has a great one.

Last year, Gail Devers was two days away from having her feet amputated. Now she is the fastest woman in the world.

Now she has the gold medal for the Olympic 100 meters.

Devers was a promising hurdler on the U.S. Olympic team in Seoul. She did not make the final, but most everyone agreed her best days were in front of her. Soon after the 1988 Games, though, she began feeling chronically weak, and her body began behaving strangely.

Her hair started falling out, and she began gaining weight at an alarming rate. She reportedly went from 53 kilograms to 63 kilograms in two weeks. She experienced memory loss, migraine headaches, and sporadic temporary loss of vision in one eye. She shook involuntarily. "I was losing a lot of blood," she said, recalling that she had three to four menstrual cycles a month.

For almost two years Devers continued training hard in the hurdles and the sprints, but her results continued to be discouraging. The doctors she went to kept telling her that her body was tired and suffering stress, and that was why it was responding as it was.

Finally, on the advice of her physical therapist, Bob Forster, she went to a doctor to be tested for Graves' disease, which affects the thyroid. Forster had noticed that Devers's eyes had begun to bulge, and he was aware this was a symptom of Graves' disease.

Devers was diagnosed as having Graves' disease and was immediately put on radiation therapy to correct it. A drug was prescribed that would minimize the side effects of the radiation.

But it was on the list of banned drugs for Olympic athletes, so she chose not to take it; she continued training.

Within a year, she began experiencing terrible problems with her feet. She had blood blisters between her toes, on her soles, on her heels. She went to a podiatrist and was again apparently' misdiagnosed. "As soon as 1 took off my socks he told me 1 had a severe case of athlete's foot," Devers recalled. "I told him 1 didn't think so, 1 thought it was something worse. But he gave me some topical creams and assured Ole it would get better." It didn't.

Devers returned to the podiatrist in greater pain than before.

She had been wearing five pairs of socks during training to cushion the pain, and it was not helping. "He told me,

Gail Devers crosses thefinish line a split second ahead of Jamaican Juliet Cuthbert to win the women's lOO-meter gold medal in the 1992 Olympics and to claim victory over a devastating illness.

'Gail, you're exaggerating this,''' she said. "He told me it was stress."

Meanwhile, her feet were swelling to unbelievable size. At one point they were as big as a man's size II. And they were bleeding. Her skin was breaking down all over her body. The slightest scratch would start to bleed, then scale. "There were days Gail wouldn't come out of the house because of the way she looked," Forster said. "She described herself as a monster."

But she continued to train. When her feet hurt too much to run, she worked out on a stationary bike. This is the monomania of athletes. "My feet were not only bleeding, they were secreting something putrid," Devers said. "I'd get home and take off my socks, and my feet had a stench you could smell across the room."

One day in March of 1991 the pain got so intense that Devers could not even walk to the bathrQom. She got down on her knees and crawled there. "I can't describe the pain 1 was having," she said. "It felt like my feet were going to fall off."

This time they literally carried her to the doctor, and this is

what Devers says he told her: "Had 1 walked on my feet for two more days, they'd have had to amputate."

So it was not athlete's foot. Devers says her condition was an extreme reaction to the radiation. The therapy was changed, and within one month she was running pain-free.

It seems so simple in the retelling. Fifteen months after the crisis, Devers became the first woman to ever make the U.S. Olympic team in both the 100 and the hurdles. [Devers came close to winning a gold in the hurdles. To quote Bert Rosenthal of Associated Press: "Devers was three strides from running into history when she fell after clipping the final hurdle. The 100-meter dash champion would have been the first to sweep the 100 sprint and hurdles, but she wound up fifth."]

Devers was not even supposed to medal in the 100. Gwen Torrence was supposed to be the top American. She finished fourth. Merlene Ottey of Jamaica was supposed to be Torrence's top challenger. She finished fifth.

The women's 100 here did not figure to be nearly as compelling as in Seoul. Four years ago, the men's and women's 100s were the most glamorous races of all .... There was much fluttering about the mysterious Mata Hari, Florence GriffithJoyner, and palpably clammy tension hovering around the grudge match-up between Carl Lewis and Ben Johnson.

Griffith-Joyner blew into Seoul like a whirlwind after shocking the track world with spectacular performances at the U.S. Olympic trials. Before the trials, she was considered a competent Olympic sprinter, but any brief fame derived more from her absurdly long fingernails than her running. After the trials, she was Madonna.

The Olympic record was Evelyn Ashford's at 10.97 seconds.

Griffith-Joyner beat it to death in all four of her Seoul 100s, three heats, and the final. Ashford, who ran the second-fastest 100 of her life in the final and still spent the race looking at her compatriot's heels, said afterward: "No woman can run that fast." The combination of Griffith-Joyner's unlikely dominance and her obvious physical changes-since the 1984 Games she was more muscular and her voice was dramatically deeper-prompted people to question aloud whether she was on steroids. The mad swirl made her even more of a draw in Seoul.

Gail Devers brings no such speed, no such glamour. She does not wear one-legged lace outfits like Griffith-Joyner or grow her nails Howard Hughes-style and paint them like Picasso.

Gail Devers brings a story.

"I'm sitting here thinking back to a year and a half ago, when 1 was on my knees and couldn't walk, and now I've got a gold medal," Devers said in an interview soon after her victory.

She held the medal up for all to see, took a deep breath and smiled, gloriously. "Use me as an example," she said. "Whatever you want to do, if you have faith, it can happen. The last three years of my life have been a miracle."

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About the Author: Tony Kornheiser is a sports columnist with The _.

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Washington

Post.

The pretty woman in the front row listening to T. Coraghessan Boyle read his short story "King Bee" is the ideal listener: Rapt, her hands in her black blazer, she laughs in all the right places. Tom Boyle, her focus, is on a three-week tour to promote his fourth novel, East Is East, reading to 50 people at Butler/Gabriel Books in west Los Angeles.

Boyle paces about with the stoop-shouldered walk of the tall and skinny, wagging his left index finger to indicate a change of authorial mood, as he performs the story of Anthony, an adopted boy who doesn't get along with his well-meaning new parents, Pat and Ken. Boyle's taut, wised-up, simile-drunk prose is even livelier when he reads it, charged with the jaunty fierceness and Catskills timing of a born entertainer. Giggles fill the room and the mood is gleefully expectant.

Then the story unexpectedly pivots when Pat and Ken question Anthony about the missing family dog, Skippy. "'I put him in his cell,' Anthony said finally. "'Cell?' Ken echoed. "'In the hive,' Anthony said. 'The big hive.'"

Boyle glances up quickly and reads on: "It was Ken who noticed the broomstick wedged against the oven door, and it was Ken who buried Skippy's poor singed carcass .... " The woman in black jerks back, appalled. "King Bee," it now appears, is about a psychopath. Uh-oh.

The woman eventually leans forward again, but warily now, sensing menace beneath Boyle's odd magnetism. Boyle stands 190 centimeters, weighs 73 kilograms, sports a black Vandyke beard and a sheaf of hair that in certain lights resembles strained apricots and in others steel wool, and is upholstered in his public finery-an alarming black rayon suit, a strange red shirt with vertical-hold problems, a bolo tie, red sneakers, and two steel earrings. His smile lies somewhere between droll and demonic.

The next day Boyle says, "I really like the power of stopping the laughter and turning it to horror." He is sitting in the den of his serenely prosaic gray clapboard house in Woodland Hills, a quiet suburban section of northern Los Angeles. He slouches on the sofa in a torn green T-shirt and black jeans, smiling at . Il-year-old Kerrie, the eldest of his three charming children, as she dances in and out.

"It's v~ry powerful when the safety net drops away from the comic universe where nothing can go wrong, and there's this overpowering, terrible violence," Boyle continues. "I love Flannery O'Connor's A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Evelyn

Novelist T. Coraghessan Boyle isn't satisfied over his popularity with critics and readers.

This literary rebel-whose image is partly selfinvented-wants to be the greatest writer ever.

Waugh's A Handful of Dust because they suddenly violate the familiar comic balance. I once read 'King Bee' to a women's group in Iowa City-very genteel-and they were horrified.

None of them spoke or even looked at each other for five minutes afterward." He snickers. "It was great!"

Boyle has at age 42 come into his own. His intoxication with words, both in and out of the dictionary ("porcipophagic," "clerestory," and "testudineous" emerge from the mouths of unschooled narrators), meticulous historical research, and facility with a spectrum of narrative voices and situations-in short, his antiminimalism-have long won plaudits. But in his last two novels Boyle finally yoked his arrogance of talent and his wintry outlook to characters who weren't mere toys but men and women bouncing with emotional depth and ferment.

Critics' comparisons of Boyle to his polestars William Faulkner and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, formerly hyperbolic, suddenly tiptoed into the outskirts of plausibility.

World's End, which considered the ill-omened strivings of three Dutch and American Indian families across 300 years, was an ambitious attempt to do for Boyle's native Hudson River Valley in one novel what Faulkner did for his fictional Yoknapatawpha County in 14, and it won the PEN/Faulkner Award for American Fiction in 1988.

The novel begins with a lofty echo of Marquez, then swiftly veers toward the prosaic and the downright silly, a modulation that recurs throughout the book: "On the day he lost his right foot, Walter Van Brunt had been haunted, however haphazardly, by ghosts of the past. It began in the morning, when he woke to the smell of potato pancakes, a smell that reminded him of his mother, dead of sorrow after the Peterskill riots of 1949, and it carried through the miserable lunch break he divided between recollections of his paternal grandmother and a liverwurst sandwich that tasted of dead flesh and chemicals. Over the whine of the lathe that afternoon he was surprised by a waking dream of his grandfather, a morose, big-bellied man so covered with hair he could have been an ogre out of a children's tale, and then, just before five, he had a vague rippling vision of a leering Dutchman in sugarloaf hat and pantaloons."

Says novelist Russell Banks, one of the PEN/Faulkner-prize judges: "What knocked me out was the book's ambition. It took him out of the category of witty, clever social satire and put him in another league. He reached for the moon, and maybe he didn't get it all, but he

risked the talent, and that's a scary thing to do."

East Is East, Boyle's seventh and perhaps most accomplished book, is an account ofHiro Tanaka, an outcast Japanese sailor who jumps ship off the coast of Georgia to seek the American dream. Hiro is touchingly eager to assimilate, "to get to Beantown, the Big Apple, to the City of Brotherly Love; he had to blend in with the masses, find himself a job, an apartment with Western furniture and Japanese appliances .... " Instead he must flee from swamp to swamp, tormented by mosquitoes and leeches and hounded by a rogues' gallery of crackers and immigration agents. Hiro finds brief shelter at a writers' colony, but that soon proves even more cutthroat than the swamp, and he pelts back into the bog and toward the novel's harrowing ending.

With World's End and East Is East, Boyle's critical notices, almost always glowing, achieved incandescence. Gail Godwin's review of East Is East, on the front page of The New York Times Book Review, declared it "an absolutely stunning work, full of brilliant cross-cultural insights, his usual virtuoso language and one marvelous scene after another."

Novelist Ann Beattie speaks with an admiration shared by many writers when she says Boyle "is wonderful at casting a cold eye on things; at being smart; at taking the present moment, in all its grandness and combatant weirdness, and finding in it metaphoric resonance.

He's just a terrific writer."

Sales of Boyle's books, at first in the dispiriting low four figures, rose to 16,000 hard-cover and 52,000 paperback for World's End; East Is East, with 45,000 copies in print, quickly made The Los Angeles Times and Washington Post best-seller lists.

But to Boyle, that's not enough. He tells interviewers he would like to achieve the glamorous success that Kurt Vonnegut had in the 1960s and that John Irving achieved with The World According to Garp; he tells friends, in the glinting deadpan that masks his serious jokes, that he wants to be the most famous writer alive and the greatest writer ever.

Boyle believes this entails frank self-promotion, and unlike many writers who prefer to let the works speak for themselves, or at most to read in a grudging monotone before sprinting for the sherry, he lives to perform. He tells preposterous stories to warm up the crowd ("You may recall that when I was here in New York two years ago I achieved cold fusion in a pair of mayonnaise jars in my hotel room ... "), is at ease on the "Today" show and "Late Night With David Letterman" (Letterman: "Do you do research?" Boyle: "Well, I'm no James Michener. ..") and never, ever overestimates his audience's attention span or intelligence ("I feel like I'm the only egghead in a world of morons").

Boyle is not unusual among serious writers in believing television to be his enemy; he is unusual in appropriating its sensibility, in choosing to perform only stories that are lurid, funny, or violent and, most of all, very short. Though 90 to l'20 minutes is the norm, Boyle rarely reads for more than

5Q--which, at his current fee, is $50 a minute. Weeks after the Butler/Gabriel reading in Los Angeles, Boyle was still fretting about the poor acoustics, the poor lighting, and, most of all, the poor attendance. "I don't want to sound like a prima donna, but everything has to be just right," he says. "There should be just you bathed in a spotlight, reading into a huge crowd in the darkness. I'm used to reading for 500, not 50, and it made me think, Jesus, my life is a failure."

"He wants to be a rock star and win the Nobel Prize," says Frank Conroy, director of the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and an admirer of Boyle's.

Conroy and other writers have chided Boyle for reading the same "greatest hits" over and over, even to literary audiences.

Boyle responds: "That's. th~ old school, where a reading is a dignified sharing of riew work, challenging work. WHI, ..

I don't care if the audience': is.

600 Saul Bellows, I'm going :.t~ knock them dead with a comedoy routine. I'm out there as a missionary for literature, because if people laugh and enjoy themselves, they might actually do something as bizarre as reading the book."

When Boyle accepted the PEN/Faulkner Award at Washington's decorous Folger Shakespeare Library, instead of the customary novel excerpt he read "Hard Sell," a knockout piece about a public relations man trying to improve the Ayatollah Khomeini's image. "They went crazy," Boyle says. "Someone sent me a picture that shows Russell Banks and Susan Starn berg [the moderator] helpless, drooling with laughter, and nearby the runners-up are looking grim as hell, thinking, What's this idiot going to do next?"

"Every writer needs to create a myth about himself," Frank Conroy says. "It's like an American Indian running around the

fire before going into the woods, shouting, 'How brave I am!' Tom is just a lot more public about running around the fire than everyone else, and Tom's myththe way he embraces the dynamics of pop culture, of MTV-is new and strange."

Boyle's close friend Alan Arkawy says: "Tom does want to become the greatest writer ever.

But he also really wants to be famous the same way Zsa Zsa Gabor wants to be famous."

