Volume 1 - Issue 10

Volume one, number ten I March 17, 1968

" The prison did shut out the outer world, and h ere was this Inner wortd that had a strange peace about lt."

--

__.

-

-

21 The New Journal I March 17, 1968

3

Robert Penn Warren

by Susan Broudy

7

AI LaValley in jail

11

Summer violence: black and white

by Austin Clarke

14

Letters: reply to Biafra, Air War In Comment: New Haven McCarthy campaign takes on Barbieri's "many, many segments," Ronald Steel talks about the ideology of anticommunism, hard-nosed demonstrators turn out for the Peace March, and the Dramat's mixed-media Rhinoceros gets a mixed review.

McCarthy Immediately following the naming of the Democratic Town Committee's slate of delegates to the June 22 state convention, Town Chairman Arthur Barbieri lauded the committee's unanimous support of President Johnson and stated that the delegates represented the "many, many segments of the city's Democratic organization."

When Barbieri rebuffed attempts to have at least eight of New Raven's 34 delegates to the state convention pledged to Senator Eugene McCarthy, he was running the risk of a primary fight which would strain personal and organizational relationships in the Democratic party.

"If there is a contest," said Barbieri at the time, "I'll have my best foot forward."

Barbieri's organization has not lost a primary fight since he has been Town Chairman, and has nipped many primary fights in the bud with the help of Connecticut's often-revised primary laws.

Barbieri's pro-Johnson delegates are going to be a tough bunch to unseat in the April 9 primary. The party's slate includes Mayor Richard Lee, his long-time supporter and ambassador-at-large Democratic National Committeeman John Golden, and a host of office holders and organization Negroes.

These "many, many segments" of the local Democratic machine pale, however, in comparison to the pro-Johnson delegates put forward by the party in H artford.

On the Hartford ticket are Governor John Dempsey, party leader John Bailey and Senator Abraham Ribicoff, among others.

As a long time observer of the political situation in Connecticut put it, the party has everything on the line in the big city primaries. If many of the seventeen or so primaries in Connecticut are lost or if the unit rule binding delegates to the national Democratic convention in Chicago is dented by even one McCarthy delegate, the whole Democratic party organization in Connecticut would fall under a shadow and perhaps be eventually repudiated by reformers within the party.

At its March 5 open convention the New Haven McCarthy group put forth 34 delegates from the community of New Haven as well as from the university.

Prominent among the university supporters are Professors James Tobin and John Blum, as well as Chester Kerr. While much of the money, help and initial enthusiasm naturally emanated from Yale, the local campaign to unseat the town committee's delegates will quickly be forgotten and may even prove a liability in terms of state and national policy if the rank and file Democratic voters in the city do not consider a vote for McCarthy a realistic alternative.

Consequently, significant efforts have been made to obtain a commitment from prominent individuals and liberally oriented groups in the city to join in the McCarthy campaign.

Among the McCarthy delegates are Richard Belford, former chairman of the New Haven Commission on Equal Opportunities and the Reverend Robert Forsberg, leader of a church coalition known as the W~der City Parish.

Support has also come from former members of the city's Democratic organization who don't feel comfortable about either the local or the national party situation. A delegate on the McCarthy slate, Ann Mitchell, was formerly Democratic party chairlady for the city's 21st ward.

Nevertheless, most of the politically oriented social action groups in the city of New Haven have not seen the McCarthy campaign as the place to fight the good fight against city hall and the party. Overtures to these groups from the underfinanced and somewhat disorganized McCarthy Democrats have drawn outright rejections as well as offers for covert help and canvassing assistance with caveats that no mention of the names of the organizations be made.

Some black groups in the city have restrained from entering the McCarthy fight either because of their funding dependency on Community Progress, Inc., or because they are busy pursuing the fragile illusion of a statewide bloc of black voters.

If the majority of more than 20,000 registered Democrats in this city find a focus for their discontent in the promise McCarthy and the local McCarthy campaigners offer, the fight can be won. To staff the public information office at the comer of Church and Elm as well as to drive voters to the polls, babysit, etc., call 777-5381 or 562-3019 for information.

Fred Hyde Medical School

Steel One of the men Lyndon Johnson drafted to mediate the Dominican Republic crisis in 1965 was Ellsworth Bunker, now our ambassador to Vietnam. Bunker is the sort of Yale-spawned public servant who responds to duty, pragmatically analyzes a situation and shoulders his responsibility without so much as a groan. In this case, Bunker also happened to be a director of a company that is one of the largest owners of sugar lallVs in the Dominican Republic.

It's such curious coincidences as this, barely audible now next to the guns of Vietnam, that make one start to ask if Vietnam is really such a fluke, and that at the same time bring into focus a number of questions about American foreign policy. How much does the US confuse the interests of American corporations with the national interest? What are the limits of American intervention? Are all areas of the world equally crucial to the national security?

One individual actively asking these questions is Ronald Steel, who was at Yale for a week in February as a visiting fellow in Jonathan Edwards College. Steel is almost unique in occupation. He is a political writer whose perceptive and fresh insights into foreign policy have gained increased attention. Yet Steel belongs to no university, institute, magazine, government agency or politician's brood. He's freelance and self-supporting.

Steel, who graduated from North-

western and holds a master's degree in political economy from Harvard, spent a year in the foreign service before deciding that bureaucracy was not for him.

He left his assignment in Cyprus for New York, where the only writing job he could find was with a high school current affairs magazine. While with that magazine, he wrote a book review which was accepted by The New Republic.

He began writing freelance full time, with his articles appearing in a wide variety of periodicals. Some of the best have recently appeared in The New York Review of Books, and he will soon be writing a series of articles for The New American Review. Steel also spent a year as a Congressional fellow of the American Political Science Association, including a six-month stint with Senator Fulbright.

Steel's first book, End of Alliance, demonstrates the obsolescence of the NATO alliance and the archaic thinking behind the idea of an "Atlantic community." Pax Americana, which appeared last year, deals with the broader problems of America's role as a global power. These problems were also at the center of the seminars Steel led in Jonathan Edwards.

"America's foreign policy," Steel said in an interview while at Yale, "has become self-defeating. It's hung up on its own ideology of anti-communism, and bas led us into involvements not necessary for our own security or national interests or even for the benefit of the people we're trying to help.

"This counter-ideology of anti-communism has also made for an evasion of the real problems of American society.

People aren't free in this country. We externalize our own problems and are now beginning to pay the price."

Steel said that American interventionism has been based on premises that seemed reasonable two decades ago (although the factual basis of those premises is increasingly open to debate).

"But certainly," he added, "they're no longer valid today. And our foreign policy today is conducted by people whose attitudes were formed in the late 1940's and who haven't changed."

Some who agree with most of Steel's observations would change his emphasis on an ideology of anti-communism and instead point to an American preoccupation with stability and the status quo and a corresponding uncertainty when results are not predictable.

One example that bolsters Steel's contions, however, is the US reaction to Cuba. Steel was in Cuba in January, as a journalist covering the Cultural Congress.

"I went not knowing what to expect," said Steel. "I had some sympathy with the aims of the Revolution, but I probably expected to find a revolution betrayed, a party apparatus imposed on a society, with Soviet imperialism substituted for American imperialism-that it would be like Eastern Europe, but with a sunny climate. " It was quite different. There was a tremendous excitement and idealism that reminded me of the kibbutz mentality of Israel. The common danger was a cohe.'live element. Much was phrased in the traditiOnal Marxist rhetoric, but that didn't make it any less passionate or convincing.

People seemed to actively like the government. This is true of the young people, I must add. Anybody over 35 finds it very difficult to adjust to life in Cuba today."

Daniel Yergin

Volume one, number ten March 17, 1968 Editor: Daniel H. Yergin Publisher: Peter Yaeger Executive Editor: Jeffrey Pollock: Designer: Ronald Gross Photography Editor: Herman Hong Advertising Manager: Jeffrey Denner Associate Editors: Susan Braudy Jonathan Lear Circulation Manager: J ean-Pierre Jordan Copy Editor: Alan Wachtel Classifieds: William M. Burstein Contributing Editors: Jonathan Aaron Michael Lerner Steven Weisman Staff: John Boak, Paul Bennett, Peter M. C. Choy, Jennifer Josephy, Larry Lasker, Christopher Little, Howard Newman, Barney Rubin, Warner Wada Advertising: Joe Ambash, Bill Gerber, Jeffrey Harrison, Jon Hoffman, John Jeffries, Chris Moffit, Howie Newman, Will Rhodes, Edmund Robinson, Roger Sametz, Sam Sutherland.

Steve Weise, Jeff Wheelright, Rick Wilson THIRD CLASS PERMIT: Third Class post· age PAID in New Haven, Conn. The New Journal is published by The New Journal.

3432 Yale Station, New Haven, Conn. 06520. and is printed at The Carl Purington RollinS Printing-Office of the Yale University Press ill New Haven. Published bi-weekly during the academic year and distributed by qualiJied controlled circulation to the Yale CommunitY· For all others, subscriptions are $4 per year. newsstand copies 50¢.

The New Journal © copyright 1968 by Tbe New Journal at Yale, Inc., a non-profit corporation.

Letters welcome. Unsolicited manuscripts should be accompanied by a stamped, self· addressed envelope. Opinions expressed ill articles are not necessarily those of The NeVI Journal.

If you are a student or faculty member at Yale, and have not received a copy of 11le New Journal, or know of friends who ha\"e not, please send the relevant names and ad· dresses (zip-coded), together with a note of their University status, to The New Journal• 3432 Yale Station, New Haven, Conn. 06520.

Robert Penn Warren article© copyright 1968 by the Yale Alumni Magazine Credits: Peter M. C. Choy: page 11 Joel Katz: page 3 Robert Nix: cover, pages 7, 8, 9

31 The New Journal ! March 17, 1968

Robert Penn Warren

by Susan Braudy Nothing we had · Nothing we were Is lost All is redeemed In knowledge.

Brother To Dragons "Every man is a novelist," says the soft husky Southern ·voice. The words tumble by. "His hero is himself. His novel is his life. He seeks patterns in his life, his novel."

Robert Penn Warren looks over steelrimmed reading glasses from face to face around the seminar table. His next sentence is emphatic, pitched slightly higher. " We look into our past to find out who we are."

Warren checks his gold pocket watch on the table in front of him. He pulls off his glasses and pushes his chair back from the table. The class is over. His creative writing students are silent. Finally they gather their books and start walking out of the seminar room in Silliman College.

One student whispers, "I could listen to him talk for days. I wish he would always talk, not read."

A student walks up to Warren and perches on the table by his lecture notes.

He has fallen behind in the short story he is writing. Warren offers him extra time.

The student says be would rather flunk than do less than his best.

"It wouldn't be fair to you to have to read it, and if wouldn't be worth it to me to rush through it."

Warren smiles ironically. "You, sir, are an idealist. I am not. I will be glad to read anything you write. Writing is a process of learning." " Red" Warren describes his face as typically Scotch-Irish, with a strong jawbone and malarial hollows in his cheeks.

He wears a tweed jacket, low boots, laced and brown, and blue or checked shirts.

When be reaches for his watch and chain at the beginning of class, navy blue suspenders stretch over a strong chest.

He bas the flushed, translucent skin of a red-haired man. His hair is thinning, short and wavy. Its faded brown hints at the red that gave him his nickname. His eyes are small, blue, deepset; the lids are hooded. His lips are narrow, turned in on themselves, speaking of struggles on internal landscapes.

He still looks like his early book jacket pictures, though the years have added new texture to his face. In repose Warren looks grim, thoughtful. A reporter once wrote that Warren's expression for photographers suggests a farmer about to throw you off his land. But the downward pull of his mouth seems to be a self-conscious ironic chuckle after a good laugh. He looks remote until he speaks. But then you feel his force and warmth. You feel it even more when exposed to his streak pf pungent, colloquial humor. He surprises you with his joy when he smiles.

The best contemporary American writer of both prose and poetry, Warren is even more expressive when he tells a story aloud. His voice changes pitch, pauses rhythmically or over-syllabizes at the end of a phrase in a rich Southern way. Herepeats a phrase or two for emphasis or for pleasure. Often he speaks so fast that phrases seem like one word. But more This article is appearing simultaneously in the Yale Alumni Magazine.

often his slow cadences hypnotize.

Robert Penn Warren defines himself and his times thro\lgh history. For him life is not an eternal present with a future.

He uses his past to inform and enrich his present as a Southerner, a man and an· artist. And it is the world of his boyhood that has shaped his writer's imagination and his sense of history.

Warren was born in Guthrie, Kentucky, in 1905. As a boy he explored his grandfather's rundown tobacco farm and the caves and woods around it. Warren writes about the world of his childhood, of his grandfather, Gabriel Telemachus Penn, an old man, shrunken, with a pointed, clipped gray beard. He wore blue jeans which hung loose from blue suspenders. To the young boy, he looked like General Lee without his white horse.

Tlie old man brought alive the Civil War and its impact for the boy. Warren's grandfather thought slavery was a bad thing, and he did not want to see the country divided. But when war came he went with his own.

Mornings, years later, he sat on his chair under a cedar tree with a book and his pipe. He told his grandson about riding in the cavalry with General Nathan Bedford Forrest. He told of fighting in winter woods and escaping by wading through cold rivers.

"And how dead m.en looked in the river bottoms in winter, and I lay on my back on the grass, looking up in the thick cedar limbs, and I thought how it was to be dead."

Once during the war, Warren's grandfather headed a command to hunt bushwackers in Tennessee. After they caught them, the soldiers held brief, roadside court proceedings. Then they hanged them. When the war was over, families of the bushwackers got murder indictments against the Confederate troops in Tennessee. So after the war, Warren's grandfather never returnd to Tennessee, but settled in Kentucky.

"Guerrilla-what's that?" I said.

"Bushwackers, we called 'em," he said. " Were they on the Yankee side?"

"Son, they didn't have a side.

Just out to plunder and ride And hell-rake the pore countryside.

Just out for themselves, so son ... " Time is short-hell, a rope is that's that."

As his grandfather described the hangings, the boy's imagination re-created the young man who was now that shrunken old man with the pointed gray beard sitting under the cedar tree.

Calmly then, out of the sky, Blotting the sun's blazing eye, He rode. He was large in the sky ....

To the great saddle's sway he swung, N ot old now, not old now, but young, Great cavalry boots to the thigh ....

The horseman does not look back, Blank-eyed he continues his track, Riding toward me there, Through the darkening air.

The world is real. It is there.

History and poetry also infl.uenced Warren early in life. Under the cedar tree, his grandfather not only told him stories of the Civil War, but recited Burns or Byron or read to him from Napoleon and His Marshals. And Warren was discovering history and literature for himself. At six, he read "Horatius at the Bridge," at nine

Lesson No. I in Practical Economics for diamond-minded students Most of the reason for the retail price of a diamond is the fact that this is the customary procedure: jewelers buy from wholesalers. They pay high rentals for their stores. They own fancy fixtures. They have higher priced help than most other retailers. They pay a lot for insurance. They have an inventory-obsolescence problem. They spend a lot for advertising, accounting and other business expenses. They need and deserve a high mark-up. They couldn't exist without it.

But take us .We buy where the wholesaler buys.

That can save up to% to begin w ith. No inventory.

We sell from a catalogue o£ natural color photos. No overhead because we have no fancy store. No capital investment. No obsolescence. No insurance. Nothing but top quality at bottom prices.

Campus representatives: Don Rhodes

562-9415 David Wickersham 3055 E.S. 787-2553

University Diamond Company

Brandeis Book Sale Sunday, March 31 through Sunday, April 7 xoam to 6 pm 258 Church Streer (corner Grove)

"How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix." He remembers being as much impressed by a horse that could go that fast as by the poem. By 13, he was reading "Lycidas," and appreciating the poem itself. He also read Buckle's History of Civilization in England and history books by Motley, Prescott and Parkman.

Warren was an imaginative, sensitive child who found parts of his world too traumatic to understand. There was, for example, what he imagined was a lynch tree, an old oak by the decrepit town jail in Guthrie. Warren had not seen the lynching. He knows he never saw a rope on the tree. Yet, even today, he always pictures that tree with a rotten and raveled length of rope hanging from a bare bough.

An older child probably told the tale of the lynching to him. It doubtless took place before he was born, out in the country somewhere, not by the jail. But the lynching fixed his frightened fascination with the past incident in a present time and place.

The Southerner's personal past is more deeply tied with his cultural past than most other Americans. He has a traumatic cultural history. He has "blood knowledge" of defeat, guilt and tragedy.

Warren remembers his "two grandfathers in gray at Shiloh, that morning of April6, 1862, young men with other young men in gray uniforms stepping toward the lethal spring thickets iJf dogwood and redbud, to the sound of birdsong."

Warren's youth, his Kentucky, says a critic, bad a beauty, violence and sadness about it, remarkable even for the South.

It shaped his imagination, his style and his vision of man.

Warren entered Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, at 16. He was younger than his classmates and somewhat shy and withdrawn. He had been interested in a career in science. But his mind was soon changed by a poor freshman chemistry course and a good English course with John Crowe Ransom.

Ransom, Allen Tate, Donald Davidson and others bad been meeting regularly to argue poetry and philosophy at the home of a well-to-do Nashville pajama manufacturer. In 1922, they began publishing a poetry magazine called The Fugitive, asserting their independence from the Brahmins of the old South.

One day early in 1923, Allen Tate, a senior, was typing poems for the next Fugitive issue in a faculty office. In came a taJI, thin sophomore who walked with a sliding shuffle as if his bones didn't belong to one another. The red-haired stranger asked to see Tate's poems. In return he showed Tate his poem about the purple lilies of hell.

Tate and Red Warren became friends and started rooming together almost immediately. Warren decorated the dingy plaster walls of their room with "Waste Land" murals. Tate was later to call Warren "the most gifted person I have ever known."

Warren entered a Fugitive contest which was won by Hart Crane. But Warren became a regular contributor and was made a Fugitive in 1924. He became coeditor of the magazine in 1925 with Ransom, who was already developing the principles of New Criticism with Allen Tate.

The vigorous little magazine attracted wide critical attention during the three years of its existeQPe. Among its contribu-

tors were outsiders like Robert Graves, Louis Untermeyer and Hart Crane.

Critics point to the Fugitive as one beginning of the Southern Literary Renaissance.

Today Warren recalls this kind of writer's community as the ideal climate for writing. "I'm not trying to talk myself out of a job, mind you. But classes are not enough," he says with his whispery laugh.

The classroom is an attempt to reproduce this interaction. But classes are not enough if students are not engaged in this vital community outside the classroom.

"Frankly, I don't know how much goes on at Yale, outside the classroom. I know what the boys tell me. And from what I get told, it's not too much."

The Fugitives bad a community.

Though members differed in temperament and esthetic theory, they shared a Southern heritage and a love for poetry.

For Warren, the group was his education.

More than 30 years later, at a reunion in Nashville, former Fugitives expressed astonishment at the documentation compiled about them. Warren remarked, "It's like a wake with the corpse joining the festivities. But the corpse is thoroughly enjoying it."

In 1925 Warren was graduated from Vanderbilt summa cum laude with one of the highest undergraduate averages ever compiled. In 1927, after receiving an M.A. from Berkeley, he came to Yale for the first time, as a graduate student in English.

While at Yale Warren led a double life.

He spent weekends down in Greenwich Village visiting his friends Allen Tate, Caroline Gordon and Katherine Anne Porter. Besides his graduate seminars he was writing poems and reviews for magazines like The New Republic.

Through the Tates, Warren also met Ford Madox Ford, Kenneth Burke, Malcolm Cowley and Edmund Wilson.

Warren also remembers his "political baptism" in the argument and agitation surrounding the Sacco and Vanzetti case.

After a year at Yale, Warren won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford. While he was back in Nashville for a long vacation, his Fugitive friends asked him to write an essay on the Negro for a book defining agrarianism as the Southern way of life.

I'll take My Stand, by Twelve Southerners went to press in 1930. Warren wanted to call the book A Tract Against Communism. The twelve agreed on an introduction that upheld the values of an agrarian society. They opposed any industrialization in the South like that in the "so-called progressive" Northern cities.

The Fugitives had said they stood for a new progressive South. But the twelve agrarians, many of whom had been Fugitives, now opposed industrialization and other signs of the new South. Sales of the volume were poor. The public was not interested in the book, but historians and literary scholars have not forgotten it.

The book has recently been reissued as a paperback.

Warren bad written his contribution, ''The Briar Patch," while he was at Oxford. In short, the essay defends the thenexisting policy of segregation. Warren described the relation between the welfare of the Southern Negro and the white. He wanted a decent rural life for the Negro in the South. Otherwise, he felt, the Negro would be tempted by the higher wages in factory cities, a life he was not equipped by nature to deal with.

Almost from the time he wrote it,

Warren realized the essay was wrong, that he had been wrong. He has not even read it since writing it. "I remember the jangle and wrangle of writing it, some kind of discomfort, some sense of evasion. The objective fact was clear: no power in the world could have changed segregation in the South in 1929. But I make no excuse for my subjective relation to objective fact at that time."

Segregation: The inner Conflict in the South (1956) and Who Speaks for the Negro? (1964) are two non-fiction accounts of Warren's personal odyssey to the contemporary South to hear "the voices in my blood." The result is much more than a refutation of "The Briar Patch." In Who Speaks /or the Negro? Warren, the white Southerner, interviews leaders and spokesmen for the Negro revolution.

C. Vann Woodward calls the book "the most searching exploration of the thought and emotion, the tensions and conflicts of the greatest American social upheaval of the century." Woodward regrets that then is no comparable volume by an author of equal stature on the American Revolution. the Anti-Slavery Movement, or the Radical Reconstruction.

"It's purely a matter of self-indulgence that I did those two books,'' Warren says.

"You can't arbitrarily take a week off and say I'm going down there and get the reality of it. You can't bother people that way. But if you're doing something particular, you can take their time. You can call up Martin Luther King and Malcolm X and try to make an appointment."

In an abstract sense the two trips did not change Warren. But they did deepen certain feelings and convictions. "One thing was clear to me. I saw frustration of talent and intelligence. There is such waste in people spending their lives on getting something that life should give to them, like air."

Warren points to the great release of Negro creative energy that has now appeared with the removal of even a few of the restrictions of segregation. "This biJI'!I of energy applies to many things, not j\151 to writing fiction. But if you look back a generation you won't see writers like Ellison and Baldwin.

"But although everything has not been solved, this release could be of tremendOUS importance-like America's great profit from the backwash of European fascism.

What the refugees, as it were, from Hitle~ and Mussolini did for American society 15 incalculable."

Adds Warren, "And the release of Negro creative energy could be equallY important, since the thwarted energy is being released back into the bloodstrearo of national American life."

In 1939, Time magazine raved about Wat· ren's first published novel, Night Ride'·· set in the Kentucky tobacco countrY of~ boyhood. "Lanky, red-headed, soft-s~eO Robert ('Red') Warren his written a blot raphy of John Brown, a volume of v~· a number of short stories, and is an editor and founder of the Southern Review, beSl of current U.S. literary quarterlies. He bJS been an English professor at LouisianJ State University since 1934."

Time failed to mention that Warren and fellow Southun Review editor . _..t C leanth Brooks had written two teJCtOVU"' anthologies which revolutionized the . teaching of literature in colleges and h~ schools. The textbooks were An Appr to Literature and Understanding Poetf!· Brooks recalls that An Approach to L 11"

r·

s

ill

1

:j

51The New Journal I March 17, 1968

erature grew from a small mimeographed pamphlet that Warren wrote for his classes. Warren insists that even the earliest pamphlet was written by them jointly.

The textbooks concentrate on the poem or story itself, rather than its historical context or on its author. They established the essential principles of New Criticism in the classroom.

Baton Rouge was an exciting literary scene. With the Southern Review, many Southern Renaissance writers found a vehicle. But the tenor of the magazine was not totally Southern. Some contributors like F. R. Leavis, Mario Praz and Ford Madox Ford were not even American.

Many of the American contributors were quite young. Five of Eudora Welty's first stories were published there. Delmore Schwartz, Randall Jarrell, Nelson Algren, Mary McCarthy and R. P. Blackmur also published early works in the Southern IUview. More established contributors iocluded T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Mark Van Doren, Katherine Anne Porter, Wallace Stevens, Kenneth Burke, Caroline Gordon and Allen Tate.

But the Southern Review folded in 1942 IJid its editors, including Warren, left the University and the South. The magazine's abrupt end was partly a result of the political situation in Louisiana. Ironically, Huey Long's influence and pride in Louisiana State University had created an atmosphere which had made the magazine possible. Long probably never knew or cared about the Southern Review, but LSU was one of the few universities that Was expanding-hiring rather than firing - in the depths of the Depression. Many IOOd young people came there to teach, thus creating a yeasty, exciting atmosphere.