"The publicist and the audience like the idea of this literary rt;bel," Boyle says, trying on the done-it-all scowl that graces his book-jacket photos. He sits in the wooden gazebo high on the slope behind his house, staring out at the San Fernando Valley. Sometimes, at the end of one of the carousing evenings that burnish Boyle's legend of hipness, he and his friends come up here to urinate over the side.

Boyle an.d his buddies like to get drunk; speculate about the feminine mystique in terms unlikely to amuse Betty Friedan; wa~e .up at 7 a.m. on strangers' floors in Flagstaff, Arizona, and burn dolls' heads in fireplaces.

(For the record, Boyle unconvincingly denies that he blew up one pub's toilet but cheerfully admits that he and his friend Griff Stevens recently absconded with the management's "jacket required" jacket from New York City's Algonquin Hotel.) Sometimes, alone and stone drunk, Boyle cranks Bruce Springsteen or plays his saxophone at neighbor¡wexing volume, recalling the glory days a few years ago when he sang for a band called the Ventilators, his voice vaguely reminiscent of the Animals' Eric Burdon. Very vaguely.

"The audience thinks, 'He's bad,' .. Boyle says. "They want me to be running wild, to die young. But you could also present me as the family man with a PhO who's been with his wife for 20 years, loves his three kids, is a tenured professor at the Univer-

sity of Southern California, lives in the suburbs, and plants trees in his backyard."

Russell Banks says: "This hipster that we greet and interview is really a total invention of his. It will be interesting to watch him in the coming years, because it's a hard persona to project when you're 65 and bald."

Boyle's wife, Karen, noting that her husband writes methodically from 9 a.m. to I p.m. seven days a week, says that secretly "Tom is more like a workhorse than a thoroughbred." Though Boyle still kicks over the traces occasionally, vanished is the young drugstore cowboy who used heroin and tangled with the law, heading nowhere but the graveyard.

Until he found writing. Then, like many of his generation, Boyle backed from the edge of the abyss into the relative safety of family life. Asked if he ever thinks of Flaubert's remark"One's existence should be in two parts: One should live like a bourgeois and think like a nods vehedemigod"-Boyle mently. "I subscrtbe to Flaubert's dictum totally. It saved my life."

"You sit here, reading endlessly," says George Plimpton, editor of The Paris Review, "and you wait two or three years before something makes you leap out of your chair. Boyle did that to me."

The galvanizing story-"Oescent of Man," which Plimpton published in 1977-was the first of two Boyle stories about love affairs between women and chimpanzees.

The most familiar Boyle persona is the wise guy who conjures up his characters with lapidary prose, then drops them on a whoopee cushion. In World's End he evokes a marriage as follows: "He loved her, too, in his way.

She was a striking woman, with her startled eyes, her fine bones and the way she carried herself like a gift on a tray, and some-

"I really like the power of stopping the laughter and turning it to horror." times he found himself longing for her as she used to be. There were times, though, when he let his mind wander and pictured her fatally injured in an auto accident or the victim of a malignant virus."

Yet the story "If the River Was Whiskey" straightforwardly considers Tiller, a boy trying to befriend his idle, alcoholic father.

The two go fishing for pike, and his father, after a rousing struggle, boats a fish and exults. Tiller looks at it: "It wasn't a pike.

Tiller had watched Joe Matochik catch one off the dock one night.

Joe's pike had been dangerous, full of teeth, a long, lean, tapering strip of muscle and pounding life.

This was no pike. It was a carp. A fat, pouty, stinking, ugly mud carp ....Tiller looked at his father and felt like crying."

Boyle's ease of movement among voices and subjects-Water Music was about 18th-century English explorers on the River .

Niger; Budding Prospects portrayed a California marijuana farm; and his next novel will be about the origins of the healthfood craze in turn-of-the-century Battle Creek, Michigan-often confounds his critics. But Boyle himself seems almost clinical when discussing his hydraheaded prose: "It's not that I have ten options for a voice and I check them off," he says. "It's more a question of modes than voices. I think, This is a satiric piece about the foibles of my fel-

low men, or This is a tall tale, or This is a moving piece with a strong resolution, and the voice emerges."

"You can't pin him down," says Amanda Vaill, Boyle's editor at Viking Penguin, "and that infuriates some people. There's one group that only likes the satire and humor, and they want him to be wicked, ironic, and lean. Then there are the ones who like Barthian complexity, who like it operatic and long. And now there are the ones who prefer his so-called New Maturity and Vulnerability, who see a progression in soulfulness and deplore what they see as his easy, cheap-trick laughter."

The last school may number the most adherents.

Katherine Kearns, reviewing Boyle's first book of stories, Descent of Man, in the Carolina Quarterly, presciently saw "a gargantuan irreverence ...that refuses to acknowledge the profound complications of living and being human; [that] irreverence is Boyle's weakness and his strength."

Benjamin DeMott, writing In The New York Times Book Review, declared World's End a turning point in a "career that seems now to have no clear limits" but noted that in Boyle's previous work "caprice and mugging were the norms, and the career seemed to point in the direction of superior literary horseplay, not heft."

Boyle used to respond to such critiques by muttering, "Oh, those idiots, can't they see that I'm writing a beautifully designed story?" For a long time, Boyle says, "I was more interested in stories as a formal structure~ the only emotion was a kind of black comedy, a hipper-than-itall laughing at everything. But I began to realize the critics might be right. I want to do emotions, and I think I've demonstrated that I can. I even wrote a human love story recently, just to see if I could."

Then, as he ticks through the unsavory characteristics of his

novels' protagonists~one insufferable, one a scamp, one callow, one naive~Boyle shamelessly reverses field. "Well, it's true that none of my characters are admirable," he says. "But maybe I'm primarily a satirist, and a satirist needs to hold up what's not admirable.

The reviewers~and my editor, too~ seem to like what's safer, what they're comfortable with. Many American writers could have written the familiar familial empathy in 'If the River Was Whiskey,' but only one~me~ could have written stories like 'The Human Fly' or 'Sorry Fugu' [stories about, respectively, an insanely plucky daredevil and a restaurateur who seduces a hard-toplease food critic]. IfI'm to have a lasting impact on literature, it will probably be for the more bizarre material that is natural to me."

Boyle shifts dirt in his backyard, widening the paths that wind through the oleander, pine, and coyote brush he has planted to hold the arid hillside in place.

As he trundles the wheelbarrow to and fro, he contemplates further mischief in an escalating war with the pocket gophers.

"They're just like starfish," he says. "You cut them to pieces and their limbs regenerate new gophers." Sweating in the sun, he seems momentarily tranquil.

But when the conversation turns to the Hogarthian undercurrents in his work, Boyle is forthrightly bleak. ''I'm as depressed deep down as Samuel Beckett is on the surface," he says. "I'm not looking ahead joyfully to the rest of my life or the future of the human race. I've always written about man as an animal species among other animals, competing for limited IS resources.

Our population exploding, our environment is dying, science has debunked God. When there are too many rabbits, they all get tularemia and die off, and that's the way we're heading.

Somebody's dying, somebody's getting a brain tu-

mor right now~why isn't it you?

It could be you, and, as it's an awful universe, it probably will be you tomorrow." He snickers, his knee drumming now with nervous energy.

"That all life IS decay may strike some people as pessimistic," says Boyle's friend GriffStevens, "but for Tom it's a hilarious joke." Emblems of man's corporeal nature~a morbid fascination with the food that goes in one orifice and the fluids that come out the others~are a recurrent memento mori In Boyle's work. Fetid images of mud, lice, and pus haunt the air around his Olivetti typewriter and eventually seep onto the page.

But Boyle's scorn for man's "doltishness, racism, unconsciousness toward the environment and history, gluttony, and greed" is coupled with a febrile interest in the etiology of those flaws; he is that rare cynic who remains alive to the world. "He's a perpetual child," says Stevens.

"If there's something out there wiggling, he'll poke it with a stick."

"The most valuable thing about the whole human experience is innocence," Boyle says, "and you get disabused of it in childhood."

In his novels Boyle always has "a monumental character who embodies fate, who you throw your character up against, a supermaniac who punishes naivete by giving no quarter." Life imitates art: Boyle recalls taking his family down to the river when Kerrie was three.

"She was a totally sweet child, supremely innocent, and then this monstrous kid began rubbing sand in her face and eyes. She cried and appealed to me, but I didn't interfere, because I wouldn't always be there to stop the monstrous kids. It has to happen tb all of us."

Boyle's own innocence died young in Peekskill, New York.

His father, a school-bus driver, and his mother, a secretary, were alcoholics. "His father was ba(Text continued on page 41)

As part of its 50th anniversary celebrations this year, the Voice of America (VOA) recently held a worldwide contest for listeners with prizes donated by corporate sponsors.

VOA Director Chase Untermeyer drew grand prizewinners from among the more than 500,000 responses to the contest from around the world. One of the eight winners of the grand prize was Resham Singh, a farmer of village Bohru, Amritsar District in Punjab; he won a nine-day trip for two to the United States Just before he left for the United States on October 3,

accompanied by his brother-inlaw Lakhbir Singh, Resham Singh said, "When I heard the results on VOA, they simply said Resham Singh of Amritsar. I was not sure whether it was me or some other Resham Singh.

However, the suspense was over after a few day when I received an official letter."

The Singhs' tour included Disney World in Orlando, Florida, and Washington, D.C. They also visited a typical American farm.

Photo above shows Resham Singh (center) and Lakhbir Singh (left) with USIS Deputy Director James E. Smith.

AID GRANTS The U.S Agency for International Development (USAID) recently sanctioned two grants to India-one to the Industrial Credit and Investment Corporation of India (ICICI) and the other to the Government of India.

USAID will provide Rs. 708 million to ICICI to help reduce industrial pollution in India and promote bilateral private-sector linkages in environmental services and technologies. The five-year Trade in Environmental Services and Technologies project will enable Indian firms to purchase environmental technologies and services from the United States to increase productivity and reduce industrial pollution. It will also help promote collaborations between American and Indian firms in this field.

Under the second agreement, USAID will give a grant of Rs. 283 million to the Indian government for its efforts to prevent and control the spread of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) in Tamil Nadu. The seven-year project is aimed at helping nongovernmental organizations, working in concert with the government and private-sector institutions, to initiate AIDS prevention programs among high-risk groups in Tamil Nadu,one of the three Indian states with the highest levels of HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) infection, which causes AIDS.

In his first three months in India, Ambassador Thomas R. Pickering has made several speeches to business groups, including the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) and the Indo-American Chamber of Commerce (IACC)-an indication of the importance he places on closer commercial relations between the two countries.

In his address to the IACC, Pickering applauded India's economic reforms, which, he said, would greatly boost "our mutual effort to increase investment and two-way trade." In fact, the United States, he said, is even now "India's most important trade partner and largest foreign investor ....Of the 10,000 technical and financial collaborations between Indian and foreign companies now in place, the largest proportion-one quarter-is with Americans. Moreover, the curve is on its way up: New U.S. investment in India grew almost tenfold last year over 1990-91 levels. Almost 100 new technical and financial collaborations between Indian and American companies were signed in the first half of this year alone. The picture is similarly healthy on the trade side Last year, the United States bought 20 percent of India's exports-making us your single biggest customer in the world. And this happy trend continues In the first half of this year, India's export? to the U.S. were up 17 percent in dollar terms."

India's economic reforms, the Ambassador said, "have already kindled much new business interest inside and outside this country ....There has been a significant increase in visits and contacts of all kinds from American companies interested in trading and investment. In the past, many of our visitors were stopping by in India on their way somewhere else; now India is their primary destination."

However, to realize the full potential of the liberalization program, the Ambassador noted, there are still areas that "need improvement," and "overall procedures and implementation need to be streamlined and simplified ....U.S. businesses are actionoriented. They are happy to play by the rules-but first, they want to know exactly what the rules are. The keys to attracting new foreign investment...are consistency and continuity.

Potential investors want to be sure that they can depend on the policies as announced.

"Even more important than the policies themselves may be their implementation. No matter how liberal the policy, if implementation is not transparent or predictable ...then potential investors may well be discouraged."

In his address to FICCI, Pickering underscored, "As American Ambassador, I want to do everything in my power to make it easier for our two economies to work together more closely ...in promoting increased Indo-American trade and investment. I will continue to urge American businesses to look closely at the new opportunities which India offers ....lndia has the ability, resources, and the will to make its economy flourish for all its people. Please believe that you can count on us to help."

~c>z;.~ "How many times have I told you not to slam that door?"

"In November, you should vote for me because I oppose all the things you oppose and stand for all the things you stand for. "

Art in the Woods Wood-carver Scott Runion with Wooden Vessel and Ascension, two of the sculptures he created during his recent stay in Giriz, a village near Bombay.

T

o the residents of the tiny village of was the customary ambience of cultural Giriz, tucked away in an arbor in borrowings.

Runion's work, however, consisting of Vasai, 75 kilometers from Bombay, Scott Runion was a Western curios- sculpted suggestions of the human figity who worked with a manic energy ure-arms, legs, and torsos, emanating out of or disappearing into tre'e trunksbeneath the tall branches of a tamarind tree. To Runion, a wood-carver and Ful- and burnt and gashed spaces in forms that bright scholar from Sacramento, Califor- still have an unperturbed, living presence, seems to embody universal metaphors nia, the people of Giriz were unhurried spectators, their attentiveness refresh- rather than culture-specific ones. He ingly free of pretentious intellection. The takes his inspiration from mythology.

"Every singleculture relates to the meta15pieces of sculpture in wood that emerged under their intermittent gaze over a period phor of trees having a life of their own," of eight months were exhibited at Bom- says Runion. "In fairy tales and folklore, bay's Jehangir Art Gallery in the first week people are always being turned into trees or of July. They are testimony to a fond. and animals. I can't think of any religion that reciprocal relationship between Run- doesn't have an aspect of animism to it.

"The wood, in itself, is a symbol of that ion and the Sequeiras, his consummate hosts. His sculptures are also the fruit of a process of change, of going from seed to marriage of Eastern materials and ap- tree to seed again. Hack a limb off a tree proaches and a Western response to the and stick it on another and it will grow." timelessconcepts of change and the cyclical Or give it another shape and it will seem to nature of birth and death, creation and breathe stilly, as Cocoon II does, faceless destruction, which are central to Hinduism. and trussed with twigs with a hole at its The morning we set out for Vasai, center, taking refuge in silent anonymity.

Runion's preference for wood goes back however, we saw change of a more mundane nature. The stubborn sultriness of to 1984when he graduated in fine arts from June gave way to first, a powdery drizzle, the Chicago Art Institute and returned to then a steady beating down of the rain. his home state. He needed a material that Picnic hamper and umbrellas in hand, we was affordable and not too fragile.

"It wasn't till I came back to California made our way through the mud and slush outside Vasai station to a bus that would that I thought of working with wood," he take us to Small Giriz, the home of the says. "It is a universal symbol of life, Sequeiras, Bombay's leading creators of something that comes out of the earth, religious wood carving-icons and roods goes up to the sky. Wood has a mind of its for churches and for the festivals of own. I love ain [a coarse wood used in Durga and Ganapati too.

India], it fights back-I like the feeling of Alighting at Giriz and walking into sore muscles and sweat. And every single a grove of chickoo and tamarind trees piece done in ain works out differently. The and bushes of saffron hibiscus, there grain has far more characteristics, a lot came wafting up to our ears the strains more personality than teak or siwan, which of the popular number Oh, Susanna! from are too uniform." Ain is very hard. Siwan, somebody's tape recorder and the considered stronger and more flexiblethan teak, is the usual choice for statues and unmistakable grate of saw on woodfollowed by loud Hindi film music. Here dholkis (drums used by folk musicians).

But the Sequeiras (master carver Boniface and his younger brothers Roque and About the Author: Nandini Bhaskaran is on the staff of The Times of India in Bombay.

Renold) indulge the American's stubborn insistence on working with ain.

Runion's comfort with India and things Indian-from sampling the wada pao at roadside stalls to an unruffled acceptance of snakes around the house in the monsoons to visiting Tryambakeshwar (180

kilometers away) for its Shiva templestems from his large circle ofIndian friends in California, who, two years ago, urged him to visit the country to attend a wedding.

He went to Mysore on that visit and was taken with the fine craftsmanship of the traditional wood-carvers, particularly their facility with "extremely crude hand tools." Runion had worked until then only with power tools. On his return to the United States, he applied for a Fulbright grant, part ofthe objective being to learn to use hand tools.

He already had an awareness ofIndian philosophy and a more than nodding acquaintance with the writings of Tagore and Kabir. He is also fond of the poetry of e.e. cummings, "but I'm not influenced directly by anyone," he asserts.

One wonders, though, if Christianity is a conscious influence since the crucifix is a recurrent motif in his sculpture. In Dormant Spirit, for instance, a pair of veinlessfeet are embedded at the base of a tree, encased almost protectively by branches. Giriz, coincidentally, is a Christian community.

"The crucifix is very much a part of every philosophy," Runion says, "the whole concept of sacrifice, death, changing to another state, and resurrection. Or there's the phoenix that in consuming itself, rises again from the flames."

Runion continues, "I'm not interested in the linear view of life, but the cyclical.

Most cultures realize, whether it's actually stated or not, that there is a standard cycle.

All my sculptures are in a state of transition, of metamorphosis, while pointing to the stability of the overall process."

Spirit Boat, which was suspended from the gallery ceiling, seemed to contain the various strands of association-a symbol "of floating between life and death, of crossing the River Styx in a boat," the exposed ribs of the boat resembling the bones of a fish. Its open-ended form represents the female aspect. "One speaks of a ship or a boat always in the feminine,

like it was a living being," he points out.

The human figure, in fact, became a preoccupation with Runion in India-in contrast to the more abstract forms of his earlier work-because he could use hand tools to carve them. "Archetypal images and the human figure evoke a gut-level reaction," he says. "I am here to find similarities. I believe that there is a pure thread of something that runs through all cultures and that's the part that's human, no matter what socioeconomic group you come from. Everyone goes on about multiculturalism-about Mexican spraycan work, Japanese brushwork. I couldn't care less about how they're different, as long as we know how they're a representation of the same basic impulses."

He thinks Eastern aesthetics have "an extensive concern for detail, for surface ornamentation," a feature he finds in all the arts in India. An Indian music concert he attended, with its background rhythm of drums and "tremendous modulation of tone" struck him as quite different from the uniformity in traditional Western music. "It's the difference," he says in his articulate fashion, "between lace and fine linen, the one being fine and intricate, the second big and perfect."

What has been the result of this inter-" action in his own work? "My work is not intricate. I'm more interested in overall form. The approach that the Sequeiras take as wood-carvers to detail it has changed my work; I now pay more attention to surface bumps in the wood."

Also, he notes, "I can now make a piece faster though my pace is slower." If that sounds contradictory Runion explains how it has come about. Earlier, he would use power-driven tools, then come to a stop.

"With hand tools," he says, "there's a percussiverhythm and the peace of just watching the form come through slowly, letting me question and decide [the next move].

But I'm not abandoning power-driven tools," he clarifies,with the hindsight of one who has tried both, "Oh no, absolutely not.

One needs them for joinery, for instance."

For now, however, in the sylvan atmosphere of Giriz, Roque and Renold Sequeira are initiating him into the gentler, quieter labors of transferring

from paper to wood. Earlier, he would make rough sketches in a scrapbook.

"But now, after scribbling a hundred or so ideas, I pick the one I like best and then draw an exact, full-size replica of it. I then trace it on to another sheet of paper, make a cutout of it and transfer it on to the wood." The method does not work for all pieces naturally, "for sometimes it's the grain of the wood that dictates the shape.

It's a mixture of techniques." Never before though had he applied the rules of draftsmanship to the actual carving.

"Roque and Renold are masters of duplication of whatever they see in life," Runion observes. "I learned their skill of accurate reproduction but my attempt has been to capture archetypal images."

One example of a direct confluence of East and West in his work is perhaps Naga, he says. Done in tamarind wood, it is an adaptation of the snake image with its associations of fertility, the creature's indolent presence within the innards of a tree evoking the reverence with which it is held in Hindu mythology.

If Runion's Indian sojourn has enabled him to "evolve technically" in his work, he wonders if his hosts took very much from him. Practitioners of an al1cestral profession, and renowned for their crucifixes and statues of Our Lady, Don Bosco, and other saints in churches in India and abroad, the Sequeiras are comfortingly self-sufficient. "Our system of carving is perfect," says Roque, with the pride of 35 years' experience behind him. "We sketch according to 'the central line,' the center of gravity. We are just happy that an American came and stayed with us. He will take our name and reputation to his country."

0 Facing page, top (from right): Scott Runion, Renold, Boniface, and Roque Sequeira with some logs ofsiwan and teak at the Sequeira home. Center: Runion and carpenter Nicholas Hunes saw wood. Bottom: Runion works with Boniface, the eldest brother.

Patterns in Print T

he Fabric Workshop is a unique institution-part studio, part industrial plant, part training school, part gallery-on the 13thfloor of an aging office building in downtown Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

"It is very unusual for an arts institution to be all those things: A school, a print workshop, and a place that has art exhibitions--exhibitions that circulate all around the world," observes Matthew Drutt, an arts administrator and independent curator who has been associated with the workshop for years.

Basically, the workshop is a brightly lit, immense room with walls of windows facing west and north. Most of the space is occupied by long print tables necessary for printing repeat patterns on lengths of cloth. There are also a number of tiny studios for artists in residence, a darkroom, rooms for mixing dyes and pigments, offices,a well-litcomer equipped with sewing machines, two rooms used as galleries, and a room for storage and for sales.

The place is usually abuzz with hectic activity: An artist conferring with a master printer, a master instructing apprentices, a visiting artist getting a tour of the premises, a school tour, a bus tour from another city. Some 40,000 persons visit the workshop every year, with groups coming from as far as Japan.

Marion Stroud, the founder and direc. tor ofthe Fabric Workshop, recalls how it Left: Repeat yardage designs produced at the Fabric Workshop by Harry Anderson, Frank Faulkner, Jun Kaneko, Robert Kushner, Kim MacConnel, John Moore, Italo Scanga, Pat Siler, Ned Smyth, WiD Stokes, Jr., Robert Venturi, and Karl Wirsum. Right: A printing machine transfers an artist's design onto fabric.

began: "Years ago, a group of us were involved in the Prints for Progress [program], teaching inner-city schoolchildren how to print on fabric. A friend of mine, who had worked with Roy Lichtenstein and Claes Oldenburg, came to see what we were doing and said: 'I know artists who would love to do this.'

"She offered to write a grant application, so we could get some funds. Well, we got that granL.and then, of course, we had to find the space and actually do it. And we ' did it-we had 22 artists, from all over the country, that first year. This was in 1977, and we have never had time to look back."

One of the original 22 was painter Sam Gilliam, whose work Philadelphia Soft has been characterized as exploring every known serigraphic technique. ,Serigraphy is the technical term for silkscreening, or printing on silk and other glossy fabrics. Although artists in residence can try their hand at anything involving fabric that interests them, many of them continue to opt for this technique.

"We do all sorts of projects with artists-whatever they want to try," says Elizabeth McIlvaine, a staffer who has done everything from designing to printing to sewing. "I would say, though, that our main activity is still printing on fabric. This is an industrial process where the artists translate their own work into textiles. Since most of them, when they come here, have no idea what they can or cannot

do, they get very innovative, with all sorts of ideas popping up. It gets very exciting."

This excitement easily survives the more laborious aspects of the work, from the actual printing to the research. Many of the projects involve extensive research on how everyday objects actually work and how an artist can use this knowledge to turn the object into a work of art. This may require a close study of the industrial processes used in raincoat manufacture that served as the basis for works by Luis Cruz Azaceta and Ecke Bonk. Other works of art based on an industrial process include suitcases by Nancy Graves, umbrellas by Robert Venturi and others, floor tiles by Tony Costanzo, and the window shades that served as the medium for Ursula vpn Rydingsvard.

Even silkscreening, as Stroud readily admits, is very much like an industrial process. "We were thrilled one time when Bob Venturi told us he had been dealing with one of the best people in the textile industry-and had reservations that they would be able to print his fabric as well as we could print it," she says. "That's because they were automated and we are not.

So we live up to industrial standards, and sometimes surpass them. Sometimes we send a trial batch off to be tested...to make sure that it will ~ stand up to heat and light, and .â&#x20AC;˘â&#x20AC;˘â&#x20AC;˘. exposure to weather."

The workshop's growing fame has brought artists and students from all over the world to make use of its facilities. "A limited num-

ber of apprentices receive scholarships to study at the workshop," explains Stroud.

"They come here to learn both the techniques and the aesthetics of fabric art, working side by side with the workshop staff and the visiting artists. It makes for an ideal combination: Master and apprentice, experimentation and practice, creation and production."

Applicants are screened by an advisory committee of artists who review slides of each person's work. The apprentices get a stipend and are also paid for their work.

Much of the Fabric Workshop's budget comes out of grants by federal and state agencies, such as the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pennsylvania Council of the Arts, supplemented by local foundations and gifts from individuals and corporations. Sales shop proceeds playa very minor role.

Some artists never produce anything during their period of residency. Most of them, however, find the experience a source of additional inspiration. Stroud notes that silkscreening has become a favorite method for quite a few artists,

Facing page: A Bird in the

Hand Is Worth Two in the Bus, Karl Wirsum, 1978, banner (detail), pigment on black polished cotton.

Left: Philadelphia Soft, Sam Gilliam, 1977, silkscreen on Belgian linen and cotton canvas. Above: Shirt, Roy Lichtenstein, 1979, silkscreen on silk satin. Right top: Hidden, Will Stokes, Jr., 1980, bag, pigment on cotton sateen (detail at right).

including Robert Morris. Patterns that artist Richard DeVore developed in the course of his residency later turned up on his ceramics. Joseph Nechvatal is still primarily a painter-only now he paints with dyes that are similar to those he used on cloth while at the workshop.

On a more mundane level, the workshop staff takes applicants through the various steps that are involved in printing fabric. "Most of them know very little about that," says Elizabeth McIlvaine.

"After they have seen the process, we

show them slides of what other people have done, and we may talk about doing a repeat design that can be used for many different purposes. Some people might simply want to do a continuous design on a piece of fabric. Others might be more interested in some kind of soft sculpture.

There are all sorts of possibilities."

A few of those possibilities are on display in the two galleries adjoining the workshop's work area, as well as in its sales shop that is a veritable treasure chamber. Brightly colored umbrellas

by Venturi, Rhonda Zwillinger, Roger Brown, and other artists hang above chairs by Red Grooms, Mummy Bag garment bags made by Grooms and Lysiane Luong, racks for Restless Sleepers/ Atomic Shroud sheets and pillowcases by Robert Morris, and a multitude of manyhued shirts and jackets, scarves, raincoats, and other items. The workshop's archival collection contains 2,200 objects, many of which have been exhibited in America and in other countries.

Forty-two works from the Fabric Workshop are on display in an exhibition, entitled "Pattern in Print: Artists Celebrate Cloth," that is currently circulating in a number of African cities. The show feahires umbrellas, banners, clothing, and other functional items created by 30 artists over the course of 14 years.

D About the Author: Jaan Kangilaski Philadelphia-based free-lance writer.

Left: Kim's Plaid, Kim MacConnel, 1978, banner (detail), pigment on cotton sateen. Below: Les Danseuses Africaines, Margo Humphrey, 1987, scarf, five-eolor separation silkscreen on silk charmeuse.

is a

I

is barely t seven o'clock on a brisk spring morning but the campus of Colorado State University in Fort Collins is already bustling with activity. On the track, joggers trot and runners sprint, while couples stroll and skateboarders glide nearby. Casting a feeble shadow over these proceedings is an undistinguished structure of tan-colored concrete and sandstone. This is the National Seed Storage Laboratory (NSSL) of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). This stodgy, three-story building houses one of the largest and most diverse collection of seeds in the Western world. More than 250,000 seed samples are kept here, and that number increases by an average of several thousand each year. The NSSL is the central storage facility for the USDA's National Plant Germplasm System. Separate working collections of plants in the system are at four regional Plant Introduction Stations or related facilities, where they are maintained, regenerated, evaluated, and distributed on request. Duplicate seeds from each collection are sent to NSSL, and evaluation material is transmitted to the national computer database of the National Agricultural Library in Beltsville, Maryland.

Fort Collins specializes in crop plants such as corn, soybeans, and wheat. Seeds come from anywhere" and anyone-from seed companies, government agencies, scientists, farmers, and gardeners. Entrance requirements are flexible: Seeds of aesthetic or economic value are gratefully accepted. There is soybean from China, wheat from Turkey, rice from Japan, and corn from Brazil. Dorris C. Clark, a plant scientist who spent the better part of his career at the seed bank before retiring in 1988, points out that these plants are the bedrock of the American diet.