But after Long's assassination in 1936, IDd t\1e sordid scrambling for spoils, lesser people came into power. The newly appointed administration of the State University was what actually killed the Southern Review. · The Review had lost a thousand dollars every year since its founding. Reasoned the new administration: How could a magazine be any good if it cannot pay its own way after seven years?

And when Warren and the others left, tbey went, as academics, where the best jobs were. Most of these jobs were in the North. Warren went to the University of Minnesota.

Says Warren today, "Being outside your World makes you see that world with a different ratio of feelings. Your own change in attitude and feeling is imJIOrtant in defining anything. You need lOme ratio of distance that makes it IIOssible for you to see the thing as formed, interpreted."

When asked why he remains so physically far from that world-his worldtoday, perhaps too far away, Warren looks ~acted, sad. ''These problems always ltise in life. It's only by a kind of accident I'm not still living in the South today.

Wasn't a plan."

In the Forties, Warren taught at the University of Minnesota, spent one year aa poetry consultant at the Library of Congress, went to Italy on a Guggenheim ~ship, and continued to write poetry, ,.;qon and criticism. ~~~o..._~en in 1950, his old friend Cleanth ~suggested Warren's name to Yale ~ident Griswold, who was looking for ~fessor of playwriting. The Drama :--ool has changed greatly since Warren lett in 1956, but there are those whore-

:at

member his involvement with student playwrights and their work, his shyness, and his generosity.

Warren gave up teaching in 1956 to devote all his time to writing. But he missed teaching and in 1961 acepted the invitation to become professor of English at Yale.

In the last three decades, at the phenomenal rate of almost one volume a year, Robert Penn Warren has written major fiction, poetry, literary criticism and nonfiction. He is acknowledged as the foremost American "man of letters," at home in many genres.

His many honors and awards include a recent Bollingen Poetry Prize, the most prestigious award in the field, for his Selected Poems Old and New (1960). The volume samples poetry from his entire career, starting with his early historical ballads and ending with his simpler and more personal recent poems. His Bollingen citation said that the book displayed the full range of an extraordinarily gifted writer's poetic accomplishment.

Warren also received an honorary doctor of letters from Yale in 1961, a Pulizter Prize in fiction for All the King's Men (1946) and a Pulitzer in poetry plus a National Book Award for Promises: Poems 1954-56 (1957). Promises is a legacy for his son Gabriel and his daughter Rosanna, to whom the poems are dedicated. He weaves his hopes and fears for his two children with scenes of his own Kentucky boyhood. The poems affirm the process of time through the children, who are promises for the future. Warren writes of his own parents, "who died so that all promises could be kept."

For Warren poetry is a more personal art than fiction. He has not taught poetry for years because he feels too close to the process of writing poems. He found that this intimacy was impaired by teaching poetry in class. But be can teach fiction because he simply does not feel the same kind of involvement.

Warren's poetry often originates in some personal experience. "Mortmain," a series of poems about his father in You, Emperors, and Other Poems (1961), began "cooking" when Warren simultaneously discovered his father's old forgotten Greek grammar and beard his infant son Gabriel laugh in the next room. The poems specifically build on those two unages.

Though he says his poems come from his personal experience, Warren stresses that poetry cannot be merely expressive.

Poems have to communicate; they have to fulfill their own beings.

Warren's periods of poetry writing come in great seizures. They may run a few months or die off immediately. But be usually scribbles a few lines down at first. ''Then the poem gets sidetracked into a folder. But later on one of them hits and gets going."

Besides some literary criticism Warren is presently working on a novel set in contemporary Tennessee. He hopes to finish it soon. " Unless I'm lucky enough to get another seizure of poetry," he says with his dryisb laugh.

Warren the novelist bas been acclaimed for his hypnotic narrative, his ability to evoke concrete detail and the texture of the physical world and his philosophical delving beneath that texture. He writes with a corkscrew incisiveness-starting with a brilliant realistic surface and then spiraling skillfully down to abstract truths about the nature of man, time and history.

New paperbacks f~om

Noonday Press KnutHamsun HUNGER Robert Bly's fresh translation from the Norwegian breathes new life into this great classic novel. Introductions by Robert Bly and Isaac Bashevis Singer.

(N302) $1.95 Pablo Neuruda THE HEIGHTS OF MACCHU PICCHU The finest of the longer poems by the Chilean who is perhaps the most powerful Latin American poet of this century.

Spanish and English on facing pages. Translated by Nathaniel Tarn. (N334) $1.95 Jane Bowles THE COLLECTED WORKS OF JANE BOWLES

Robert Lowell, Peter Taylor, Robert Penn Warren (Eds.) RANDALL JARRELL, 1914-1965 "This collection of memoirs and critiques . .. is a credible version of a richly complicated man." Erik Wensberg, N.Y. Times. Photos. (N332) $2.45 Randall Jarrell PICTURES FROM AN INSTITUTION Jarrell's only novel. " One of the wittiest books of modern times." Orville Prescott. " Its humor reaches into regions seldom disturbed by most modern writing."-Wil/iam Carlos Williams. (N338) $2.25 Brian Friel LOVERS

A novel, Two Serious Ladies •.. a play, In the Summer House ... and seven short stories.

Introduction by Truman Capote, who calls Mrs. Bowles "one of the really original purestylists." (N335) $2.45

Two new one-act plays by the authors of Philadelphia Here I Come! and The Loves of Cass McGuire. (N341) $1.95

Edmund Wilson EUROPE WITHOUT BAEDEKER

A novel. "The most moving and powerful love story in modern literature."-Los Angeles Times. (N342) $1.95

To his account of postwar Italy, Greece, and England, Mr. Wilson has added "Notes from a Diary of 1963-64: Paris, Rome, Budapest," and a new introduction. (N311) $2.45

Isaac Bashevis Singer THE SLAVE

Wilhelm Reich REICH SPEAKS OF FREUD

Edited by Mary Higgins and Chester M. Raphael, M.D. In a long tape-recorded interview, Reich discusses his work, his Francis Steegmuller relationship with Freud, and FLAUBERT AND the early years of psychoMADAME BOVARY analysis. Coming in June.

This brilliant biography has be- (N340) $2.25 come a classic since its first publication in 1939. With a new THE AMERICAN LITERARY ANTHOLOGY / 1 Author's Note. Appendix, bibliography, index. (N333) $2.45 Stories, essays, poems, selected from several hundred Francois Maurlac issues of the little magazines QUESTIONS OF of 1966 under a grant of the PRECEDENCE National Endowment for the Arts. (N317) $2.95 A novel about the rigid aristocracy of Bordeaux, by a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Translated by Gerard Hopkins. (N339) $1.95

All Noonday books are now available at TheVale Co-op

61 The New Journal! March 17, 1968

In his essay on Conrad's Nostromo, Warren the literary critic defines the "philosophical novelist," a definition critics have since turned on Warren himself.

"The philosophical nov.elist," writes Warren, "is one for whom the documentation of th.e world is constantly striving to rise to the level of generalization about values, for whom the image strives to rise to symbol, for whom images always fall into dialectical configurations, for whom the urgency of.experi.ence, no matt.er how vividly and strongly experience may enchant, is the urgency to know the meaning of .experience."

Like his poems, Warren's fiction also originates inductively. But when he writes fiction it is a contemporary or historical event, rather than a personal experience, that fires his imagination. In 1945, when Katherine Anne Porter and Warren were both attached to the Library of Congress, she came into his office to show him an old pamphlet about the murder trial of Jeremy Beauchamp.

Warren read the pamphlet in five minutes, and a new novel began to incubate.

Six years later he published World Enough and Time. "All your first versions are in your head," Warren once said to Ralph Ellison, "so by the time you sit down to write, you have some line developed."

Similarly, if there had been no Huey Long, and if Warren had not taught those years at LSU, All th.e King's M.en would not exist. But All the King's Men is still a product of Warren's creative imagination. At different levels, the novel is re-

lated to William James and pragmatic truth in process as much as to Huey Long's career.

Warren's literary criticism includes a 1946 essay on William Faulkner that was instrumental in gaining recognition for Faulkner as a major American writer.

Warren's Selected Essays (1958) contains major essays on the nature of poetry, Coleridge, Conrad, Hemingway, Katherine Anne Porter and others. His friend and colleague R. W. B. Lewis says that Warren has recently finished some of the best criticism ever written on Hawthorne, Melville, Whittier, Cooper and Longfellow. With Lewis and Cleanth Brooks, Warren is now working on an anthology of American literature.

In 1952, while he was teaching at the Drama School, Warren married Eleanor Clark, a New Englander, who has written Rome and a Villa and The Oysters of Locmariaquer, for which she too won the National Book Award. Today Warren, his wife, and his two young children Gabriel and Rosanna still live in two converted barns in Fairfield, Connecticut. "It's a beautiful, comfortable place," says a frequent guest.

The atmosphere is informal, with the Warren serving tea while the children play in another room and a dog gnaws cheerfully on a visitor.

The family's bedrooms, their studies and a balcony make a third level off the two-story living room, which has a marvelous view of the rolling hills of

· · ror r · ~ . d o f wa1t1ng T tre coptes •

Connecticut. The family bas spent some time living in France and Italy, and they often spend parts of their summers and vacations in Vermont ski country. The whole family skis and Warren loves walking in Vermont woods.

But despite the fact that he lives in Fairfield and in Vermont and in France, the most important fact about Robert Penn Warren is his awareness of his Southern history and heritage. He grew up and was schooled in the South. He associated with Southern intellectuals at crucial times in his life. He bas a Southerner's concern and love for history.

Still, maintains a close friend, ''Warren would never move his family to the South."

In addition to close friends from other contexts, Warren belongs to a community of old friends from the South, men with whom he has enduring ties. This is a community of Southern intellectuals living in the North, in a sense exiles from the South, men who share a common past.

The group includes Cleanth Brooks of the English department; John Palmer, editor of the Yale Revi.ew; C. Vann Woodward of the history department; Albert Erskine, senior editor of Random House ; and novelists William Styron and Ralph Ellison.

These friends feel that the basis for their relationship is more than any shared Southern identification. They speak of Warren·s generosity, his kindness. Warren has often gone out of ftis way to help beginning writers, in and out of his class-

room. Ellison recalls that he came to the publication party for InvisibLe Man in a Greenwich ViJJage bookstore. He also remembers that Saul Bellow bad an early boost from Warren when they were both at the University of Minnesota.

Ralph Ellison speaks slowly during a telephone interview. "It is simply that Robert Penn Warren is a very fine human being."

Woodward says, "Warren's loyalty to his friends is phenomenal. But it's not the 'I'll scratch your back so you scratch mine' variety so often found in the New York literary establishment."

Willie Morris, young editor of H arpers and author of North Toward Home, says, "Warren has always been a hero to me and to Southern writers of my generation. And he becomes even more of a hero after you meet him."

During the fall semester Warren teaches both a literature and an advanced writing seminar. One of his colleagues in the English department speaks wistfully aboll Warren's administrative unobtrusiveness. " I wish he would talk up more at depart· mental meetings. We should be making more English department decisions from the perspective of the creative writer, with an eye toward increasing the number of creative writing courses we offer. I hope Red Warren doesn't feel his days as an educational reformer are over."

Warren's teaching technique in his literature and creative writing classes fol· continued on p(lge 13

Now get the fastest service plus lowest prices for all your copying and printing.

4¢ first copy each page 2¢ each additional copy to 400 special lower rates for larger quantities

the charlton press 2 88 Dwight Street (right past Holiday Inn) While you wait, same day, or overnight service; free pick-up, delivery and collating; call 562-162 5 day or night for copy pick-up

711be New Journal I March 17, 1968

AI LaValley in jail: All the II

ly b

routines you live by drop away very suddenly~ and the time really stops. There was no time. People ask~ did it go by slowly did it go by fast. It just did not exist.~~ I

j)

r's

:s

ng

oli

IS.

t~

n

ith

r

1-

13

Over two thousand people participated in demonstrations outside the Army Induction Center in Oakland, california, on December 18 and 19, 1967. The police, apparently having learned to do without rough tactics after the bloody demonstrations in October ("letter from Berkeley," The New Journal, October 29, 1967), were efficient and even anxious to avoid violence.

Almost 300 people were arrested during the two days of demonstrations.