"As rich as it is in natural resources, the United States has very few major native food crops," Clark says. "Corn, for instance, was brought in from Central America, and we certainly don't have any indigenous wheat or rice. What is native are wild blueberries and cranberries, sunflowers, pecans, some varieties of beans, and squash-that's about it. All our major food crops have come from other parts of the world. As a people, we have always been very aggressive about importing seeds from outside. The Massachusetts Bay colonists, for instance, brought seeds with them (in the 1600s) and had a standing order for more from every ship coming to the New World from Europe."

Naturally, they and other early settlers did not have the foresight, or the resources, to institute a seed bank. In fact, until the Fort Collins facility opened in 1958, tens of thousands of seeds from around the globe, collected by USDA plant

Facing page: Tiny.okra plants sprout from rolled moist paper toweling made specifically for seed germination tests.

breeders and other scientists, were stored, if at all, in attics, barn lofts, offices, and garages. There was no central facility for preserving seed and no funding for it. "When plant breeders went back to reevaluate stored seeds for desirable genetic characteristics, often the seed was dead," Clark says. It is estimated that as much as 90 percent of seed samples brought into the United States before 1950 were lost owing to neglect or ignorance.

Seeds are, of course, our major food source, since they or their products sustain us directly, and indirectly through animal feed, but their value doesn't stop there. A seed contains within it all the information necessary to guide a plant's development and survival. Instructions are embodied in a substance called germ plasm, the genetic material that, encoded in seeds and other plant material, distinguishes one individual from another.

The genes in germ plasm allow one plant to survive a drought, when all around it shrivel and die; they hold the key to resistance to disease and insects. So it was concern hot for the seeds per se, but for their value as germ plasm that prompted the institution of a worldwide network of seed banks. In 1974 an international community of concerned scientists, along with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and other groups, established the International Board for Plant Genetic Resources to oversee this network. By 1985 an estimated 227 national gene banks in 100 countries and several international research centers were involved in germ plasm storage. Even more are needed.

Explaining Genetic Potential Germ plasm is vulnerable. Left unprotected it tends to erode.

Modern development-burning of forests, clearing of marginal land, overgrazing-is causing the extinction of hundreds of wild plant species that the world may well need for future agricultural and medicinal purposes. And, while not actively destroying plant varieties, modern agricultural techniques add. to the problem. This is because today's marketplace and farming techniques require uniformity in plants, particularly in our food crops-uniformity that allows them to be grown quickly and in massive quantities. To be profitable, all tomatoes in a given field have to mature to about the same size at about the same rate so that they can be picked in one day by one mechanical harvester. Any plant that doesn't measure up, whose fruit ripens a few days late, for instance, might as well be a weed. Modern farmers don't want variety. They demand high productivity and hardiness, and plants that produce fruits and vegetables that will stand up to the rigors of machine picking, long-distance shipping, and long-term storage. All of which hybridization-the crossing or other manipulation of the germ plasm of seeds--ean ensure. This makes absolute economic sense. What farmer in his or her right mind would grow a variety of wheat or corn or barley that required more water or

attracted more pests or produced less abundantly than another variety? Unfortunately, left unplanted, these less popular (and frequently indigenous) varieties die out, and with them their germ plasm. That germ plasm, often the end product of aeons of evolution, is unrecoverable. Once gone, it cannot be replaced. And while the plant itself may no longer be desirable, the genes it carries may well be.

"For a plant breeder to make progress, he has to go out and find genetic potential and exploit it," explains Eric Roos, a plant physiologist and research leader at Fort Collins. "Maximum genetic diversity is key to this process." Scientists develop new plant varieties by breeding or otherwise transferring desirable genes from one plant into another. For example, a perfectly good, sturdy, fast-growing variety of soybean that lacks resistance to attack by a certain insect might benefit from being crossed with a less productive type that stands up well against the pest. The plant breeder's job is to get the gene for disease resistance into the more fruitful variety of soybean, either by complex crossbreeding or, probably in the near future, by using genetic engineering techniques to physically transplant the gene. If that gene is unavailable, the plant breeder is out of luck. The seed bank is our main reserve-germ plasm kept in its coffers is not subject to the whims of agricultural fashion.

How important is genetic diversity? Consider the Irish potato famine of the l840s. The Irish had come to depend on a few varieties of a species imported into Europe from the Andes by Spanish explorers in the 16th century. These varieties had no resistance to the Mexican blight that wiped them out. The potatoes rotted, tens of thousands of people emigrated, and nearly two million starved.

American agriculture has never suffered such a devastating setback, but it came uncomfortably close in 1970. That was the year a fungus, Bipolaris maydis, the Southern corn leaf blight, swept through Florida, across the Southeast and into the plains, leaving in its wake hundreds of thousands of hectares of dead and dying corn. The epidemic wiped out 15 percent of the U.S. corn crop that year, and sent chills down the spines of farmers and plant breeders. A report published two years later by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) concluded that B. maydis had "made a liability out of a technology that had been devised to improve the efficiency of the nation's agriculture." Part of what had made growing corn so efficient in the United States was that the crop had become nearly uniform.

This made corn easy to plant, harvest, and process. By the late 1960sthe seed companies had bred a common genetic trait into hybrid corn that enhanced the efficiency of seed production.

But it also increased the corn's susceptibility to the fungus, which thrived on the cool, wet conditions prevalent in the summer of 1970. "The key lesson," the NAS report warned, "is that genetic uniformity is the basis of vulnerability to epidemics."

Which brings us back to seeds. Because the seed companies

and plant breeders had supplies of older hybrid stock, they could phase out the blight-susceptible variety and revive the U.S. corn crop. If those seeds or similar ones had been unavailable, the resistance would have been unattainable, leaving the U.S. corn crop vulnerable to the next epidemic of Southern corn leaf blight. Crop diversity generally averts such

agricultural economy like that of the United States, where many farms cover thousands of hectares and are planted in only a few varieties of highly productive crops, there is relatively little variation to be found. Here, the seed bank becomes a vitally important, albeit somewhat artificial, source of genetic diversity.

Life Span of Seeds

Clockwise from left: Research agronomist Phillip C. Stanwood removes a seed sample from a liquid nitrogen cryovat during tests to determine the effectiveness of such storage on seed longevity; botanist Dorris C. Clark checks seed samples in one of NSSL's ten cold storage rooms; NSSL Director Louis N. Bass and a visiting Nigerian official exaniine a bean seedling; and Diane and Kent Wbealy, founders of Seed Savers Exchange, cultivate more than 1,000 kinds of vegetables at their farm in Decorah, Iowa.

sweeping devastations as the potato blight and the corn blight.

In a,country such as Peru, there are so many different potato varieties that a disease or pest is less likely to make a dent in the overall supply. Thousands of different rices in Asia uniquely suited to the areas in which they are grown illustrate the inherent value of diversity. But in a highly industrialized

The Fort Collins seed bank itself offers no visible clue to the weightiness of its purpose. Small and crowded, furnished in government-issue gray metal with barely a potted plant in sight, it has the look and feel of a generic administrative office circa 1955. The main attraction, the seeds, are on the second floor, piled into row after row of metal trays crammed into dark rooms refrigerated to below freezing. Outside the storage areas, technicians clean and count the seeds, which are poured into small white bags lined with layers of polyethylene film and aluminum foil. Seeds that naturally contain 12 to 15 percent water are dried down to about six to seven percent to extend their life. The bags are then heat-sealed and placed'in freezers.

Seed, in the words of one plant scientist, is merely a package of potential, a snippet of genetic material surrounded by enough food to get the plant sprouted. Once the plant has roots to suck in nutrition from the soil and leaves to absorb sunlight for photosynthesis, it is on its own. Low temperatures inhibit the process of germination-eold throws the seed into a state of dormancy, broken by a warm spring day. "Spring" comes at NSSL when the seed is pulled out for a germination test.

The bank runs 20,000 to 25,000 germination tests a year, an incredibly laborious process. Samples of seed are removed from their bags, put on moist paper, then placed in 1.8-meter-high stainless-steel chambers and kept at optimum temperatures.

The longevity of seeds varies, but those of good quality, properly kept, can last for 100 years or more. Popular legend has it that 3,000-year-old wheat seeds taken from an Egyptian tomb were germinated in the mid-1800s, and in fact grew into three sturdy plants. Popular legend is wrong. The longest-lived seed on record, according to David Priestley, a plant biochemist and author of a standard monograph on seed aging, is lotus seed from Manchuria, estimated to be about 700 years old.

"We are not certain why a seed ages," says Priestley. "There are, of course, a number of ideas; moSt involve biochemical changes. No one has been confident enough to pin down the exact reason. Philosophically, it's a very interesting question because seeds themselves seem to balance on the border between life and death. In fact, one can put seeds into a sort of state of suspended animation-actually slow down their molecular motion by cooling them down to near absolute zero." The seed bank selectively suspends seeds in time, in an effort to lengthen their life. Research agronomist Phillip C. Stanwood is investigating a system whereby seeds are frozen in

tanks of liquid nitrogen at -160 to -196 degrees Celsius, a process that slows their metabolism to the point where they almost cease to age. This takes place in a large room, protected only by a wooden door hung with a sign that reads, "Danger: Room Nitrogen Content High, Asphyxiation and Suffocation Possible." Stanwood pays the warning no heed as he strides in to demonstrate how life can be frozen in time. Explaining that an unprotected hand would freeze solid in minutes, he dons gloves before plunging a fist into one of the fuming nitrogen tanks and fishing out an aluminum canister. The canister is loaded with long, thin tubes, each of which he has packed with up to 3,000 seeds.

"Deterioration of seed is the result of some as yet unknown physical mechanism," Stanwood says. "Instead of trying to understand what that mechanism might be, I decided to look at what could circumvent it. This led me to cryogenics [the physics of very low temperatures]. The trick is getting seeds down to cryogenic temperatures and back without damaging them. Ice crystal formation can rupture the cell membranes and walls, but we have preserved 140 different species this way, more than 30 on a long-term basis. And we're hopeful that we'll be able to store a lot more. You could store samples of all the cereals known to man in just 30 liquid nitrogen tanks."

Cryogenic storage is important not only because it extends the life of the seed, but because it someday might be used to preserve that which, as of now, cannot be stored. Cocoa; rubber, wild rice, tea, and most maple and palm seeds are too high in moisture to keep in conventional cold storage. Attempts to dry them down to the six to seven percent moisture required for storage have been generally unsuccessful, but Stanwood hopes that a cryogenic approach might work.

Saving the Rare and Endangered Experts generally agree that the seed bank, while critical, should only be considered part of a larger program of plant preservation. Even under the best of circumstances, a certain percentage of seed will not survive extended periods in cold storage. And when it does survive, according to Henry L. Shands, national program leader for germ plasm at the USDA's Agricultural Research Service, that doesn't really offer a complete picture of a species' potential. It is only, as he puts it, "a snapshot of a plant's genetics in time."

Optimum variability is promoted only by planting and allowing nature to take its course. There is a large and growing network of professional and amateur botanists and horticulturists who are making sure that rare and endangered seeds get a chance to do just that. The Center for Plant Conservation at Harvard University's Arnold Arboretum in Boston is dedicated to the preservation of wild American plant species. To that end, the center coordinates the collection of rare species throughout the country, and their cultivation in nurseries and greenhouses at 20 botanical gardens and arboretums. Donald

Falk, executive director of the center, points out that between 3,000, and 5,000 of the plant species in the United Statesroughly 10 to 20 percent-are imperiled or in danger of extinction, and that as many as 700 of these, ifleft unprotected, will vanish in the next decade. "There is no dignity in extinction," he says. "It's a permanent, irrevocable state. We'd rather see these plants preserved in seed banks than not at allthe seed bank is an insurance policy." As insurance, the center has sent a few rare and endangered species to NSSL for cryogenic storage.

At the grass-roots level, another category of collectors is concerned with the preservation of heirloom vegetable seeds, varieties that, as their name suggests, are often family treasures passed down from one generation to the next. They are rarely, if ever, available in commercial catalogs and are therefore quite vulnerable to extinction. In fact, according to Diane and Kent Whealy, founders and directors of the Seed Savers Exchange in Decorah, Iowa, about five percent of seed company offerings are dropped every year. The germ plasm in these seeds might have vanished forever ifnot for the efforts of Seed Savers and a handful of other organizations around the country. Seed Savers Exchange members are encouraged to scout for rare seeds in attics, barns or wherever, propagate them in gardens, then make them available for cultivation. The process can be habitforming: One member grows 400 different varieties of squash in his garden and is eager to plant more.

The Whealys themselves cultivate more than 1,000 varieties of vegetables every summer on their 23-hectare farm, which, complete with a trout pond and a barn restored by Amish workmen, is tucked into a bucolic valley eight kilometers north of Decorah. They also keep a collection of 6,000 varieties of heirloom seeds in small airtight jars lined up in file drawers in their barn. But their goal is to see these seeds planted, not stored.

It is clear that as developing nations move from subsistence farming to modern agricultural techniques, native varieties will give way to higher yielding but far more uniform crops. Such genetic erosion puts all the more pressure on seed storage facilities, like the one in Fort Collins, to maintain as many volumes as possible in their genetic libraries. These seeds may well hold the key not only to our agricultural history, but to our future.

"The genes in our seeds are perishable," says plant physiologist Roos. "The bank is indeed a treasure, but it is also a very important responsibility. For if we don't have .seed, we don't have agriculture, and without agriculture, there can be no civilization. The seed bank is the safeguard of civilization as we know it; maintaining it is a national trust."

D Ellen Ruppel Shell, a Boston-basedfree-lance writer on science and technology, has recently published A Child's Place: A Year in the Life of a Day Care Center.

About the Author:

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Joint Savings Account In 1988, India and the United States launched the Plant Genetic Resources Project to foster the collection, preservation, and global exchange of India's rich plant genetic resources, The National Bureau for Plant Genetic Resources (NBPGR) in New Delhi is implementing the seven-year, $24 million project jointly funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Government of India.

"This Indo-U.S. joint effort aims largely at accelerating India's ongoing programs for the bene~ of farmers through scientific conservation and better utilization of India's rich bounty of genetic diversity in crops, constituting at least 160 domesticated species and twice that number in wild and weedy relatives," says NBPGR Director R,S. Rana, who is coordinating project activities. Many of these species constitute the basis for the development of new superior crop vari-

eties using traditional plant breeding methods and biotechnological tools for crop improvement.

The project was conceived in response to a report of the Indo-U.S. Subcommission on Agriculture which proposed that the two countries collaborate in the conservation of plant genetic resources.

Rapid advances in biotechnology have further enhanced the value of candidate genes.

One major project activity is the construction, at a total projected cost of $6.4 million, of a complex in New Delhi to house NBPGR's headquarters and the new National Gene Bank. The gene bank will have the capacity to store more than 800,000 samples, The current gene bank can store fewer than 200,000 samples. The foundation stone for the gene bank was laid in July this year.

Other activities include construction of plant quarantine greenhouses at four

R,S, Rana (right), director of the National Bureaufor Plant Genetic Resources in New Delhi, shows visiting American horticulturists Jack E. Staub (left) and James D. McCreight the sites where they will be conducting explorations of cucumber cultivars as part of an Indo-U.S. project aimed at conserving India's plant genetic resources.

locations around the country, upgrading of physical facilities at 30 germ plasm storage sites, a computerized germ plasm database management system, advanced training for scientists, purchase of various equipment, and joint research programs, The U,S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is playing a central role in technical assistance, training, and collaborative research.

"Shrinking genetic diversity among high-yielding and widely grown varieties spells danger;" warns Rana, "because it also implies greater vulnerability of crops to widespread damage by virulent patho-

gens and pests." The 1970 corn blight in America (see previous article "Banking on Seeds") is a case in point.

International cooperation is often essential to combating such problems.

For instance, when powdery mildew threatened America's melon crop in 1970, a cultivar (a derived plant, as distinct from a natural variety) introduced from India provided the most dependable source of genetic resistance and proved a boon to breeders. Another well-documented example is the successful use of wild Indian rices in the development of superior varieties resistant to brown plant'

J-L. Karihaloo, an NBPGR scientist who has received training in plant genetic resource conservation at the University of California, Davis, under a USAID program, is currently studying the genetic relationship between wild and cultivated plants.

hopper and grassy stunted growth virus.

These varieties are cultivated throughout Southeast Asia. The dwarfing gene of wheat introduced in India from Mexico was largely responsible for India's green revolution.

"There are two ways of improving agriculture," says B.P. Srivastava, a USAID official. "We may alter the environment to suit the plant, and this has been largely done through better irrigation, fertilizers, pesticides, etc. The second method involves changing the plant to suit the target environment." It is this bio-

technology approach that the project intends to promote, because it offers the best hope for feeding the world's growing population, given the severely limited land available for agriculture.

For instance, Srivastava says, "biotechnology can help us develop salt-tolerant varieties that can be grown in saline areas so far lying unutilized. Similarly, drought-resistant genes may be incorporated in a high-yielding variety enabling it to grow and yield better in desert and semidesert areas." Built-in genetic resistance to pathogens and devastating pests is another promising and exciting area.

Biotechnology has the added potential advantage of being environmentally friendly .. It can considerably reduce the use of fertilizers, insecticides, etc. It also has the potential for providing a green cover to deserts without depleting water tables because much less irrigation will be required.

More than 30 young Indian scientists have already undergone training in various U.S. laboratories in germ plasm cataloging procedures, preservation techniques, and in the conservation and management of plant genetic resources.

Recently James D. McCreight, a research horticulturist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and Jack E. Staub, a professor of horticulture at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, were in India in connection with a joint exploration of cucumber cultivars.

Two joint explorations have also been successfully undertaken in America-one relating to the collection of wild sunflowers and the other to jojoba, an oilyielding plant in the southwestern United States.

At the foundation stone laying ceremony for the National Gene Bank, Agriculture Minister Balram Jakhar said, "I consider the project an important step toward the long-term conservation of our natural wealth of plant resources and also as an example of fruitful bilateral collaboration between the United States and India."

0 About the Author: Sharmila Chandra is a New Delhi-based free-lance

writer.

Cargill Inc., a world leader in agribusiness, has a Bangalore-based subsidiary that recently began selling high-yielding hybrid sunflower and corn oilseeds that it developed in India. ne day last January, Rod Jamieson, production director for Cargill Seeds India Private Limited, noticed burn marks on the leaves of some sunflower plants at one of the company's hybrid seed production fields in northern Andhra Pradesh. He took photographs of the ailing leaves and showed the photos to Cargill's worldwide oilseeds research manager, Al Jarvi, who was in India on an inspection trip. Jarvi keeps tabs on Cargill oilseeds production around the world from his research center office in Fort Collins, Colorado.

Examining the photos at Cargill India headquarters in Bangalore, Jarvi and Jamieson settled on a diagnosis: "We had been spraying the sunflowers with fungicides and the farmers had a habit of adding a little bit of urea to the spray," Jamieson says. "We believed that this extra urea was burning the leaves.

Our response was to tell them to stop spraymg urea.

"About two weeks later our production supervisor came back with some horrendous photographs and some bloody awful numbers to show that the problem was actually a lot more serious than we originally suspected. It had gotten away from us."

By this time Jarvi had left India, so

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The Flowering of Cargill India

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Jamieson did what any Cargill production manager anywhere in the world would do in this situation: "I picked up the phone and called Mary Lou." Mary Lou Straley is Cargill's North American research manager for sunflowers, an expert in plant breeding and plant pathology, and "one of the best sunflower scientists in the world," according to Jamieson. It was midnight when the phone call from Jamieson woke her up at her home in Fargo, North Dakota, site of another Cargill research facility. "It sounds like a soil nutrition problem," she said. "Send me all the information and the photographs that you have."

Jamieson sent by express air service the photos and a descriptive report prepared by research agronomist Venkatesh H. to Fargo. A few days later he got a call from

Cargill Research Agronomist Venkatesh H. (left) discusses techniques of growing sunflower seeds with two farmers.

Straley: A boron deficiency was responsible for the problem, something that could easily be corrected.

It is technical support from people like Straley and Jarvi, not to mention communications ties with company offices all over the world, that gives Cargill a leg up on the competition in India. "We have a worldwide team approach," Jamieson says. "You don't mind going out there and sticking your neck out when you have so much support."

Cargill Seeds India Private Limited, a subsidiary of Cargill Inc., USA, was set up in 1988 in collaboration with the Tedco Group of New Delhi, which holds 49 percent equity, to develop sunflower,

corn, sorghum (jowar), and pearl millet (bajra) hybrid seeds for the Indian market. After three years of research to develop hybrid strains that would thrive in Indian soil, Cargill launched its first sales in July, marketing sunflower hybrids Advance and SH 3322 through its sole distributor, Rallis India. And last month, Cargill began marketing a corn hybrid seed. Meanwhile research efforts continue with sorghum and pearl millet.

Managing Director John Hamilton forecasts that Cargill India will rapidly expand into a Rs. 250 million operation. He predicts that by this time next year, Cargill will be second only to Mahyco, a company in Maharashtra, in the production of sunflower seed in India.

India traditionally has been a big importer of vegetable oils. Cargill's entry into the sunflower and corn seeds markets means that Indian farmers will be able to satisfy more and more of the domestic vegetable oil demand.

Sunflowers in particular offer the potential for a very high yield of oil per hectare.

The Cargill Story Cargill Inc. is America's largest privately held corporation. Some 40 family members own 100 percent of the company's voting stock. The company had revenues of more than $49,000 million last year.

The first seed was planted in 1865 when William Wallace Cargill opened a grain warehouse in Conover, Iowa, a town on the then American frontier. Cargill would buy wheat from farmers and arrange for it to be shipped and sold in urban markets.

He brought his three brothers into the business, expanded into barge towing, lumbering, and coal hauling, and moved

the headquarters to La Crosse, Wisconsin, where members of the MacMillan family were among the local business leaders. A son and a daughter of W.W. Cargill each married a MacMillan. Descendants of these two families have been running the company ever since.

The chief executive officer (CEO) today is Heinz Hutter. He recently succeeded longtime CEO Whitney MacMillan. Hutter runs the company from its current headquarters in Minneapolis, Minnesota, overseeing some 58,000 employees at 800 locations in 54 countries.

MacMillan, now 62, saw Cargill develop into much more than just the world's biggest grain trading company.

As Fortune magazine notes, "It buys, sorts, ships, and sells just about everything else that comes out of the earth, including coffee, sugar, cotton, crude oil, hemp, and rubber." Food processing, industrial products, merchandising, transportation, and financial services are among its numerous activities.

The company has prospered over the years, according to Fortune, "by sticking with values that too many large public corporations have shucked off. At a time when most chief executives are obsessed with next quarter's earnings, Cargill's managers have a strategic vision that extends well into the next century. While other companies struggle with too much debt, Cargill boasts a balance sheet so conservative it can only be called oldfashioned. While employees at many Fortune 500 companies are angry at their bosses and disenchanted with their jobs, Cargill workers are so unabashedly enthusiastic that their sentiments border on boosterism."

Cargill India has a perfect example of unabashed enthusiasm in the person of Managing Director Hamilton. The 46year-old Australian talks with gusto about establishing operations in India, the outstanding progress Cargill has made in developing hybrirl seeds here, and the ingenuity and resourcefulness not only of the company's approximately 50 employees but also the hundreds of farmers who participate in the company's pro-

Cargill India Managing Director John Hamilton (left) talks business with Finance Director S. Ramakrishnan and Production Director Rod Jamieson.

gram. Hamilton peppers his conversation with words such as must-and-want analysis, input responsive, enterprise costing,. flat management-terms no doubt gleaned from his many years in the agribusiness world and from the management-technique books that line his office bookshelves, such as Running Things and Quality Without Tears, both by Philip B. Crosby, and Talking Straight by Lee lacocca.

Hamilton, a trained economist, worked in Australia as an agricultural consultant, manager of a large cattle station, and owner of an agricultural products distribution business before hejoined Cargill 14 years ago. He worked with the company in Australia and then around 1986 went to Indonesia to put together the broken pieces of a badly managed Cargill seed-producing operation.

In 1988 the Government of India approved Cargill's five-year-standing application to establish operations here.

Hamilton was chosen to set it up, and Rod Jamieson, 42, a New Zealander with a background in agronomics, was

brought in from a Cargill operation in Australia to evaluate production possibilities. They quickly hired an accountant with experience in agricultural financing, S. Ramakrishnan, as finance director.

Their first task was to determine the best location for their base of operations.

They went all over the country looking at climate conditions, soil, labor, professional services, communications, transportation, social conditions, and other factors, and decided that Bangalore best suited their needs.

They opened their office in January 1989. Jamieson launched the research program with sunflower and corn trials, designed to identify the genetic combinations that would perform best in India's agriclimate. K. Vasudeva Rao and Venkatesh H. were hired to manage the trials. Today Cargill India is running 49 different trials in 16 locations.

"We have created a name for ourselves for being methodical and committed to the process of research and development," Hamilton says, "and we will not sell a product until our research and development confirms that we have excellent material and until it has been verified by independent evaluation in tests by the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR).

"One of the conditions imposed on us by the Government of India is that we only deal in products that perform nationally," Hamilton continues. "An Indian company can deal in a product that performs in only one area, but we had to meet a national standard set by the ICAR. Their criteria are almost impossible to meet, but we did it."

Cargill tested its sunflower and corn seeds in the All India Crop Improvement Programmes and had outstanding results.

Three varieties of sunflower seeds came in first, second, and fourth, and three varieties of com seeds came in first, third, and fourth. The number one sunflower seed yielded-under near perfect conditions at the government research station at Raichur-a return of 4,361 kilograms of seed per hectare. That contrasts with an average sunflower seed yield in India of 500 kilograms per hectare. What this shows, Hamilton says, is that Cargill can produce a seed that will respond exceedingly well under proper conditions of soil, water, irrigation, fertilization, insect control, etc.

Encouraged by their success in the national tests, Hamilton decided in January of 1991 that Cargill was ready to go into commercial production. He and Jamieson chose four general locations, two in Kamataka and two in Andhra Pradesh, to base production efforts. The next step was to recruit farmers and a supervisory staff. Today Cargill has 2,700 farmers from 65 villages in the program, accounting for more than 1,200 hectares under cultivation. Nineteen production supervisors look after the villages. Under them work 20 coordinators and field assistants who are paid a commission on the basis of the seed produced by the farmers with whom they work.

For the production staff, Hamilton and Jamieson concentrated on recruiting young professionals with about five years of experience. They wanted neither novices nor older workers with ingrained work habits that might conflict with the Cargill approach.

"Our production staff is beginning to develop a sense of esprit de corps because

they are beginning to get results," Jamieson says. "It was a bit of a gamble on their part to join us. It takes courage to leave a job that you've been in for five years and join this multinational that's been around for three years in India and has yet to sell a product. So, we took on board some ambitious people who were not averse to taking some risk. It is starting to payoff now and they're beginning to feel pretty good about it. They're getting good quality seed in the bag, they've seen that we do know a good bit about what we're doing, that we have done a lot of hard work, and the yields look quite promising. " Training and communication are integral to the success of the operation.

Cargill has stringent rules governing planting and other procedures to ensure that optimal growing conditions prevail.

One essential condition, for instance, is that a Cargill sunflower field be situated at least one kilometer away from a nonCargill sunflower field to avoid any cross pollination with an inferior plant.

It is the job of the coordinators, village insiders, to ensure that field isolation is maintained. First off, they try to recruit all the farmers in a particular village to participate in the Cargill program, but that is not always possible. So, when a farmer outside the program plants, for instance, a sunflower field too close to a Cargill sunflower field, the coordinator will try to persuade the outsider to substitute another crop and even help him to do so. "In some cases, a coordinator will actually pay for the removal of a crop," Jamieson says, "because he knows that if the field is not removed, he won't get his commission."

The company will not accept seeds from any Cargill grower whose field has been too close to a non-Cargill grower.

Hamilton and Jamieson are the antithesis of desk bound, coat-and-tie managers. They spend a good deal of their own time out in the fields, down on their knees, hands in the soil, working side by side with supervisors and farmers. They have established a lot of close, personal bonds with farmers and their families, but say that teaching the company's methods is not easy. "Indian farmers are no dif-

ferent than Australian or French farmers," notes Jamieson. "They will only change operations if they can see good logic in the new operations."

Take the example of Mallikarjuna of Sirugappa village in Bellary District.

Since his field was opposite the research station of an agricultural university, he had access to a large fund of technical information, and much of it conflicted with what Cargill was telling him.