Among those arrested on the first day was Albert LaValley, who had not been particularly politically ICtive during his ten years at Yale as a graduate ltudent and as an English teacher. last fall LaValley, whose book Carlyle and the Idea of the Moderns has )lilt been published by the Yale Press, went to teach at San Francisco State College. The following interview Is the story of LaValley's experiences in the Ill-in and during his subsequent jail term. The story exists within the larger context of the discovery of an environment very different from the one LaValley had known at Yale. The interview was conducted over long-distance telephone In mid-January by Susan Braudy and Daniel Yergln.

How did you first get Involved?

How did I come to sit in at the Oakland Induction Center? This is difficult to trace. The first step here this winter was turning in my draft card. I turned in my draft card in early December.

I read a letter to my class that I wrote to my draft board in which I expressed my feelings about the frustrations young people were facing. I wrote that nobody was paying attention to these things. 1thought the government was alienating people who would be leaders tomorrow. And I said to the class that I was thinking about my own protest, about going fo jail, and some of them said, "Why don't you?" I pondered it for a while and then decided that I would go.

I knew what the Oakland demonstration wasthere were signs up for that-but I didn't know anybody working on it. I then decided that I would have to go to some meetings. I wanted to find out what jail was like and how violent this thing was going to be. And I went down to--it was like going underground-to this very, very sinister street, to a converted warehouse, where some people who had been in jail in October were having a meeting. We sat on the floor in a very pot-like atmosphere. These people struck me as much less shrill than the people up at State. They were rather ironic, and it was the first irony that I had seen out here. They had a sense of humor, and they seemed realistic. Yet they seemed committed to things. So I knew that I was with good people.

There were all these older people, from all walks of life, which came as a surprise, and this was true in jail too. We had a vineyard owner from Modesta, a Quaker, who's been committed to these causes for a long while. We had several educators. We had a pacifist from the Forties, who runs the Walden School in Berkeley. We had a longshoreman-an M.A. from Stanford, but still a longshoreman. And we had two Unitarian ministers.

At this tactics meeting in the warehouse run by the War Resistance League, we were learning purely non-violent tactics. At the meeting I realized that there are threats to face. Sometimes Hell's Angels motorcycle gangs come to muddy things up. In fact, the Angels did appear at a Be-In on Sunday before the Oakland demonstration. They beat several people up, and the police didn't Interfere.

What did they teach you at the non-violence school?

First we play-acted picketers and active hecklers, and this can be very real. I was surprised. My Eastern irony says that this kind of thing does not work-we are play-acting. But it does work, it did work. Old people got tackled, knocked down and kicked by young people. In fact, we all took our turns at getting knocked down and kicked.

So after this practice morning se..ion, waa Oakland next?

Monday morning, the 18th of December, about six o'clock in the morning. There at the Oakland Induction Center, a large support group was walking around on the streets. I think nearly three hundred people were eventually arrested for civil disobedience and for not having their draft cards.

I was in the first group arrested. I simply sat in a doorway at the Induction Center. It was a very strange feeling. It was raining, everything was wet. It was about six in the morning, and there I was sitting in a doorway.

Did you walk up to the Induction Center by yourseH or in a group?

People just gathered around there. It was extraordinary to see how many people drove up from various places all alone, and, even in this public place, had a private sense of using this kind of protest for a private educational experience. Really remarkable.

Many had not been very active in war resistance. At Yale they would be isolated people, I think. Here they have started doing things. That morning around the Induction Center, some were picketing. Those

who were going to commit civil disobedience were asked to come over in front of the Center.

You just sort of found yourself a place. I wanted to get it over with. So I simply sat in this doorway; then more people came to sit there, too. With about ten of us in the doorway, it got crowded. It got tense. They put up large boards inside the door. I didn't know whether they wanted to force the door open and push us out of the doorway, or whether they were simply protecting their door. Then several people who worked at the Induction Center came. They insisted on going to work. And they did trample over us.

A girl on crutches was there with us. This made things a little difficult. Then a .group of inductees who were really up-tight arrived. We tried talking to them, but it didn't seem to work. One of them kept screaming, " There's psychiatric help for you people."

Then a Marine came up. I don't know what his function was, but he looked very magnificent in his uniform. He was breathing very tensely.

I was a little bewildered by the whole thing. As I was sitting there, a few of my students came by and shook my hand. It was very strange. Everybody said I looked rather innocent. I was just waiting for it to get over. And I was afraid something violent might happen.

Then it happened. Just like on television. A man came up and said that he was the manager of the building, and that we had to move on or we would be arrested. And then the police came and did their little act with the bullhorn and took pictures and hauled us off. A few people did resist arrest. They went limp.

And then came the Oakland jail?

The police station, the courthouse and the jail are all part of one complex at Oakland. The first thing that hit me was the inhumanity of the process. It startles anybody who's arrested. The deeper I went into the experience, the more inhumane and sadistic people seemed, and the more contained by the system they were in. I had been at an English Department party at San Francisco State the night before, and that first day at Oakland I was very tired. They took us into a large room at the jail. They fingerprinted us five times.

Our pictures were taken three times. Booking is pure bureaucracy, and here too the arbitrariness seemed evident. Some people had almost all their clothes taken away. I guess they had sympathy for me because of my back brace. They left not only my sweater, but my coat. I was the only person with a coat. I gave it to somebody else who was freezing.

Then began two weird days without even a glimpse of daylight. There was some electric light, but we were in these dim, Kafkaesque yellow rooms. They all looked alike, and we w~re herded from one to another. The first day they took us to a room with a hundred beds, and I talked to a lot of people. Already you could see civilization springing up there. People were introducing themselves, making up games and welcoming new arrivals. Most people, we found out, had been arrested not for sitting in the doorway, but for sitting in lines in front of the buses carrying the inductees.

The second day in jail at Oakland was more mindboggling. We could have gotten out on bail, of course, but we decided against it. And what stunned me again that day was the total inhumanity of the process.

I hadn't eÂĽpected it to be this bad. They keep herding you from room to room, very small rooms. You don't know where you're going. lee Bond, a very levelheaded fellow from San Francisco State, began feeling Ill. So we told the guards, who said they would give him attention. But all they did was take him and throw him in another cell all alone. And they left him there. This was the first example of their punitive way of dealing with illnesses that continued much more disastrously later in the jail at Santa Rita. Their reasoning: If you're going to get sick, you don't get arrested, you don't go to jail. At one point they said, "Let the bastards die."

The problem of crowding was less serious, but still striking. On the second day, for instance, they took twenty-five of us-no, fifty of us-into a tiny room, the anteroom to the courtroom, a really foul place. It

81 The New Journal I March 17, 1968

had only one toilet, and crap smeared all over the place, peeling walls, and things written all over it.

Everybody had bad headaches from being herded from one of these close rooms to another all day long.

This Is the Oakland City Jail?

Yes, but then right outside where we were was this plush courtroom with great wood panels on the other side of the door. The judge was elected but everybody knew he was a Reagan man, and we kept hearing that the sentences were going to be very stiff. He wanted to give us a year's probation and fifteen days, but the lawyers had indicated that they were not going to take that. The judge was angry. He was determined to punish us. He sentenced people in groups of ten or twelve. He read the charges: we had tumultuously and offensively gathered and refused to disperse and things like that. There were several charges, and many of them were dropped. Finally, we were all sentenced for disturbing the peace. The judge gave twenty-day sentences to first offenders and forty-five days to those who were committing civil disobedience a second time.

I was with Lee Bond on the bus that took us to the Santa Rita jail. You are put into a bus where each seat runs across the bus, and there are several paneled areas that you are locked into. I was locked into an area with this guy Lee, and he was in such pain that he could hardly move.

When we got to Santa Rita, we made a point to get medical help for Lee. They finally took him into the Oakland Hospital, where he saw a doctor. He saw four doctors later at various times, none of whom did much of anything. Later he needed hospitalization, and we went on strike for him, but I will come to that.

But they did try to take care of him.

Santa Rita is south of the Livermore Valley, and it is called the Santa Rita Rehabilitation Center. lslt a prison farm?

No, it is the county jail. It is not a real prison, but a minimum security prison, with fences all around it. Actually, it is an old Navy Base.

At Santa Rita, they stripped us of everything. What had not been taken at Oakland was taken there. Then we were sprayed with DDT, which is a little painful.

They give you a pair of dungarees that don't fit you. You are allowed to keep your shoes and socks, after they have searched them. They give you a blue shirt, and that's it. No reading material. You have to keep washing your underwear, and during the twenty days almost everybody's underwear was worn out.

Stockings completely disintegrate if you wear them for twenty days in a row. When we lett, we willed whatever underwear was still intact to the people who were still there. The first bit of brutality we felt1don't know if it was really brutality-we were awakened the next morning about 4:30 for breakfast.

The temperature was about 30 degrees. Most of the time the weather was very warm, but that first day was cold. There was heavy frost. Then we were dragged outside and made to wait in line for fifteen minutes before we went to breakfast. And this was the beginning of the general harassment.

If they woke you at 4:30, what time was breakfast?

We were normally served breakfast at 5:30. We were scheduled for only two meals a day after our rebellion, so I ought to talk about the rebellion. The first night we were told we were going to be integrated with the other prisoners. If we shaved and showered, that is. But many people did not want to shave. Some people had beards for religious reasons, and others had beards because they played in rock-and-roll bands. And others felt a kind of castration in having these crewcut people coming at your beards and moustaches with clippers.

They wanted you to get your hair cut too?

You had to have your hair cut and a shave. You would be allowed a thin moustache, but you had to

have your hair cut. An older man from the nonviolence tactics school felt that our main issue was the War. He had a beard for twenty years and he did not seem to think that it was a major issue. But the young people really did think it was an issue. And most of the older people decided the first night at Santa Rita to support the young people and not have a shave and haircut.

And the next morning it happened-quite impromptu. They came in and asked how many wanted to be integrated and get privileges. But those who don't, they said, can take your blankets and clothing to the other barracks. And that's what we did. Everybody just got up and did it. Then they herded us into an area with five barracks around a courtyard; we were segregated from the regular prisoners. We were put into two adjoining barracks, separated by a gate.

They closed the gate after three days, when they saw that we were having meetings and getting a little too organized.

The barracks I was in did not open into the courtyard. So when we opened our doors, we were just on a sidewalk that ran about a hundred feet-the length of the barracks. So it was 50 or 60 people in a room about 100 feet long. The room had nothing in it but double bunk beds, five cold-water spigots, three johns and a urinal. That was it. We could open the doors and go out to the sidewalks in the front, but no farther. The johns were the same as they are in all prisons, out in the open. The bathroom itself was not even closed off. You know, it was almost part of the main room.

Were the barracks heated?

They were supposed to be heated. Some of them were, but ours wasn't. But after a while the weather got warmer. Though some people still got colds. It was cold at night, of course. It was always cold and uncomfortable to sleep there. We told the lieutenant about our colds when he came to talk to us at one point. He said colds are not a new thing, they are not an old thing either, they are there, they are everywhere people gather. Soon we sounded like a tuberculosis ward. I was very lucky. I had a cold two days and then it went away. We were fortunate to be in our barracks, because we finally began getting sunshine all day, and we sat outside in the sun.

The women were taken elsewhere?

Oh, yes. We saw them for the last time on the paddy wagon trip from the Induction Center at Oakland.

But you heard about Joan Baez and her being put Into the Hole (solitary confinement)?

In prison there is a grapevine, you see. Everything travels. When we went on a hunger strike for Lee Bond to get some medical treatment, the women went on a sympathy strike the next meal. They knew by that time. The captain came on the second day of our strike, and Lee was still very sick, and our Stanford pathologist said he needed to be hospitalized. I told the captain at this point about him, and the captain said that he would be given medical treatment. I was interested in my own attitude. 1was willing to admit that the captain was a rational man. He seemed rational. I believed he would bring medical treatment. But the next day no medical treatment came. This fellow Lee could not get up to go to the dining hall, where we went twice a day. Our group was segregated from the other prisoners. We had only two meals a day, one at 5:30 in the morning, the other at three in the afternoon. We were allowed no privileges, no visitors, no mail, ingoing or outgoing.

We did not have jackets for ten days. We didn't even have any toothpaste for five days or toothbrushes tor six. You cannot believe what the first taste of toothpaste is like after six days. It's the most exquisite flavor.

I had believed that the captain would get help tor Lee, but he did not get help, and he lied to us in other instances. It was clear that the man was a liar, but I was not willing to admit this. I had always assumed that Jaw has some justice in it, but I quicklY

e

91 The New Journal I March 17, 1968

learned that it does not. It is quite arbitrary. Their punitive techniques were simply haphazard. Everything went according to whim. It was just like Catch-22. We actually had a copy of Catch-22 in the barracks. I split in into two parts, and it was widely circulated. It was a great favorite. Many felt it was the greatest book ever written, but that could be because they read it in jail, which is Catch-22 all over. The people in charge say something is the rule, but the rule is incomprehensible and you can't question it.