A Cargill supervisor advised Mallikarjuna to continue irrigation after flowering of his sunflower plants, but he ignored the advice. Later he saw that other Cargill fields had much greater yields than his own and changed his ways.

Prathap Reddy, owner of a 20-hectare spread in Kurnool District of Andhra Pradesh, resisted Cargill's prescription for about 75 centimeters spacing between rows of sunflower plants. He insisted that his practice of planting rows 45 centimeters apart would be just as effective.

But when a Cargill supervisor, who was conducting a sunflower trial on one of Reddy's fields, reaped a bumper harvest, Reddy not only became a convert, but he also began spreading the Cargill gospel among neighboring farmers.

Hamilton says many Cargill farmers "are producing yields probably four times what they ever had before, and just because they have learned new farming techniques. " The learning is not all one way.

Jamieson says that Cargill has learned new techniques and practices from Indian farmers as well and made changes to the company's manual of operations to incorporate the acquired wisdom. In one case, Cargill adopted a local planting practice. In another, a farmer showed Cargill supervisors how to collect sunflower pollen before honeybees arrived.

This practice effectively prevents bees from usurping the pollen, which the farmer can then transfer by hand to female flowers. The technique of this nifty operation has been passed to Cargill supervisors in other areas.

The rewards for farmers are attractive.

A Cargill farmer earns about Rs. 20,500 per hectare, according to Jamieson. Given (Text continued on page 40)

Laboratory Harvest

T

here is nothing American about Indo-American Hybrid Seeds (IAHS) in Bangalore. This 100 percent Indian owned and operated firm, which took root in the 1960s by producing hybrid flower seeds for export to the United States, has grown into one of the premier horticulture companies in Asia. n recently branched out into the biotechnological art of tissue culture, creating flowers, fruits, and vegetables for customers in India and abroad.

IAHS opened its tissue culture lab two jears ago. The laboratory's major activity is producing ornamental flowers for nurseries in Holland, Denmark, and the United Kingdom. It had orders this

year for some 2.3 million tissue culture ornamentals, representing Rs. 13 million in revenues. The orders are expected to double in 1993. For the Indian market, the laboratory is producing high-yielding banana and cardamom plants.

Tissue culture is the art of growing cells of plants (or animals) artificially in a controlled environment. In IAHS's laboratory, whose sanitary conditions exceed those of a hospital surgical theater, technicians wielding surgical-like knives slice tissue off premium quality donor plants and bulbs and place it in a sterilized medium of salts, sugars, vitamins, hormones, and other ingredients, formulated differently for each type of plant, to stimulate rapid

growth. The process is repeated several times over with each new growth, producing an amazing multiplier effect. In just one year the meristem tissue from three donor plants can produce a one-hectare banana plantation; tissue from one floral bulb can create as many as one million bulblets. Biotechnology Director Jitendra Prakash says it usually takes a mInimum of six months to create the several thousand plants requested in an order.

The tissue culture lab comprises five growth rooms, each of which can hold 400,000 cultures at a time; 44 laminar flow workstations; and a media kitchen that can prepare 10,000 bottles of media a day. A greenhouse adjacent to the lab is

used for hardening plants primarily for the domestic market. The climate-controlled greenhouse features a state-of-theart misting and fogging system. (As a sideline, IAHS is also in the greenhouse design and construction business.)

IAHS is also setting up a research laboratory, purchasing some of the most advanced equipment in the world for use in micropropagation, somatic embryogenesis, biochemistry, immunology, virology, and cellular and molecular biology.

It is offering services to other companies in disease screening and cleaning for plant viruses, bacteria, and diseases. The lab is also creating unusual flower varieties, such as a blue lily for a customer in Holland.

Despite the growth of its biotechnology division, hybrid seeds still account for the majority of IAHS's business. Manmohan Attavar, president, founded the Bangalore company in 1965on his return from study and training in the United States. A $14,000 loan from the Ball Seed Company of Chicago, where he had trained in plant breeding, enabled Attavar to get started. N.K. Bhat joined him as managing partner in 1967. They began by producing hybrid flower seeds for the American market.

An early customer, Pan American Seed Company of Colorado, still is a major purchaser. As success bloomed, IndoAmerican cultivated customers in Europe, the Middle East, and India, and began developing fruit and vegetable hybrid seeds. Today vegetable seeds account for the majority of its total seed market, flowers increasingly going the way of tissue culture, and the company has moved into sunflower and castor oilseeds production.

For the Peto Seed Company of California alone, Indo-American is producing ten tons of tomato seeds in 15 to 20 varieties yearly, depending on what the company orders. These hybrids yield 62 tons of tomatoes per hectare; this contrasts with 15 to 25 tons for ordinary tomato seeds. Peto is such a big customer that it sends representatives to Bangalore twice a year to consult with Indo-American officials and to visit farmers in the program.

"We have trained about 5,000 farmers in F-1 seed production," Attavar says. An F-1 hybrid, the first generation in a cross between two hybrid parents, achieves the maximum output and produces plants that are genetically identical.

IAHS trains farmers at its facilities in Bangalore. They learn emasculation, pollination, pollen collection, and facts on when to harvest, how to extract seeds, and how to treat them. "We adopt a whole village and work with all the farmers," Attavar says. "If they do things right, they can earn Rs. 15,000 to Rs. 20,000 for a quarter-acre crop."

F-l hybrid production is highly labor intensive, requiring 13 to 15 persons per quarter-acre unit. "We don't give more than one acre to a family because they can't handle more than that," Attavar says. "The program is very good for youth employment.

"India is ideal for this kind of work, because it has all the climatic regions.

Almost all other places have become too expensive, but India remains inexpensive because we have educated people and inexpensive labor."

-G.E.O. Founder Manrnohan Attavar holds a protray of hardened plants in the biotech greenhouse.

After the shoots have rooted in culture bottles they are planted in the greenhouse for hardening.

In IAHS's new biotechnology facility a technician checks a jar containing tissue culture before placing it in one of the five environment-controlled growth rooms, each of which can hold 400,000 cultures.

a farmer's costs of Rs. 3,700 to Rs. 5,000per hectare for fertilizer, manure, water, and other inputs, the profits are attractive in a high production area. In terms of yield per hectare, small farmers do better on average than large farmers because they are able to pay closer attention to individual plants, which is crucial to efficient hybrid seed production.

Cargill sets target production goals for each village on the basis of local growing conditions and the amount of foundation seed it supplies, which is free for the farmers. When a village exceeds the goal, Cargill will reward the community by, Rod Jamieson and Research Analyst Radhika Kumar place test seeds in a germination cabinet that Kumar designed. Samples from every lot are tested before sale.

perhaps, buying a television set for the local school, constructing a miniclinic or child-care center, or repairing the local place of worship. This is not any grand gesture of largesse on Cargill's part. As Hamilton notes, the company makes "an additional margin" on any seed over the target goal because "the marginal cost of production has been next to nothing" for this extra amount. Rather, the company sees its action as good public relations and an expression of community responsibil-

ity. Creating lasting ties between farmers and the company is an integral part of its program. "We want each village to stay with us forever," Hamilton says.

Hybrids Are not for Everyone Hamilton says that he made a fundamental decision when he came to India that Cargill would be incapable of marketing a product here. For that reason, he signed a long-term contract with Rallis India, the country's number one distributor of agricultural products.

Cargill sunflower seed has been presold to Rallis for the next four years, including 300 tons for this current season.

Cargill India recently began construction on a Rs. 70 million processing plant in Bellary in Karnataka to clean, grade, and package its seeds in heatsealed plastic packs. The plant, which will be able to handle 7,000 tons of seed per annum, is expected to begin operations around February 1993and willalso feature a research and training center to disseminate seed technology.

The target customer for Cargill initially is the pro.gressivefarmer who has good soil located in a reliable rainfall area or has access to irrigation, and who has enough land so that he does not risk starving his family should a cash crop fail.

Hamilton says a substantial proportion of Indian farmers falls into this category.

"It's important to note," he says, "that we are not trying to sell hybrids to the subsistence farmer on marginal ground in an area where rainfall is inherently uncertain, because he cannot afford, nor may be benefit from, the other inputs that help to realize the full genetic potential of our hybrids.

"If he does buy our seeds, he will get better yields than he is getting at present in some years, but in other years, should the rains fail, or whatever, he will not benefit from the full genetic potential.

In that year buying our seed will be a

bad financial decision for him."

It has taken a lot of hard work and perseverance to reach commercial production. Hamilton says that he not only had to deal with government footdragging and opposition from various agricultural groups in India, but he also had to contend with some skepticism among Cargill management back in Minnesota.

"One of our very senior guys was really down on India, saying, 'Well, I'm not sure they'll be able to do it over there' and 'We do it better here,''' Hamilton said. Two factors helped Hamilton overcome such resistance. One, Cargill's management structure is so lightly layered that there are only three persons between Hamilton and CEO Hutter. This gives Hamilton ready access to the top echelons of the company. Two, when world oilseeds chief Jarvi made his inspection visit to India last January he issued a very favorable report, saying, "Production staff led by Ravi Reddy (deputy to Jamieson) appear well trained and enthusiastic about their jobs.

General agronomy in the production fields was good, equal to any of the Cargill production units [around the world]."

The words "equal to any of the Cargill production units" caught the attention of the decision-makers back in Minnesota who now are telling Hamilton that they would like to see Cargill India begin supplying some of the company's other overseas markets. Hamilton is eager to do that and has applied to the Government of India for permission to export hybrid seed. For the time being, however, the terms of its operating license limit it to domestic sales.

"We are quite delighted with what we have achieved," Hamilton says. "We are building a good seed company. We're going to end up with 80 to 90 people in this organization and they are going to benefit well from working with us. But the real benefit is going to accrue to the 2,000 to 3,000 farmers that we work with in the production fields and the tens and twenties of thousands of farmers who end up growing our products."

0 Free-lance writer Brinda Sekhar of Bangalore contributed to this article.

sically not there, even when he was there," says Gordon Baptiste, a childhood friend. When he was 17, Boyle foresightedly changed his name from Thomas John Boyle-his father's nameto the memorable battle cry T. Coraghessan Boyle, the trumpeting "Coraghessan" (pronounced cor-RAG-a-sen) taken from his mother's family. Boyle recalls, "My mother would say to me of my father: 'What he does is crap.

You can be better, do better than working with your hands.'

"I tried to understand him, but he was usually extremely morose and insensibly drunk, like his father before him. He'd grown up in an orphanage because his father couldn't take care of him.

My mother always wanted us to go to church, and he'd say, 'I went to church every day for six years in St. Joseph's Home.' She also always wanted us to go camping, and he'd say, 'I camped for a year and a half in France during the war.' So we never went out much as a family. My mother told me he had had a personality like mine, very lively and funny, but the war disarranged him somehow ... ." Boyle's voice dwindles, and he jumps up to move some dirt. His last two novels have featured a foredoomed search for a missing father.

Placed in a class for slow learners in second and third grades, Boyle gradually fell in with a set of excitable boys, many of whom remain close friends. In high school they drank hard, wore torn leather jackets, peeled out in the family station wagon, and busted up churches. They once stole a one-meter-high statue of Jesus Christ and placed it on Peekskill's main street so it appeared to be directing traffic.

Boyle characterizes his role in this vandalism as "mainly being led by friends who had a lot of anger to get out-when you're young and you have hormones racing around, you break things. " In spite of his father, Boyle has become an avid outdoorsman, but

to this day he won't go into a cathedral, even as a tourist.

Boyle went to the State University of New York at Potsdam with the idea of being a music major, skated through with about a 2.0 average and taught high-school English at his alma mater to avoid the Vietnam draft, drifting into a weekend smack habit and a grungy life outwitting police searches. He was a selfdescribed "dilettante of heroin" for two years: "We were killing pain in our bodies before we had any pain to kill."

A friend's near-fatal overdose and his mother's concern finally made Boyle face the question lurking beneath youthful nihilism: How much do you really want to die? Boyle kicked the habit and-though he remembers no epiphanic arrival at the typewriter-began to write. He had had one creative-writing class at Potsdam, and he admired the work of John Barth, Thomas Pynchon and Robert Coover, but it wasn't until The North American Review published his story "The 00 and Hepatitis Railroad or Bust" that he embraced writing as a vocation.

In 1972, a few months before his father died, Boyle was accepted by the prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop [see pages 46-47], solely on the strength of his writing samples. "If they'd considered my academic record and such niceties as peer and teacher recommendations, I'd still be in Peekskill," Boyle says.

He left five years later with a perfect 4.0 average, a PhD in 19th-century British literature, and his bent for macabre tales honed into a salable skill.

Since then Boyle has made his living writing and teaching writing at the University of Southern California. The big changes in the last decade have been the arrival of children and the not coincidental filtering of genuine empathy into his writing. "His earlier stories, to me, had a real problem with women," Boyle's

"Here I am in headlong pursuit of fame, just racing toward it, arms outstretched, and so far it's great .... " wife, Karen, says. "But they're less threatening now."

East Is East has a female character-Ruth Dershowitz, an ambitious but undertalented writer-who, in her zest for fame, her yearnings for love and bursts of altruism, and her ultimate selfdeceptions, quivers with the contradictions and sadness of a real person. Boyle believes she is his pinnacle in character development. "Ruth Dershowitz," he says, "and I've been saving this for these interviews-c'est moi, as Flaubert said of Emma Bovary. I had all her anxieties and petty jealousies when I was young and at Iowa."

The anxieties haven't entirely disappeared.

As he walks me around his palm-lofty neighborhood, holding forth on overdevelopment and declining realestate values, Boyle talks about his fears. "I used to be worried about children and how they'd cut down my freedom. I took Kerrie to see King Kong when she was two days old, and we sat in the front row, and afterward I had no idea how to feed her with the bottle. I had never seen a baby in my life, and I was terrified and drunk and crazy. Now I've got my life in order, mostly.

I'm not Bukowski, I'm not going to be giving readings drunk for the rest of my life. That possibility frightens me, terrifies me, because my parents died drunk.

I've been drinking too much

lately, but I've stopped now, and it's O.K. "The strange thing is," he continues, scuffing his black boots on the sidewalk, "that though I may sound cocky and scl~confidentalot,andthatpu~ some interviewers off, I don't have any fears of being a glib talk-show guy in a funny jacket. I mean I'll do it, and I'll enjoy it, going up there to look like a Christmas tree ball on TV, but I'm never going to become Truman Capote. The work, finally, is most important.'"

We walk on in silence, and then he laughs. "And it's going pretty well, right? I mean, here I am in headlong pursuit of fame, just racing toward it, arms outstretched, and so far it's great, because I'm at the first stage, where people recognize me and say, 'Hey, Tom Boyle! I liked your last book!' Stage two is 'Hey, Tom Boyle! You sunavabitch!'" He mimes an angry fan throwing an upper cut. "Stage three is Jerry Salinger, where you live behind a big fence and don't answer the phone."

"O.K.," I ask, "would you rather be Emily Dickinson, where nobody knows who you are when you're alive, but I00 years after you're dead you're read by every college sophomore in America ... ."

"Choice B!" Boyle interrupts.

"Choice B, whatever it is! Choice B is where everyone reads me now but after I die I'm forgotten, right?"

"Well, yeah, but to make it harder, Choice B is that everyone reads you but you sell best in drugstores-you're not really respected. " Boyle says instantly, "Then I'd take Choice C, where I lose both legs and have a brain tumor, but everybody reads me and respects me, both now and after I'm dead.

Perfect."

0 About the Author: Tad Friend is a contributing editor to Vogue and Esquire magazines.

Sinking House After Monty's last breath caught somewhere in the back of his throat, with a sound like the tired wheeze of an old screen door, the first thing she did was turn on the water. She leaned over him a minute to make sure, and then she wiped her hands on her dress and shuffled into the kitchen. Her fingers trembled as she jerked at the lever and felt the water surge against the porcelain. Steam rose in her face; a glitter of liquid leapt for the drain.

Croak, that's what they called it. Now she knew why. She left the faucet running in the kitchen and crossed the living room, swung down the hallway to the guest bedroom, and turned on both taps in the bathroom there. Almost as an afterthought she decided to fill the tub, too.

For a long while she sat in the leather armchair in the living room. The sound of running water-pure, baptismal, as uncomplicated as the murmur of a brook in Vermont or a toilet at the Waldorfsoothed her. It trickled and trilled, burbling from either side of the house and driving down the terrible silence that crouched in the bedroom over the lifeless form of her husband.

The afternoon was gone and the sun was plunging into the canopy of the big eucalyptus behind the Finkelsteins' when she finally pushed herself up from the chair. Head down, arms moving stiffly at her sides, she scuffed out the back door, crossed the patio, and bent to turn on the sprinklers. They sputtered and spat-not enough pressure, that much she understood-but finally came to life in halfhearted umbrellas of mist. She left the hose trickling in the rose garden and went back into the house, passed through the living room, the kitchen, the master bedroom-not even a glance for Monty, no: she wouldn't look at him, not yet-and on into the master bath. The taps were

cilantro, flour tortillas, and a pound and a half of thresher shark ;1tthe market; and start the burritos for supper. But for now she was stretching.

She took a deep drag on the cigarette, tugged at her right foot, and brought it up snug against her buttocks. After a moment she released it and drew back her left foot. One palm flat on the floor, her head bobbing vaguely to the beat of the music, she did half a dozen repetitions and then paused to relight her cigarette. Not until she turned over to do her straight-leg lifts did she notice the dampness in the rug.

Puzzled, she rose to her knees and reached behind her to rub at the twin wet spots on the seat of her sweats. She lifted the corner of the rug, suspecting the dog, but detected no odor of urine. Looking closer, she saw that the concrete floor was a shade darker beneath the rug, as if bleeding moisture, as it sometimes did in wint~. But this wasn't winter; this was high summer in Los Angeles, and it hadn't rained for months. Cursing Sonny-he'd promised her ceramic tile, and though she'd run all over town to get the best price on a nice Italian floral pattern, he still hadn't found the time to go look at it-she shot back the sliding door and stepped into the yard to investigate.

Immediately she felt the Bermuda grass squelch beneath the soles of her aerobic shoes. Before she'd taken three strides-

ILLUSTRATIONS

weak, produced barely a trickle, but she left them on anyway, and then flushed the toilet and pinned down the float with the brick Monty had used as a doorstop. And then, finally, so weary she could barely lift her arms, she leaned into the stall and flipped on the shower.

T

Wo weeks after the ambulance came for the old man next door, Meg Terwilliger was doing her stretching exercises on the prayer rug in the sun-room, a menthol cigarette glowing in the ashtray on the floor beside her, the new CD by Sandee and the Sharks thumping out of the big speakers in the corners. Meg was 23, with the fine bones and haunted eyes of a poster child. She wore her black hair cut close at the temples, long in front, and she used a sheeny black eye shadow to bring out the hunger in her eyes. In half an hour she'd have to pick up Tiffany at nursery school; drop off the dog at the veterinarian's; take Sonny's shirts to the cleaner's; buy

BY NAND

KATYAL

the sun in her face, Queenie yapping frantically from the fenced-in pool areaher feet were wet. Had Sonny left the hose running? Tiffany? She slogged across the lawn, the pastel Reeboks spattered with wet, and checked the hose. It was innocently coiled on its tender, the tap firmly shut. Queenie's yapping went up an octave. The heat-it must have been 95, a IOO-made her feel faint. She gazed up into the cloudless sky and then bent to check each of the sprinklers in succession.

She was poking around in the welter of bushes along the fence, looking for an errant sprinkler, when she thought of the old lady next door-Muriel, wasn't that her name? What with her husband dying and all, maybe she'd left the hose running and had forgotten all about it. Meg rose on her tiptoes to peer over the redwood fence that separated her yard from the neighbors' and found herself looking into a glistening, sunstruck garden with banks of impatiens, bird-of-paradise, oleander, loquat, and roses in half a dozen shades.

The sprinklers were on and the hose was running. For a long moment Meg stood there, mesmerized by the play of light through the drifting fans of water; she was wondering what it would be like to be old, thinking of how it would be if Sonny died and Tiffany were grown up and gone.

She'd probably forget to turn off the sprinklers too.

The moment passed. The heat was deadening, the dog hysterical. Meg knew she would have to do something about the sodden yard and the wet floor in the sunroom, but she dreaded facing the old woman. What would she say-I'm sorry your husband died, but could you turn off the sprinklers? She was thinking maybe she'd phone-or wait till Sonny got home and let him handle it-when she stepped back from the fence and sank to her ankles in mud.

W

hen the doorbell rang, Muriel was staring absently at the cover of an old National Geographic that lay beneath a patina of dust on the coffee table. The cover photo showed the beige and yellow sands of some distant desert, rippled to the

horizon with corrugations that might have been waves on a barren sea. Monty was dead and buried. She wasn't eating much. Or sleeping much either. The sympathy cards sat unopened on the table in the kitchen, where the tap overflowed the sink and water plunged to the floor with a pertinacity that was like redemption.

When it was quiet-in the early morning or late at night-she could distinguish the separate taps, each with its own voice and rhythm, as they dripped and trickled from the far corners of the house. In those suspended hours she could make out the comforting gurgle of the toilet in the guest room, the musical wash of the tub as it cascaded over the lip of its porcelain dam, the quickening rush of the stream in the hallway as it shot like a miniature Niagara down the chasm of the floor vent. She could hear the drip in the master bathroom, the distant hiss of a shower, and the sweet eternal sizzle of the sprinklers on the back lawn.

But now she heard the doorbell.

Wearily, gritting her teeth against the pain in her lower legs and the damp, lingering ache of her feet, she pushed herself up from the chair and sloshed her way to the door. The carpet was black with water, soaked through like a sponge-and in a tidy corner of her mind she regretted it-but most of the runoff was finding its way to the heating vents and the gaps in the corners where Monty had miscalculated the angle of the baseboard. She heard it dripping somewhere beneath the house and for a moment pictured the water lying dark and still in a shadowy lagoon that held a leaking ship poised on its trembling surface. The doorbell sounded again. "All right, all right," she muttered. "I'm coming."

A girl with dark circles around her eyes stood on the doorstep. She looked vaguely familiar, and for a moment Muriel thought she recognized her from a TV program about a streetwalker who rises up to kill her pimp and liberate all the other lea ther-clad, black -eyed streetwalkers of the neighborhood. But then the girl spoke and Muriel realized her mistake.

"Hi," the girl said, and Muriel saw that her shoes were black with mud. ''I'm your

neighbor? Meg Terwilliger?"

The girl looked down at her muddy shoes. "I, uh, just wanted to tell you that we're, uhSonny and I, I mean; he's my husband?we're sorry about your trouble and all, but I wondered if you knew your sprinklers were on out back?"

Muriel attempted a smile-surely a smile was appropriate at this juncturebut managed only to lift her upper lip back from her teeth in a sort of wince or grimace.

The girl was noticing the rug now, and Muriel's sodden slippers. She looked baffled, perhaps even a little frightened. And young. So young. Muriel had had a young friend once, a girl from the community college who used to come to the house before Monty got sick. She had a tape recorder, and she would ask them questions about their childhood, about the days when the San Fernando Valley w'as dirt roads and orange groves. Oral history, she called it. "It's all right," Muriel said, trying to reassure her.

"I just-is it a plumbing problem?" the girl said, backing away from the door.

"Sonny ... ," she said, but didn't finish the thought. She ducked her head and retreated down the steps, but when she reached the walk, she wheeled around. "I mean you really ought to see about the sprinklers," she said. "The whole place is soaked, my sun-room and everything-" "It's all right," Muriel repeated, and then the girl was gone and she shut the door.

S

he's nuts, she is. Really. I mean she's out of her gourd." Meg was searing chunks of thresher shark in a pan with green chilies, sweet red pepper, onion, and cilantro. Sonny, who was 28 and so intoxicated by real estate that he had to forgo the morning paper till he got home at night, was slumped in the breakfast nook with a vodka tonic and the sports pages. His white-blond hair was cut fashionably, in what might once have been called a flat-top, though it was thinning, and his open, appealing face, with its boyish look, had begun to show signs of wear, particularly around the eyes, where years of escrow had taken their toll.

Tiffany was in her room, playing quietly with a pair of six-inch dolls that had cost $65 each.

"Who?" Sonny murmured, tugging unconsciously at the gold chain he wore around his neck.

"Muriel. The old lady next door.

Haven't you heard a thing I've been saying?" With an angry snap of her wrist, Meg cut the heat beneath the saucepan, and she slapped a lid over it. "The floor in the sun-room is flooded, for God's sake," she said, stalking across the kitchen in her bare feet till she stood poised over him.

"The rug is ruined. Or almost is. And the yard-" Sonny slapped the paper down on the table. "All right! Just let me relax a minute, will you?"

She put on her pleading look. It was a look compounded of pouty lips, tousled hair, and those inevitable eyes, and it always had its effect on him. "One minute," she murmured.

"That's all it'll take. I just want you to see the backyard. " She took him by the hand and led him through the living room to the sun-room, where he stood a moment contemplating the damp spot on the concrete floor. She was surprised herself at how the spot had grown-it was three times what it had been that afternoon, and it seemed to have sprouted wings and legs like an enormous Rorschach blot. She pictured a butterfly. Or, no, a hovering crow or bat.

She wondered what Muriel would have made of it.

Outside she let out a little yelp of disgust-all the earthworms in the yard had crawled up on the step to die. And the lawn wasn't merely spongy now, it was soaked through, puddled like a swamp. "Jesus Christ," Sonny muttered, sinking in his wingtips. He cakewalked across the yard to where the fence had begun to sag, the post leaning drunkenly, the slats bowed. "Will you look at this?" he shouted over his shoulder.

Squeamish about the worms, Meg stood at the door to the sun-room.

"The Goddamn fence is falling down!"

He stood there a moment, water seeping into his shoes, a look of stupefaction

on his face. Meg recognized the look. It stole over his features in moments of extremity, as when he tore open the phone bill to discover mysterious $20 calls to Billings, Montana, and Greenleaf, Mississippi, or when his buyer called on the day escrow was to close to tell him he'd assaulted the seller and wondered if Sonny had $500 for bail. These occasions always took him by surprise. He was shocked anew each time the crisply surveyed, neatly kept world he so cherished rose up to confront him with all its essential sloppiness, irrationality, and bad busi'ness sense. Meg watched the look of disbelief turn to one of injured rage. She followed him through the house, up the walk, and into Muriel's yard, where he stalked up to the front door and pounded like the Gestapo.

No one responded.

"Son of a bitch," he said, turning to glare over his shoulder at Meg as if it were her fault or something. From inside they could hear the drama of running water, a drip and gurgle, a sough and hiss. Sonny turned back to the door, hammering his fist against it till Meg was sure she could see the panels jump.

It frightened her, this sudden rage.

Sure, they had a problem here, and she was glad he was taking care of it, but did he have to get violent, did he have to get crazy? "You don't have to beat her door down," she said, focusing on the swell of his shoulder and the hammer of his fist as it rose and fell in savage rhythm. "Sonny, come on. It's only water, for God's sake."

"Only?" he said, spinning round to face her. "You saw the fence-next thing you know the foundation'll shift on us. The whole damn house-" He never finished.

The look on Meg's face told him that Muriel had opened the door.

Muriel was wearing the same faded blue housecoat she'd had on earlier, and the same wet slippers. Short, heavyset, so big in front she seemed about to topple over, she clung to the doorframe and peered up at Sonny out of a stony face.

Sonny jerked round to confront her and then stopped cold when he got a look at the interior of the house. The plaster walls

were stained now, drinking up the wet in long jagged fingers that clawed toward the ceiling, and a dribble of coffee-colored liquid began to seep across the doorstep and puddle at Sonny's feet. The sound of rushing water was unmistakable, even from where Meg was standing. "Yes?" Muriel said, the voice wi thered in her throat. "Can I help you?"

It took Sonny a minute-Meg could see it in his eyes: this was more than he could handle, willful destruction of a domicile, every tap in the place on full, the floors warped, plaster ruined-but then he recovered himself. "The water," he said. "You-our fence-I mean, you can't, you've got to stop this-" The old woman drew herself up, clutching the belt of her dress till her knuckles bulged with the tension. She looked first at Meg, still planted in the corner of the yard, and then turned to Sonny.

"Water?" she said. "What water?"

T

he young man at the door reminded her, in a way, of Monty.

Something about the eyes or the set of the ears-or maybe the crisp, high cut of the sideburns ..,Of course, most young men reminded her of Monty. The Monty of 50 years ago, that is. The Monty who'd opened up the world to her over the shift lever of his Model A Ford, not the crabbed and abrasive old man who'd called her "bonehead" and "dildo" and cuffed her like a dog. Monty.