The girls were also in trouble for failing to obey some rule which they did not understand. They later went on strike, which brought them a bread-andwater diet for three days. Joan Baez was put in the Hole because she was the spokesman who went up to ask what rule they had violated.

When the captain came second time, he came to quiet us, because he thought we might become a problem like the girls. I was interested to see if there was a unanimity of response to him. Everybody knew that this man was a fool. I began to detect a mechanical smile that I had not seen the first time.

Whenever we asked a question, he said, "I came to tell, not to discuss." There was finally a violent debate about what to do to get medical treatment for Lee. He had not been allowed to eat for two days because he could not walk to the dining hall, and we would get busted and sent to solitary if we brought food back. He was in great pain.

At breakfast the next morning everybody took an empty tray and sat down. There were a few other prisoners, non-cooperative sorts, who saw us, and it reached them immediately. They cheered us whenever we entered the dining hall after that, and they would always flash a V-sign to us. As we lett the dining room that morning, we sang "We Shall Overcome." It was really a moving kind of experience, and by nine there was medical help.

a

Ironically, 1don't think the medical help had anything to do with our strike, but the strike had other 900d effects. It helped bind us together. It also gave the other prisoners the sense that things coul? .be done to make Santa Rita a better place. I see 1a11 as a kind of rug under which all our American problems are hidden. Prisoners are mainly winos and narcotics cases, and probably about eighty per cent Negroes.

Eighty-three per cent come back to prison. No rehabilitation goes on there, obviously. It is a place Where society conceals problems. You learn to look at America in a completely different way; you see that jail is just an incarnation of all the worst things in this country. The people who run it are violent a.n.d &adistic-the struggling little men, mostly ex-m1htary, Who need power. .

The captain is obviously a parody of authonty figures who roam through our society, those mechanIcal people who claim they're only doing their job.

He appeals to regulations and rules, and the world becomes kind of crazy because there are endle~ rules, and it you ask a questi~::m, sudd.enly ~rule IS Invented to take care of it. It 1s very dtsturbtng to see this; it can alter your vision of America. People in 1hia country have cut themselves off from a sense of

responsibility. They have gotten into their own bag, into their suburban home, and they don't care. They don't see the horror that goes on. They can say that this is the greatest country in the world, and at the next moment condemn the War in an abstract way.

But then it's really interesting to see how we learned to live so well together under these intimate conditions. We had nothing at all. Our books were taken away from us, aside from a few that had been smuggled in or had been lying around. The intensity of learning to live with these people made all other things seem trivial, made the prison seem trivial. And it made even outside seem trivial after a while. When I came out that last Saturday, I expected the real world to be more real, to be beautiful and tangible.

But when I came out, everything was shadowy and fictive. The real world was back there with those people. We were obviously intensely relating to each other while we were there.

extraordinary intelligence working out astrology charts for people. Suddenly I realized I knew a little astrology; I read Yeats, for instance. All right, so it still sounded zany to me. But I listened. I learned something too. Meanwhile somebody else was doing yoga. We soon started holding yoga classes, which I joined to get rid of my nervousness. I was nervous as hell that first day. I did yoga simply as a physical tool, not for any kind of theoretical belief at all.

But it did relieve my nerves.

How do you mean?

Well, I was struck both at Santa Rita and in the Oakland jail by how civilization suddenly seems to begin again when you do not have things. We made balls out of blankets, yarn and adhesive tape that a trusty smuggled to us. In fact, he was very good at getting us things from the outside. He brought cigarettes every evening. The trusty was our liaison with the world outside and with the other prisoners, some of our fellows, who had taken the shave and haircut and gone out and worked. One guy from Santa Cruz worked on a pig farm. Another guy worked in a bakery. The Stanford pathologist ended up pouring water in the dining hall.

The guards would harass those who stayed behind.

One of their techniques was to take someone off to solitary, quite arbitrarily, for some offense that you could never understand, and keep him there for five days. Some people were in maximum security for the time, where all you got was a mattress and a simple blanket in the evening from 11 to 6. The rest of the day you had to stand in a seven by seven cell, shared with cockroaches and ants.

About the twelfth day, a guard we called Piggy, who was new on the job, came to harass us. He herded all 60 of us into the little john area and made us walk by it again and again. Afterwards we sang Mickey Mouse songs because we were so frustrated and offended by the whole thing. Then he hauled one guy off. We were so stunned that we did not protest. When he came back that night and tried to take someone else off, we just all walked outside. We are all going, we said. And with that he had to get the lieutenant who came down and apologized and said that the man was new. Toward the end it was very beautiful to watch this punitive system break down. After that many people wanted to go greystone, solitary.

They wanted to see what it was like. They also wanted to subvert the system.

Piggy came in once and pleaded with us to rescue two people outside on the sidewalk who refused to come in for the count. He said to us, " Is there anybody here in authority who can persuade these two people to come in?" One black fellow, who is going to be a fine leader someday, answered, "I am the only black man here, therefore I have the power."

What else happened among people in your barracks group?

My own feelings about the group are the interesting part of the experience. Actually this intense group thing might happen under any situation of psychological stress. It does not have to happen in prison. But because it was prison, it made some difference. And it opened me up to many new things.

At first I was perfectly friendly with people, but 1 was the only person in his thirties in this barracks, though several people were older. I was also the only regular college teacher. And I had been resisting the California environment.

That first day in Santa Rita, I met two extremely intelligent people talking about astrology. 1never had any great interest in astrology, and I don't expect to develop one. But here were guys of

At first I felt distant from these life styles. They struck me as strange, remote and sometimes ridiculous. Then I moved to an acceptance of diversity and new things which I had really believed I could not tolerate. In the process I learned how stuffy and rigid I was. My conservatism was constantly being brought home to me on the matter of colleges and universities. Thi~ always came up as my topic in discussions because I was part of the institution that many considered evil and actually doomed. Out here all kinds of free universities are beginning.

They are a partial answer to people's community needs, because the established universities have become so big and bureaucratic. Yale seems incredibly human by comparison with these things out here. Free universities do develop as alternative communities. They stress group therapy types of programs and the exotic, but always with a kind of personal bent. I have looked very, very suspiciously at these things, but I talked to people at Santa Rita and elsewhere who made incredible sense about them. People talked about the kind of education that could be based on each person's needseducation that does not try to channel anything or to place anything on top of people.

In jail, these kinds of educational situations would spring up. Little by little seminars did develop, though they were hardly ever scheduled. We had seminars on Martin Suber. We had seminars on the future of the resistance movement, on the draft laws, on literature. You name it, there was a seminar.

We had humanistic psychology lectures, and lectures on the longshoremen's union.

Why can't we all conduct education in a more leisurely manner like this, with courses less rigid, less structured? I liked the fact that you could go to the classes you wanted. This is education to meet your interests and needs.

Did the time pau slowly?

At Santa Rita jail, anyway, the atmosphere of The Magic Mountain was always running through my mind. There was an incredible sense of severance from the familiar. All the routines you live by drop away very suddenly, and time really stops. There was no time. People ask, did it go by slowly, did it go by fast. It just did not exist. Several people said the whole experience resembled a very long acid trip.

Time really stopped because there wasn't anything to measure it by. There were just our meals, and sometimes it got dark, and sometimes it was light.

The effect of this on me was very peculiar. First of all,

10 I The New Journal ! March 17, 1968

Hair stylist (for men)

Gentlemen's Workshop Do you get your hair cut with the same attitude that you cut your fingernails? Instead of just a "haircut," why not have your hair styled next time?

A hairstylist considers your face as a whole. He can do more to improve your appearance than your tailor.

Try it, unless you are perfect now.

By appointment: 777-4123 2 56 College Street Diclc Ferriudo, proprietor

a serenity came over almost everybody. The prison did shut out the outer world, and here was this inner world that had a strange peace about it.

It seems to me now that I still had a kind of academic pose in jail, and I was probably looking on it as a kind of experiment. It was interesting to see there in microcosm some emerging life styles in this country, despite the zaniness of certain interests like yoga and drugs. The drug culture was absolutely pervasive, but in a much less frivolous way than I saw at Yale. Here it was just there, it was a part of a larger thing, while at Yale people seemed to be pursuing drugs with either a kind of religious fervor or an escapist motivation. There were two ends to the barracks. There was a radical violent end, and a quiet pacific end. A Quaker in his late forties observed, '.'We are seeing here what afflicts the peace movement in general. We have violent, revolutionary people who did not know what they were getting into when they came to jail, down at the other end of the barracks. And we have us."

Friday, the evening before we were released, someone announced that Spock and Coffin had peen indicted. Everybody quieted down. Everyone became terribly serious. Then we began to joke about never getting out, about being taken to former relocation places for the Japanese during World War II. We heard rumors about how these places were being expanded and refurbished for dissenters.

What did you hear about Coffin's Indictment?

We didn't hear much. We didn't really know what exactly had happened.

Not knowing what happening, wasn't this sort of scary?

Gnomon Copy Service 294 York Street Telephone: 777-1429 Monday through Thursday 8 am to 12 midnight Friday and Saturday Bam to 6 pm Each page: 4 ¢ first copy 2 ¢ each additional copy Free pick-up and delivery on orders over $5.00

1:00AM and you~re still studying Don't go to bed hungry, go to

OLIVMS Open 24 hrs. a day 1064 Chapel

Yes, that was the scariest piece of news we heard.

Now, I thought, it's out in the open: they're not permitting dissent any more. They' re not playing games now. They' re not trying to cover things up with jargon and double talk. And I was scared about the implications for us. The FBI had come to prison to see people like one guy who had refused induction.· Friday night everybody quieted down and went to bed. And Saturday morning, our last day, we got up as usual and went to breakfast at 5 :30. After breakfast everybody acted as usual. We went back to bed. We knew we were going to get up at 8:30.

When we got outside the jail we were suddenly all hugging each other. There had been many moving moments, moments when we had had to coalesce as a group during crises, to decide what we were going to do and to use our group power, which was all we had. These moments did tie us together somehow, as well as moments when we just sort of circulated and got to know each other well. I know these people and their backgrounds better perhaps than I ever knew anyone at Yale. Simply because all we really had was each other, and our resources. People really did talk all about their hopes and their ideals.

I can see possibilities for a truly new society emerging out here. These people in jail were the sort of leader types that would have, years ago, filtered into business. It seems to me the basic question is, will these people ever be able to get into the power structure in any way?

No matter where you are, It Is a little difficult to escape the war. That Is the thing?

Well, that is the thing that makes it academic and relevant. I went down to Santa Cruz on Saturday and talked to Harry Berger. It was very shocking to him that these things are happening in the real world.

But he said, with your sort of personality you can work with this sort of thing, but I have to be inside my academic environment. There he was in his office surrounded with all his books. And I said, "Well, you know, I conquer my nervousness and coast on a kind of high when I get involved in these things." He said that he could not; he would simply disintegrate. I think this is a problem a Jot of academics face. They are so structured in their

isolated role of Independent scholarship that they cannot somehow make the real world meet it.

Where would you like to be teaching now?

I think I might like to stay at State. I am beginning to adjust. There is an incredible diversity there. I like the fact that some students are older. Some are really older, 26, 27, up to 30. They are late starters, but fine people, very committed to what they are doing. You get magnificent attendance in class. If I could get a lighter work load, .I would not really mind.

AI, you were at Yale for nine years?

Ten. Ten years. Well, Imagine you were at Yale and reading this Interview and it was of someone else.

What do you think your reaction would be?

Well, I don't know. I guess I couldn't imagine myself even doing this at Yale. At Yale people's life styles are determined by the college. Here the aura is different. San Francisco State is an urban campus. It reflects what is going on in the streets. Our campus is the city. You have much more sense of vitality here than at Yale. Walking across campus, there is always someone speaking for something crazy. It seemed weird to me at first, because all the political stuff d id not appear to be an organic part of the college. It j ust went on, it goes on all the time, part of the scene.

People are at ease in the new life style emerging here.

I was in the Good Karma Restaurant where people were having a seance over on one side. One guy with us would occasionally play the flute; and then everybody went into this hand-clapping thing. But people were quite at home doing this.