When the stroke brought him down, she was almost glad. She saw him pinned beneath his tubes in the hospital and something stirred in her; she brought him home and changed his bedpan, peered' into the vaults of his eyes, fed him Gerber's like the baby she'd never had, and she knew it was over. Fifty years. No more drunken rages, no more pans flung against the wall, never again his sour flesh pressed to hers. She was on top now.

The second young man-he was a Mexican, short, stocky, with a moustache so thin it could have been penciled on, and wicked little red-flecked eyes-also reminded her of Monty. Not so much in the way he looked as in the way he held himself, the way he swaggered and puffed

out his chest.

And the uniform, too, of course.

Monty had worn a uniform during the war.

"Mrs. Burgess?" the Mexican asked.

Muriel stood at the open door.

It was dusk, the heat cut as if there were a thermostat in the sky. She'd been sitting in the dark. The electricity had gone out on her-something to do with the water and the wires. She nodded her head in response to the policeman's question.

"We've had a complaint," he said.

Little piggy eyes. A complaint. We've had a complaint. He wasn't fooling her, not for a minute. She knew what they wanted, the police, the girl next door and the boy she was married to-they wanted to bring Monty back. Prop him up against the bed frame, stick his legs back under him, put the bellow back in his voice. Oh, no, they weren't fooling her.

She followed the policeman around the darkened house as he went from faucet to faucet, sink to tub to shower. He firmly twisted each of the taps closed and drained- the basins, and, then crossed the patio to kill the sprinklers and the hose, too. "Are you all right?" he kept asking.

"Are you all right?"

She had to hold her chin in her palm to keep her lips from trembling. "If you mean am I in possession of my faculties, yes, I am, thank you. I am all right."

They were back at the front door now.

He leaned nonchalantly against the doorframe and dropped his voice to a confidential whisper. "So what's this with the water, then?"

She wouldn't answer him. She knew her rights. What business was it of his, or anybody's, what she did with her own taps and her own sprinklers? She could pay the water bill. Had paid it, in fact.

Eleven hundred dollars' worth.

She watched his eyes and shrugged.

"Next of kin?" he asked. "Daughter?

Son? Anybody we can call?"

Now her lips held. She shook her head.

He gave it a moment and then let out a sigh. "Okay," he said, speaking slowly and with exaggerated emphasis, as if he were talking to a child. "I'm going now.

You leave the water alone-wash your face, brush your teeth, do the dishes. But no more of this." He swaggered back from her, fingering his belt, his holster, the dead weight of his nightstick. "One more complaint and we'll have to take you into custody for your own good.

You're endangering yourself and the neighbors, too. Understand?"

Smile, she told herself. Smile. "Oh, yes," she said softly. "Yes, I understand."

He held her eyes a moment, threatening her-just like Monty used to do, just like Monty-and then he was gone.

She stood there on the doorstep a long while, the night deepening around her.

She listened to the cowbirds, the wild parakeets that nested in the Murtaughs' palm, the whoosh of traffic from the distant freeway. After a while she sat on the step. Behind her the house was silent: no faucet dripped, no sprinkler hissed, no toilet gurgled. It was horrible.

Insupportable.

In the pit of that dry silence she could hear him, Monty, treading the buckled floors, pouring himself another vodka, cursing her in a voice like sandpaper.

She couldn't go back in there: 'Not tonight. The place was deadly, contaminated, sick as the grave-after all was said and done, it just wasn't clean enough. If the rest of it was a mysteryoral history, 50 years of Monty, the girl with the blackened eyes-that much she understood.

M

eg was watering the cane plant in the living room when the police cruiser came for the old lady next door. The police had been there the night before, and Sonny had stood out front with his arms folded while the officer shut down Muriel's taps and sprinklers. "I guess that's that," he said, coming up the walk in the oversized Hawaiian shirt she'd given him for

Father's Day. But in the morning the sprinklers were on again, and Sonny cal1ed the local substation three times before he left for work. She's crazy, he'd hollered into the phone, irresponsible, a threat to herself and the community. He had a four-year-old daughter to worry about, for Christ's sake. A dog. A wife.

His fence was falling down. Did they have any idea what that amount of water was going to do to the substrata beneath the house?

Now the police were back. The patrol car stretched across the window and slid silently into the driveway next door. Meg set down the watering can. She was wearing her Fila sweats and a new pair of Nikes and her hair was tied back in a red scarf. She'd dropped Tiffany off at nursery school, but she had the watering and her stretching exercises to do and a pasta salad to make before she picked up Queenie at the vet's. Still, she went directly to the front door and then out onto the walk.

The police officers-she didn't realize for a minute that the shorter of the two was a woman-were on Muriel's front porch, looking stiff and uncertain in their razor-creased uniforms. The man knocked first-once, twice, three times.

Nothing happened.

Then the woman knocked. Stil1 nothing. Meg folded her arms and waited. After a minute the man went around to the side gate and let himself into the yard. Meg heard the sprinklers die with a wheeze, and then the officer was back, his shoes heavy with mud.

Again he thumped at the door, much more violently now, and Meg thought of Sonny. "Open up," the woman called in a breathy contralto that she tried unsuccessful1y to deepen. "Police."

Then Meg saw her, Muriel, at the bay window on the near side of the door.

"Look!" she shouted before she knew what she was saying. "She's there, there in the window!"

The male officer-he had a moustache and pale, fine hair like Sonny's-leaned out over the railing and gestured impatiently at the figure behind the window. "Police," he said. "Open the

door." Muriel never moved. "All right," he said, cursing under his breath, "all right," and he put his shoulder to the door. The frame splintered easily, water dribbled out, and both officers disappeared into the house.

Meg waited. She had things to do, yes, but she waited anyway, bending to pull the odd dandelion the gardener had missed, trying to look busy. The police were in there an' awful long time-20 minutes, half an hour-and then the woman appeared in the doorway with Muriel.

Muriel appeared heavier than ever, her face pouchy, arms swollen. She was wearing white sandals on her old splayed feet, a shapeless print dress, and a white straw hat that looked as ifit had been dug out of a box in the attic. The woman had her by the arm; the man loomed behind her with a suitcase. Down the steps and up the walk, she never turned her head. But then, just as the policewoman was helping her into the back seat of the patrol car, Muriel swung round as if to take one last look at her house. But she wasn't looking at the house; she was looking at Meg.

T

he morning gave way to the heat of afternoon. Meg finished the watering, made the pasta saladbow-tie twists, fresh salmon, black olives, and pine nuts-ran her errands, picked up Tiffany and put her down for a nap.

Somehow, though, she just couldn't get Muriel out of her head. The old lady had stared at her for five seconds, maybe, and then the policewoman was coaxing her into the car. Meg had felt like sinking into the ground. But then she realized that Muriel's look wasn't vengeful at all-it was just sad. It was a look that said, This is what it comes to. Fifty years, and this is what it comes to.

The backyard was an inferno, the sun poised directly overhead. Queenie, cleansed of fleas, shampooed, and with her toenails clipped, was stretched out asleep in the shade beside the pool. It was quiet. Even the birds were still. Meg took off her Nikes and walked barefoot through the sopping grass to the fence, or what was left of it. The post had buckled

overnight, canting the whole business into Muriel's yard. Meg never hesitated.

She sprang up onto the plane of the slats and dropped to the grass on the other side.

Her feet sank in the mud, the earth like pudding, like chocolate pudding, and as she lifted her feet to move toward the house the tracks she left behind her slowly filled with water. The patio was an island.

She crossed it, dodging potted plants and wicker furniture, and tried the back door.

Finding it locked, she moved to the window, shaded her face with her hands, and peered in. The sight made her catch her breath. The plaster was crumbling, wallpaper peeling, the rug and floors ruined: she knew it was bad, but this was crazy, this was suicide.

Grief, that's what it was. Or was it?

And then she was thinking of Sonny again-what ifhe were dead and she were old like Muriel? She wouldn't be so fat, of course, but maybe like one of those thin and elegant old ladies in Palm Springs, the ones who'd done their stretching all their lives. Or what if she wasn't an old lady at all-the thought swooped down on her like a bird out of the sky-what if Sonny was in a car wreck or something? It could happen.

She stood there gazing in on the mess through her own wavering reflection. One moment she saw the wreckage of the old lady's life, the next the fine mouth and expressive eyes everyone commented on.

After a while she turned away from the window and looked out on the yard as Muriel must have seen it. She saw the roses, gorged with water and flowering madly, the impatiens, rigid as sticks, oleander drowning in their own yellowed leaves-and there, poking innocuously from the bushes at the far corner of the patio, was the steel wand that controlled the sprinklers. Handle, neck, prongs: it was just like theirs.

And then the idea came to her. She'd turn them on-the sprinklers-just for a minute, just to see what it felt like. She wouldn't leave them on long-the water could threaten the whole foundation of her house.

That much she understood.

0

The Man Frotll Io"Wa Paul Engle, distinguished poet and founder and director for 25 years of the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, died on March 22 last year at O'Hare Airport in Chicago. He was on his way to Poland to receive the country's Order of Merit. Engle was born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in 1908. He published some 20 volumes of poetry and prose, and edited several prestigious anthologies. With his wife, China-born writer Hualing Nieh, he founded the unique International Writing Program-an extension of the Iowa Writers' Workshop-in 1967. More than 800 writers from 80 countries have participated in the program. Indian participants, in addition to Ashokamitran, have included Dilip Chitre, Sunil Gangopadhyay, Qurratulain Hyder, Adil Jussawala, Jayanta M ahapatra, Prayag Shukla, Syed Mustafa Siraj, Sivasankari, Usha Subramaniam, Shrikant Varma, and Nirmal Verma.

When I received an invitation from the International Writing Program (IWP) of the University of Iowa in 1973, I immediately recalled Hindi poet Shrikant Varma's article on the program in SPAN (August 1973). I wrote to him, asking about the IWP. He sent me a prompt, simple reply: "Do go to the program.

Paul Engle is a very kind and understanding person. You will have no difficulty whatsoever." And when I consulted Airoavatham Swaminathan, one of the three or four people who have shaped my literary career, he simply said: "Engle, he is the one who did that anthologyMidland."

I arrived to a welcome dinner at a glittering restaurant, the Highlander, miles away from Iowa City, even though Paul knew that all I ate was a small selection of cooked botanical specimens.

But he had to greet people, especially writers, in style.

Paul's concern for the workshop participants went beyond the luncheons, din-

cans, he also saw to it they had all the solitude for their creative pursuits.

It was after a few days at the program that I asked him about Midland. Soon after he handed me a slightly discolored copy of the anthology. "It appears this is the only copy I have," he said.

"I will return it in two weeks."

"No."

ners, and parties he organized at his residence or elsewhere. He spent a lot of time and effort to keep them in a state of cheerful importance, accompanying them on the several trips they made, listening to them, counseling them, reading their manuscripts.

He was 65 when I first saw him in 1973.

I often wondered how one like him, whose essential pursuit was writing and literature, could devote so much of his time, energy, and attention on strangers who would go away in a few weeks and may well not even remember him and his enormous efforts.

But he never seemed to mind.

Participants, for example, were free to go or not to the weekly visit to the supermarket, the Friday seminars, or any of the other numerous functions. But he was there at everyone of them, getting them started, guiding them, packing essential information in the fewest words with always a pause or a remark that made the moment both mirthful and literary. (On a visit to an atomic energy plant, his instructions were: Dress casually. Do not wear high heels.

Do not wear dresses or skirts. You must climb ladders in the plant and we do not want to have to fish you out of an atomic boiling bathtub.)

One day he took me to an American football game; it must have been a very special match. The Iowa City stadium pulsated with far more people than the town's population of 50,000. The foot-

Left: Paul Engle. Above: Engle's wife and IWP cofounder Hualing Nieh with noted Indian writer Shrikant Varma during the 1979 program. Varma, who died in 1986, also participated in the 1970-71 program.

bailers and the band players were somewhat overdressed, the brave cheerleaders nominally clothed, but I was in terrible discomfort. They said the temperature was five degrees below zero but to me it seemed more like 50 below zero. Soon after the spectacular parade and the cheering was over, Paul, realizing my predicament, rushed me to his house and got me a steaming cup of coffee. He had me take off my shoes and warm them and my feet at the fireplace; gave me moccasins to wear. I was moved and remembered Varma's words-"a very kind and understanding person." My experience was corroborated by almost every other participant; they had similar stories to narrate about Paul's concern and consideration.

For the Thanksgiving Day dinner, he said he would bring the turkey, but to make it a truly international event Paul laid a difficult condition for the guests: Everyone should prepare a native dishthe program would bear the expense-to be shared by all. "But if anyone brings a terrible preparation, the one who cooked it will have to eat the whole thing."

While Paul created numerous opportunities for the participants' recreation and for them to meet a cross-section of Ameri-

"Well, O.K., ten days. One needs at least that much time to do justice to the book," I said.

"Make it ten years."

Paul Engle could transform an otherwise formal academic program into an experience of warmth, enlightenment, and camaraderie and it is difficult to say whether all that would have been possible but for the constant presence of an extraordinary associate of his-his wife Hualing Nieh Engle, a writer of eminence and sensitivity. The two were nominated for a Nobel Prize in 1976. Letters seconding their nomination flooded the committee from all parts of the world.

Technically, the Engles retired in 1987 but writers the world over could not think of them as outside the IWP. A friend said that the program was Paul Engle's poetry, but Paul Engle wrote many memorable poems-lucid, truthful, delicate, and moving. I discovered by chance that a plaque in honor of the war dead in the Iowa Memorial Union of Iowa City was inscribed by a poem of his: On this wall, in this town, in their own state We name their individual names, to state That they were not just group, crew, squad, alone, But each one man, one mortal self, alone, Who fought the brutal frenzy of his time, Who touched with human hand this iron time.

So, in a time of fear, have no dejection, Remember these men on whose lives you stand.

Recall their name, face, human imperfection, How their death gave life to this lucky land, For memory is mortal resurrection, Light as sun rising or a loving hand.

0 About the Author: Ashokamitran is the pen name of J. Thyagarajan, noted Tamil writer, who has published several novels, collections of short stories, and articles on current affairs.

WORLD TRADE FAIR INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION AND CONFERENCE ON FOREIGN COLLABORATIONS, INDUSTRIAL AND BUSINESS OPPORTUNITIES 18TH TO 28TH MARCH, 1993. NEW DELHI - INDIA

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BUSINESS POTENTIAL Based on the past experience, the businessactivity at the Fair is expected to be around Rs. 3,000 crores (US$ 1000 Million). Extensive media coverage is being given to the Fair through Press, Radio and Television in India and abroad.

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