I do not know if that answers your question. I am trying to think what I would say if I were back in New Haven. Yale is somewhat shielded. There are incredible amounts of tradition in the East in education ; there are ways of dealing with things. A good example would be the problem of student suspensions at State. Nobody would have gotten upset about it at Yale because Yale has been taking care of suspensions for years with the city, with the law. All these things have been worked out by precedent.

No one knows what the precedents are here at State. You have a sense that institutions were b uilt yesterday, that they can be changed by students, t hat they are also at the whim of politicians. There is stability in Eastern institutions, and you do not question things that Eastern institutions decide. They have an aura about them which they lend to anti-war activity there. The picture I get of it is, you are going to have a meeting, you have it in Battell Chapel, and it is already sanctioned religiously. It is sanctioned in some way by the authorities. Out here nobody is going to give you any space for your meetings. They are going to kick you out of Grace Cathedral. Most institutions here are not fully grown. They do not speak from behind any authority. So you question them, you can question their authority at every point.

AI, just like In some kind of television show, you are going to have to summarize now.

My ideas will be changing all the time on all these things. This scene constantly redefines itself, and I suppose that an Easterner, looking at it, would say, " What a mess!" and "Aren't these people being silly to be sucked into things." They are not ironic enough, you might say. They do not have perspective on themselves.

What will happen If Coffin and Spock are convicted?

What do you think?

Martin Luther King talked today out here. He said the government is trying to scare us into silence and that we must not abandon our protests. King said that they have picked on Coffin and Speck to scare us.

But we are really going to stand. King said he will continue to speak out against the War. The most important thing King said was that we're in a new phase.

Ill The New Journal ! March 17, 1968

Summer violence: black and white

by Austin Clarke Born in Barbados and educat.ed at the University of Toronto, Austin Clarke is a producer for the Canadian Broadcasting Company and the editor of Ebo Voices.

The author of three novels, the latest entitled The Meeting Point, Mr. Clarke was recently a visiting fellow at Berkeley, Calhoun, and Morse Colleges.

Certain misconceptions drift around this Yale campus like the woof in the long hair of the various cultists. These misconceptions, on a superficial examination, have to do with the relationship of the black student to the white student; and on a larger scale, with the relationship of the two races in the larger society of which Yale is, ironically, a very unreal sample.

But in the deeper realities of racism in this country, these misconceptions become hypocrisy and racial deceitfulness-perhaps cultural deceit, which is about the most heinous crime a man can rationalize himself into committing, by the process called intellectualism.

It is now obvious even to those who are gripped in this cultural deceit that America is in a state of tension, trembling like a bowl of psychotic jello. It has put itself into this position of nervous trembling tension, in the first place, through this deceit. But this deceit has a certain historical basis. The relevant fact is, that the white man is concerned about violence this summer. In blunt terms, he is concerned about the possibility of his being killed in what Esquire magazine, very emotionally, called The Second Civil War. The black man, on the other hand, is more correctly, deeply concerned. His concern is for his life, whether or not he is something called, by the inventiveness of journalism, a Black Nationalist, a Black Racist, or a Black Muslim; and his concern at this time of tension is based on no more startling an historical fact than that, even in times of less expressed tension, his life, his creative ambition in terms of achievement within the greater society, has always been dominated by the possibility of his being killed by whites, simply because he is black.

I do not think, however, that the concern of the white man in this context is anything more than an awareness. His concern cannot be, and is not, from his own historical relationships with black people, of a nature that can be translated into any creative action to avert this impending violence-violence both to himself and to the black man. I think that the white man today in this country, because of his stance of silent immorality, has been put in a position of interpreting this concern (if he has thought about it at all in these terms) to mean his concern for white lives.

And also, his concern for white property.

He will arm himself against blacks; blacks in general, blacks whose very presence and existence, he is convinced, threaten him and are even bent upon the destruction of him as a man. This white choice, this arming against the Second Civil War, has in effect stated that the possibility of understanding, of communication between the two races, of facing the reality that this arming is no solution, is really the signal that the black man must once again clothe himself in his historical shell of defensiveness.

One gets the impression that the two

forces in the society, the civil and the private attitudes to arming and therefore to violence, must react one upon the other in such a way as-to create a chain reaction of indiscriminate slaughter of blacks and whites. And the sad possibility exists that when white citizens arm themselves, their act presupposes a certain incapability on the part of the Jaw agencies to do the job of killing the identified enemy cleanly and efficiently. The terrible implication exists that the white citizens have private scores to settle which may not arise out of the declared state of rebellion or revolution or riot. There is a very real possibility that this private arming might result in a mad thirst for black blood, the racial implication of the term notwithstanding.

The concern of the black man is a real one. He has found himself in a position that may be called revolutionary, revolutionary not so much in a political sense as in a cultural sense. His historical tradition in this country has taught him that the white man could conceivably choose one of his race for lynching, for murder, for rape; the society has reacted against him in such a way as to rob him of all his freedoms, or of a considerable and significant amount of the freedoms that exist by the simple fact of birth. Today, this black man is in a position in which he sees that the society has in fact, through its acts, chosen his entire race, or a considerable portion of it, tot elimination. Police forces have bought equipment which traditionally one expects to find only on the battlefield of an enemy of the United States, not in a black community. The publication, whether intended or not, of descriptions of the arsenals located strategically throughout the country, the hardened attitude of white egotism and the very existence of these arsenals states that the justification of their use almost coincides with the apparent sanguinity of their purpose. This is the revolutionary position confronting the black man in this country.

You get the terrifying feeling in the guts that every white man you meet on the street is praying for the summer to come, like Americans wish for Christmas and Santa Claus. You get the uneasy premonition that something has been planned: wait until summer, this Negro problem will be solved once and for all. But although this is the wrong medicine for an ailment which was wrongly diagnosed to begin with, no one seems too worried about it.

It has gone beyond that.

I have not yet considered the causes for this intensified white attitude reflected in civic and private arming. They are simple: the attitude arose out of the various white reactions to the rebellions, to "crime in our streets," to "lawlessness," to "civil violence," which are really euphemisms for "niggers acting up and getting out of hand." But these rebellions were caused by something else: something cultural, something historical, something that exists in the very foundations of this society. The arming and its motivation state bluntly that the causes of those rebellions (not only of last summer but the perennial question of what to do with the niggers in the woodpile of society) have now become irreconcilable, absolutely insoluble. They state bluntly that the possibility of any creative relationship between blacks and whites is not only nonexistent, but undesirable; and in this way, the act of arming and the apparent desirability of implementing the usefulness of those arms shows that white America is reverting back to the psychology of the

12 I The New Journal I March 17, 1968

strong cowboy of the legendary West.

Bang! Bang! Bang! Problem solved. You blow the morality away in the smoke of the gun and the guilt and the conscience disappear with the smoke.

It should be evident by now that I have laid most, if not all, of the liability upon the white American. This is not necessarily a racist point of view. It is more the point of view derived from a realistic appraisal of the real power of this white American - a power which is undeniably great enough to end effective racism, a power which by its execution in racial considerations ignores morality and conscience. But this acknowledgment of the white man's power does not imply that the moral aspect of racism, though its end might be achievable, would disappear with the actual, physical end of racism. And this would be my refutation of the opinion of Dick Gregory, the comedian, who told a Yale audience recently that while he was disposed to call America the most racist country in the world, this definition did not exclude the black American. This opinion of Mr. Gregorys undoubtedly shows a comedian's predisposition for making people laugh, if at the expense of keeping them instructed. For if Mr. Gregory were concerned more with instruction than with comedy, then he would have understood that historically the power to do good and the power to do evil, like the corresponding freedom to be good and to be evil, has always been in the hands of the white man; and this power bas been used.

To substantiate this position, let me go back to what can be seen in the white pri-

vate assumption of arms. It is egotism.

It is self-protectionism. It is alienation. It

also is a statement that those agencies elected to provide protection for the citizen (black and white) within the law have broken down or are assumed to have broken down, that those agencies are too impartial (depending upon one's degree of racist attitude) to the black citizens. The white citizen with arms ceases to regard the black citizen as a citizen at all, or as a human being, and regards him more as a threatening force outside of himself. As a statistic. As a minority, defined only by reports of commissions. Some social psychologists have defined this society as a song-singing society. I think it is a commission-oriented society.

One gets the feeling also that this white arming is to serve not only the preservation of white lives but also the maintenance ,of white property. Recognizing the sovereignty imputed to property by the white man, and recognizing the white man's refusal to acknowledge his associative humanity to blacks (both innocent and guilty in a riot-violence context) when they are locked in a so-called riot-this recognition clearly exposes the sliding scale of cultural and moral values, the schizophrenic, in American civilization.

But the white man cannot stop at arming himself and then wait behind the darkened blinds of h is conscience for the black revolutionary or the black rioter to show his face of anger and dissent.

Similarly, the white man cannot justifiably correlate his inaction, his nonparticipation in killing blacks, or his lib-

eralism with his financial contribution to so-called civil rights movements and organizations or his physical participation in them. In the present context of revolution, the white man cannot sit down in front of his television set, view the violence and conclude that he is morally righteous and racialistically better than the killing cop, merely because of this physical non-participation. He cannot in any way achieve this moral absolution, even if in the process of witnessing the "detached" television violence he does shed a few tears. It is beyond tears and moral values. For him to rationalize this way is to pretend he can live outside the reality of his social responsibility, which has now become a responsibility because of factors that are out of his control.

Basically, this action of non-action cannot be a realistic tactic, because in this context of violence in the revolution, the definitions of white liberal, white activist, white racist, white cop, on the one hand, and black nationalist, Negro, nigger, Black Muslim, Uncle Tom, on the other, will cease to have value, will cease to have relevance. The values which both racial groups think they can derive from the violence, from the threat of violence and from the communication or political relationship erupting out of the conclusion of the violence-these values are going to be the real values. Nobody should be too concerned, in this context, if he is to be killed, although he does not subscribe to or maintain either antagonistic attitude or ideology in the revolution. The revolution is going to create, out of itself, the

M.gical Mystery Tour $4.57 Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band $4.57 Revolver $3.57 Rubber Soul $3.57 The Beatles Yesterday and Today $3.57 The Early Beatles $3.57 Beatles VI $3.57 Hard Day's Night $3.57 Help $4.57

Remember to visit the Co-op for all the really new records in classical, folk, jazz, pop; all at low discount prices and P.R. too.

side that people are going to have to take.

It will resolve itself into a case of having

your allegiance chosen for you, by the simple logic of your color.

The perspective of reality tells us, or ought to tell us, two things. First, violence is American. And white. Second, in the state of tension and jello-sensibilities, it may be, perhaps, perhaps, desirable that the violence express itself in a contr olled way--on both sides-in order that the two peoples can r ecommence some more creative functioning in their society. In this sense, the violence may be desirable.

If it can be projected that this essential violence will result in a plateau of relationships which are more creative (a redefinition of the morality of the two races; a miraculous comprehension of the futility of this kind of violence in this kind of society), then the violence ceases to be merely essential and becomes desirable.

Violence in itself is undesirable. As a creative artist I have to recognize the negativism of violence. But my creative imagination does not blind me to the greater realities which state, especially loudly today, that whether or not I am involved in something called art-for-art's¡ sake, I am a member of a society which today threatens the elimination of my race. And I am aware of the greater values deriving from those greater realities.

There is nothing you or I can do to avert this violence, in its political considerations. But there is something you and I may do-perhaps will have to do-once the violence erupts.

0

131 The New Journal I March 17, 1968

continued from page 6 lows a similar pattern. He believes the best writing courses could be courses in Milton or the French novel, and he constructs his own class discussions around the analysis of a novel or short story. How is the story made? he asks. How does it express its .aning? How does it fulfill itself?

Warren's current critical emphasis goes far beyond the concentration on the text advocated by his earlier textbooks. The ltOry comes out of a man's "life context" and "life needs." His "life context" is the whole period he wrote in: the social context, the conflict of values in his world. But there is also an individual with "life needs" behind the story. "Every man has his own place to scratch, his own little scab to pick," Warren says. How does the author lranslate his preoccupations and life conat into a story that has meaning and relevance for others?

The standard authors Warren talks about in class are examples of men grappling with the problems of writing. WarJeD's sense of history again dictates his leDSe of what is most important for a writer to learn. Young writers especially IDd it hard to understand their relation to lbeir own times. Literature courses teach bow other writers faced this problem.

Dreiser dealt with the newspaper, "the bot stuff." Hawthorne went back into history. The student's sense of his own role can be sharpened by these examples.

Warren and his writing students thrash out individual story problems in frequent conferences. "I don't think what is done in a conference could be duplicated in a class of fifteen people. It's too public. It would he inhibiting to me and to the students."

Ia writing conferences Warren encourages &lhldent to explain how the story came out ef his deeper self, not as a dire, dark auto11iosraphical secret, but as the expression of a relation between himself and his life.

One student compared the atmosphere ef the conference to a profound converlltion on someone's front porch. Although Warren bas made no marks on a story except the time of the appointment, be reJDembers its details and methods almost CIOmpletely. "He gives a general opinion of -and then leans back and asks you what J'UUr theme is, what are you trying to say.

After you tell him, he points out which ll:enes work toward that end and which don't. He suggests alternatives and tells JOU to let your mind play over the story, letting new associations build up."

Both Warren and his students find this Rperience rewarding. The students sense a Wisdom and a deep interest in their problems and work. Warren himself says that tallting personally to students is one of the -.est important things be does. It is his CIDiy way of continually knowing their lraeration. "Otherwise, I'd be going into &friend's living room and have his son or ll'andson say 'Good evening, sir' and then 10 out. If you have any curiosity about the lbape of the world, teaching is one way of seeing something that's happening."

'--headed, frukled, lean, a little #ooped, IIVIIo yearned to be understood, to malce communication, !'o touch the ironic immensity of afterIIOon with meaning, J'o lind and know my name and make it

,.,d,

fl._

..._one wild word:

l.iaht, liaht, light!

~lid all identity tottered to that remorseleu vibration. •

Counter-demonstrators The big American flag at the head of the demonstration returned to the Green about the time the last of the marchers set out for the Induction Center. This meant that about six thousand people who had turned out on the afternoon of March 3, 1968, were strung out through the center of New Haven, and the "counterdemonstrators had some time to kill.

The professional counter-demonstrators knew this was their hour. The Bridgeport Anti-Communist Society's mobile graveyard circled the Green a couple of times on the back of an enormous truck, with its row of markers commemorating the millions and hundreds of millions from Russia to Cuba who have died by being forced to live under communism. A sevenyear-old struggled manfully under a sign condemning red professors and pink students. A leaflet passer was training a man in his late twenties in the minimax of counter-demonstrating. It was business as usual.

But even professionals are human. The man who drives the graveyard exploded at the Yale graduate student who led the marchers, carrying the flag. "Hey you," he began, "you the sonovabitch pushed me in the water at Westport ...."An elderly patriot with Kresge's Stars and Stripes threatened to burn anyone who wanted to burn the flag. It must be admitted though, he thought most of the peaceniks were sincere, and did not object to their use of the flag ("... it's a law that you gotta fly the American flag at demonstrations, to show that you love your country ...").

For every professional there are half a dozen concerned citizens, and a more significant number of just plain folks.

They never meant to be counter-demonstrators. They just happened to come from Madison to shop in the Mall, or from North Haven to take their girlfriend to a movie when they discovered the march.

Nobody ever pays attention to professionals except other professionals. It's hard not to pay attention to a concerned citizen, however. You know the general line: "You ain't worth the air you breathe and it's fre~get a bath, you filthy scum -if you don't Jove your country, go to Russia," and so forth. Do not underestimate the concerned citizen. He may have a son or a brother or a boyfriend who is getting shot at, which is after all the kind of thing that makes one concerned.

He is neither pink-brained nor yellowbellied. He's a taxpayer too. He knows that America has never lost a war.

Besides, if the demonstrators are not interesting enough to those who passed by, there are always the Slum Lords, or the Shakers, or the Comrnancheros. They pass for motorcycle hoods, complete with denim uniforms and Hell's Angels faces, until you realize that there aren't any motorcycles to be seen, except for the massive police Harleys. They have come to taunt the cops and to join in the traffic jam along the march route in their blue Pontiacs and, finally, to exercise their right of free speech by singing "The Battle Hymn of the Republic."

And they do attract the younger element. Your common garden variety high school student, who never seems to have much to do anyhow, must pass his Saturday afternoon one way or another, and motorcycle gangs are entertaining. As the speeches started on the other side of the rope, wandering twos and threes coalesced

to the tune of "Glory, glory, hallelujah, the truth goes marching on."

A handful broke from the crowd to see whether they could cop the peaceniks' flag. "Hey, hey, what do you say, let's support the USA," they chanted.

Meanwhile, Arthur Miller earnestly declared that war is not an athletic contest.

Two dozen eggs were thrown into the knot of high school students, but it didn't matter, since the eggs were still in their cartons. Before long, the enormous seagull which had spent the afternoon on top of the WELl flagpole across the street headed for sea, and the crowd of high school students dissolved like salt in water.

An elderly Negro policeman turned to his fellow officer and said, "OK, Mouseketeers, let's take it easy." In a minute, William Sloane Coffin would speak. And General Westmoreland wants another 206,000 troops next year.

James Thorpe Graduate student, English.

Rhinoceros If a rhinoceros were to run over a housewife's cat, you would probably think that the cat had no business being in the rhino's cage. If a logician were to tell an old gentleman that since a cat has four paws, and his dog also has four paws, his dog is therefore a cat, you would know that you were at an lonesco play. And if the old gentleman were of the beatnik type, if the housewife were to wear a miniskirt, you would realize that you were watching the Dramat production of Rhinoceros. Let me add right away that I love cats (when they are not dogs), miniskirts (when they are not worn by bousewives) and Dramat productions (when they don't transform a logician into a Dr. Leary, who happens to be something like his opposite).

Said Ionesco: "The bad qualities of a play are due to the fact that they are not in conformity with the play itself." Likewise: the bad qualities of the directing of a play are due to the fact that they are not in conformity with the play itself.

That, I think, was the problem with the Dramat's production.

Let me quote Ionesco once more: "I have been very much struck by what one might call the current of opinion, by its rapid evolution, its power of contagion, which is that of a real epidemic. People allow themselves suddenly to be invaded by a new religion, a doctrine, a fanaticism. ... When people no longer share your opinions, when you can no longer make yourself understood by them, you have the impression of being confronted with monsters-rhinos, for example. They have that mixture of candor and ferocity.

They would kill you in the best of conscience." Around 1938, in Bucharest, lonesco had witnessed many of his relatives and friends being contaminated by the ideology of the epoch, Nazism. The play, whose initial purpose was to describe, in an almost clinical fashion, this process of Nazification, had its world premiere on the stage at Dusseldorf in November, 1959, and the way it was received by the German audience proved they made no mistake about its meaning.

For the record, it must be said that Ionesco intensely disliked the way the play was produced on Broadway. "[In America] everybody agreed that the play was funny .

But it is not funny; although it is a farce, it is above all a tragedy. A man watches powerlessly the transformation of his

world; he does not know any more whether he is right or not. He struggles hopelessly. He is the last one of his kind. He is lost. People find that funny!"

The structure of the work is classic: a simple idea (under certain circumstances, men become rhinos), a regular progression (one anonymous person becomes a rhino, then an office colleague, then Beranger's best friend, then everybody except Beranger and his girl friend, then everybody except Beranger), finally a denouement (the paradoxical-and dubious-victory of Beranger). In other words, a trap which progressively closes upon its victim. But in this production, the trap did not work perfectly. One of the reasons was that the staging was not in accord with lonesco's play. This we can see, for instance, in the sets of the first two acts.

In the first scene, brown and sad walls, moderate light; in the second scene. a brightly lighted and very modern advertising office in Madison Avenue, where people seem to have a lot of fun perfecting the "bad breath" television ad. Just the opposite of the directions given by Ionesco and, more important, just the opposite of the spirit of the play. Details? Maybe, but "the bad qualities of the directing ..."

Again, in the first scene of the second act, Beranger, who has come to John's room to apologize for an argument, watches as John turns into a rhino. The striptease and bellydancing of Jon Marks as John were very impressive and in perfect accord with the spirit of the play, the moral striptease being cleverly paralleled by the physical. Then Beranger returns to his own room, which is soon besieged by a herd of rhinos, increasing in number minute by minute, roaring louder and louder, from the streets, on the telephone, on the television. And here I have no fewer than two quarrels with the Dramat production.

First, the decorator has created for John a beautifully furnished, sophisticated room, and for Beraoger a very shabby one. Now nothing is further from the spirit of the play than the implication of any social difference between John and Beranger: both work eight hours a day in the same sort of office, if not in the same one. Ionesco, whose stage directions are never to be overlooked, is very clear on this point. "Beranger's room looks surprisingly like John's." Why? To emphasize the basic fact that Beranger could be¡John, and John, Beranger. No matter what the dtfferences are between the two friends, they are less important than their similarities. Beranger finds it difficult to summon the energy to meet each new day; be is "not used to himself," and nevertheless he is the one who remains a man. It so happens that be is immune to the "rhinoceritis." John is happy with himself, be feels "light, light," and yet he is the one who chooses to become a rhino. The opposite couJd just as well have been true.

My second disagreement with the Dramat production appears to me the more important. The whole last scene seems pointless (I am almost sure of that) and boring (I am quite sure of that). It is partly Ionesco's fault. Beranger's successive confrontations with his colleague Dudard, with his girl friend Daisy, and finally with himself are a little bit mechanical, almost too well planned. It is partly the fault of the actor playing Dudard, who seemed to have some difficulty in bringing life to the character, not one of the best created by Ionesco anyway. But it is

141 The New Journal I March 17, 1968

mainly, I believe, a problem with the direction. In fact, the solution had been outlined by Ionesco himself: "On the back wall, stylized rhinos' heads appear and disappear, more and more numerous up to the end of the act. These heads must become more and more beautiful in spite of their monstrosity." I do not pretend that the heads have to be on the back wall or even that they sho uld really look like rhinos' heads. Any cinematographicor psychedelic--device would be welcome, but the absolute imperatives are constant motion, constant increase in number (the notion of proliferation is dear to Ionesco's heart) and constant increase in beauty.

True, we had once in a while a happy bunch of characters with rhino's noses dancing around the stage, but this is hardly an adequate solution. The rhinos must be present all the time and must become mor.e and more beautiful.

T his is basic: their growing beauty should condition the audience, or at least prepare it, to the sudden about-face of Beranger, succumbing to the temptation of the "rhinoceritis" and shouting, "I am not handsome! Th.ey are handsome!"

Moreover, lonesco took the trouble to indicate a second device which, added to the first one, should put the audience in a sort of mesmerized mood, much the same as Beranger's own emotional state. He looks at some of his friends' portraits, and then puts them on the wall. "The ugliness of these portraits contrasts with the rhinos' heads, which have become very beautiful." Unfortunately that device also was overlooked in the Dramat production, and

the result is to put on the poor words uttered by Beranger a burden that they were not intended to bear.

There is one last problem. The whole play has been transported from France to the United States, 1968, in order to focus the meaning of the play on current American problems. The majority of the slides stressed the bad conscience of Am er ica toward her minority groups and toward the violent intervention in Vietnam, and seems to disapprove. This is at least the impression that I gather ed. On the other hand, I was told that what the director had in mind was exactly the opposite, to castigate the extremists, whether on the right or on the left. If this is so, he failed to convey that impression, at least to me; and in any case, it is at best risky to assume common features between the "New Left" (even the "New Right") and Nazi ideology. Furthermore, even assuming it to be proved, the parallel does not seem to work. Beranger's ultimate loneliness stems from a totalitarian condition. All or almost all his fellow citizens are overcome by the "rhinoceritis," and especially the bourgeois, the pressure groups, the gens en place, the government. It seems to me that in 1968 in America, Beranger would have, on the contrary, no problem at all.

I have been critical enough of this Dramat production to have the right to say (and a chance to be believed) that such an ambitious production is a most exciting and most welcome contribution to a more alive American theater. J on Marks in the role of John was without contest

the best rhino around. Clay Howe was an excellent Beranger, soft-spoken, marvelously helpless and once in a while genuinely moving. As for the director, Leland Starnes, he has an obvious sense of theatrics, an ability to manage actors, and a lot of imagination. Indeed, why not imagine Ionesco's play speaking American? But here the accent is too heavy, the intonation overstressed.

Ray Ortali Assistant Professor of French .

Letters To the Editors: T he road to nation-building is not smooth for a country like Nigeria. With 56 million people in an area about the size of Texas and Okll}homa, Nigeria has within its boundaries 250 or more ethnic groups speaking different languages. Yet never before in the history of modern Africa have so many people been ruled by so few whom they themselves elected.

Political parties in Nigeria grew along ethnic and regional lines, mostly to protect each group's or region's interest- and so contributed to suspicion among ethnic groups. Each party is held together by traditional, familial, ethnic and religious loyalties. The l bos, the most educated and vocal group in pre-independent Nigeria, came to dominate the NCNC (National Council of Nigerian Convention), which became merely the mouthpiece of an lbo ethnic and cultural or&anization, the l bo Union.

R elax.

When you're out of the office, let VI P h andle all your calls For details: 787- 4104 VIP answering service

I n the fall of 1965, an election was held in Western Nigeria. Charges arose that the election was rigged. Several young Army officers used the confused situation as an excuse to carry out a coup, which most people considered a relief from corrupt politicians. It wasn't until the dust had settled that the coup's true nature was discovered. Among its victims were many prominent politicians-none of whom was an Ibo. Several top-ranking Army officers from the North were cut down. The country, as a result of the coup, passed into the bands of an lbo, General Aguiyi Ironsi, who set up comm issions to study and recommend strict structural changes in the civil service and the Constitution. But in May, 1967, before these commisions were able to report, Ironsi had decreed a unitary system of government and ordered the unification of the civil service.

In the North, civil servants demonstrated peacefully against the steps taken by the Ironsi regime. At this time, the Ibos resident in the North showed a gross lack of decency in greeting the deaths of the Northern leaders with pomp and show.

It is worth noting, moreover, that not one of the l bo politicians lost an ounce of blood; and yet the coup supposedly was national. Thus, the demonstrating civil servants were joined by all sorts of people, at which point the demonstrations became so violent that many I bos lost their lives.

The story of the regrettable but provoked killing has been told and retold.

T hrough the maze of facts and fiction, one fact stands out clearly. For any group of

151 The New Journal I March 17, 1968

people to function rationally and maintain their stability under the prevailing circumstances, effective leadership was aecessary. But effective leadership among lbe civilians was lacking. And in the Army, the senior officers were shot.

Therefore, when civil rampage started it was difficult to contain.

The July, 1967, countercoup and the subsequent rise of Major General Yakubu Gowon alienated Lieutenant Colonel Odumegwu Ojukwu, an lbo, then Governor of the East. Frantic attempts were made to salvage what remained of the nation while Ojukwu was seriously arming himself, preparing for a showdown with lbe Federal Government. A plane carryiDa arms to Ojukwu crash-landed in the Republic of Cameroon, creating an inlemational incident and alerting the Fednl Government to Ojukwu's intentions.

Ojukwu proclaimed Eastern Nigeria independent of Nigeria and christened it "Biafra." This was tragic. It was in the interest of all Nigerians that the country lhould remain united. On July 6 last year, Gowon ordered a "police action" against lbe rebels. The civil war had begun.

The Biafran propaganda machine went lo work. It still includes a big public relations outfit in New York and CongressIliaD Joseph Y. Resnick (Democrat of New York) in Washington. Nigeria bad eone communist, they said. What bad ICtually happened was this: Nigeria's plight was fully appreciated in Moscow, and Nigeria gained the right to buy a conlianment of arms on a cash-and-carry ~s. It could not stoop to the level of lbe rebels by purchasing arms in the black IDarket. This move by Nigeria was seriOUSly "regretted" by the American State Department.

American intellectuals who rallied to lbe Ibo cause have confused the issues.

1be issue is not one of "pogrom" or "aenocide," which Americans themselves bave admitted cannot be blamed on any Olle group; rather, the issue is one of Ibo leeession from Nigeria. It is important lo note that the lbos form only nine of the fourteen million people in the still11om "Republic of Biafra." No mention lias been made of the minority groups who CICalpy the eastern and southern flank of Biaha, and who make up the other five llillion. These people are Nigerians and 'fould like to remain so. About sixty per cent of Nigerian oil is produced in this lllinority section of Biafra, whereas only lve per cent is produced in Iboland proper.

1'be minority peoples, therefore, saw in lbe creation of Biafra an attempt by the line million "enterprising" lbos to domillate and exploit their oil resources.

The press, especially the New York filnes, bas variously described the lbos • the most advanced, hardworking, liesternized and educated people in Mtaeria. And as Lazarus Ekwueme, a Yale Nuate student from Biafra, has proudly ltated, "We are the Jews of Africa. We -ve so much in common with the Jews: llnbition, love of education, pride and llersecution." But how long ago did Western education come to the lbo people?

Six hundred years ago, Islamic religion, education and culture were established in llcllt of Hausaland. The Arabic script was llled in keeping records of court proceed!~~~ and in day-to-day communications ~een people. Western mission~ies ~ed on the coast in the early rune~ century. It was only then that the ~among other Southern Nigerian lloptes, took to Western education and

excelled. It was not easy for most people of the Northern States to make a swift change from Arabic to Western education.

This explains the lag which partly contributed to their being looked down upon by the average lbo. Education among the lbos has been valued too highly. According to them no one has the ability to lead unless he bas a college degree, and yet Balawa, the prime minister of Nigeria (1957-(!6) who bad no college degree, ran the most delicate coalition government modern Africa has ever known.

It is my belief that the mutual suspicion which existed among Nigerian people previous to the civil war can now be eliminated by the division of the country into twelve regional States. The degree of mutual responsiveness among the people has hit its lowest point, but this can be raised to a significant level if leaders of good will can reassure the people at large of their determination to sacrifice their selfish interests, eschew the lust for .power and give up their inordinate ambition for the good of the whole country. Our experiment will benefit Africa immeasurably. African unity will be an unrealizable dream without a united Nigeria. It is our duty, then, to close ranks. We must, in the African tradition, keep a family quarrel within bounds, for we have enemies in the form of disease, poverty and, above all, outsiders.

Haroun-ai-Rashid Adamu (The author of the preceding letter is a student in Yale College whose home is in Nigeria. He is responding to the article "Beleaguered Biafra and the threo.t of genocide" in the January 21, 1968, issue of The New Journal.)

To the Editors: Reading some of the reactions to Robert Crichton's review (reprinted in this magazine February 14 by a group of Yale faculty members, including myself) of Frank Harvey's Air War: Vietnam raises that awful question that must occur to us in our darker moments: does America deserve to escape the nuclear war toward which current Administration policies are leading on? On February 15, Mr. Lawrence Shaw, with equal measures of logic and compassion, protested that the atrocities resulting from indiscriminate bombing in Vietnam, as recorded by Mr. Harvey and again by Mt. Crichton, were "important, but peripheral": hence we should ignore them. On March 3, Mr. Fred Reames unjustifiably accused us of never having read Mr. Harvey's book in its entirety (most of us, including myself, have read every ghastly word of it), and then suggests that Mr. Crichton's review can be ignored because it was printed in the New York Review of Books, whose editorial policy is "slightly to the right of Ramparts'."

Anything printed in the New York Review, therefore, must be false; Mr. Harvey's book itself, on the other hand, commissioned by the Air Force, is presumably true. Mr. Reames says nothing of the fact that Mr. Crichton's review consists chiefly of quotations from, and direct references to, Mr. Harvey's book. On his own terms, Mr. Reames's arbitrary truefalse categories do not work; and the fuzziness of thought which they show may be a typical accompaniment of the moral cowardice which keeps so many of us from taking a humane an~ honest look ~ w~at Americans are at th1s moment domg m Vietnam.

Adam Parry Associate Professor of Classics

Classifieds 20¢perword Ads may be mailed or telephoned to: William M. Burstein 544 Yale Station New Haven, Conn. 06520 776-2551 Monday- Thursday 7-8 p.m.

WANTED: ONE COFFEEHOUSE for the young people of the Hill. Help the New Haven Young Friends (Quakers) help the H.P.A. build the ~'Afro Lounge". Send donations to Young Friends at 1940 Yale Station or call 777- 1643 for information.

SUMMER SUBLET-Greenwood St., near medical center, short busride to Old Campus.

3 ¥.!clean, airy rooms on 3rd floor. Utilities.

No roaches. Unbeatable at price: $60/ month or best offer. Call 777-2230.

APT. AVAILABLE IN JUNE (leaving country) 3 rms & bath, $85/mo-utilities paid. 3 min walk to Sterling Library. On-street parking. Take it for summer or longer. Unfurnished, but will sell my furniture very cheaply.865-0312 BIKE FOR SALE-German Racing Bike, multi-geared, RIXE, export delux. One pedal substandard, 7 needs other work also. Take it away for $10. 624-3783

3 Yale seniors seeking house to rent in New Haven area next September to June. Anywhere within 30 minutes or so of Yale campus. Call 777-8364 or write 704 Yale Station.

SUMMER SUBLET two blocks from campus. Option to keep. Reasonable. 8_65-3712 Nu? So you need some furniture? You should only stop by the Hadassah Thrift Shop, 1199 Trumbull College. Such nice things you'll find at Macy's?

FORSALE-1964 BERTRAM 25, twin 110 bp Volvo I/ O's, 2 berths, galley, fully equipped, call 777- 1133.

Two open, loving girls wanted. Contact Wayne, Tom, 455 Yale Station. 776-2298 ALASKA. Anyone interested in a ride (or a rider) to Anchorage this summer? Will leave New Haven on or about June 1 and return in

early September. Share driving and expenses.

Call 776-5591.

Need a ride to the Pacific Northwest at the end of May? I have room. Call Jerry at 772-0461.

Annaninha: "Eu quisera dar-te, ademais dos beijos e das rosas, tudo o que nunca foi dado por urn homem Asua Amada, eu que tao pouco te posso oferecer." Mike

-------------------

To date, 349 Yale students and faculty members have signed the draft refusal pledge. If you wish to add your name or to obtain information, write Yale Draft Refusal Committee, 2053 Yale Station.

DEFEND COFFIN. Send legal funds for the Boston Five to the Civil Liberties Legal Defense Fund, 98 Prescott St., Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138.

PORTRAITS-fantastic. Will haggle. Barry Sigel, 7th floor Art and Architecture building.

FOR SALE-Used Caloric Gas Stove 42".

Good Condition. Call239-9308 after 5 P.M.

New Haven's Leading 'Art' Theatres

THE LINCOLN 6th WEEK ALL

~r~j ~'~g~~~.

GRADUATE

THE CROWN Nominated for Academy Award As Best foreign film Claude t.louch's

LIVE FOR LIFE with Yves Montand, Candice Bergen and Anne Girardot

NOMINATED FOR 7 ACADEMY AWARDS

Next- Albert Cemua' 'The Stranger'

THE LARGEST LP SELECTION IN CONNECTICUT

DISCOUNTS ON ALL RECORDS NEW HAYEN'S ONLY COMPLETE RECORD SHOP COME IN AND BROWSE FREELY 33 BROADWAY, NEW HAVEN, CONN., 777-6271

Advertisement

Of all society's laws, the command to kill is perhaps the one law which a moral man should presume always to disobey--except when he has compelling reasons for obeying.

Ignorance, doubt, the lack of specific opposition are never convincing reasons for following the call to war. Fear of imprisonment or of the law are neither moral reasons for killing, nor rational reasons for dying. And even for the most deeply committed democrat, majority approval of a war is not sufficient cause to fight in it. To fight, to kill, to die, we would need more than a justification of this war. We would need conviction-strong conviction that what we do is just and right, that the destruction of Vietnam is the only way to save something as close and as dear to us as the life . we might lose. To fight without this conviction is to kill wantonly, to sacrifice needlessly.

The burden of proof-the necessity to convince us with real and irrefutable argumentsrests with the government which would send us off to kill and to die, and not with those of us who would refuse to serve. The law tells us co¡participate in war unless we are forbidden by conscience and religion to do so. We believe that war is grave enough and horrible enough that people should oppose it, unless compelled by conscience and survival to support it.

WE ARE NOT CONVINCED. We will not serve this brutal war. We will not cease in our efforts to stop it.

We are told that draft resistance is an intensely personal decision-between a man and his conscience-and that civil disobedience should not be undertaken for political ends. Yet our "personal" decision is a matter of life or de~th for someone whose conscience is not consulted; submission to induction is every bit as political as resistance. We are told that our conscience cannot be exercised through a group; we must act individually, one by one. Yet in our name the government uses an army, and destroys a nation. We are told that two wrongs do not make a right, that while the government may be wrong, we should not use illegal means to oppose it. Yet we do little harm, much less than the harm we would do by remaining silent. Can this be compared to the systematic destruction meted out by U.S. troops and bombers? Finally, we are told that were everyone to follow his conscience instead of the law, it would lead to anarchy. Yet Hider came to power legally, and Eichmann carried out his duties under the law. Has not history shown us a far greater danger when everyone follows the dictates of government without regard to his conscience?

Patriotism has often required that men die for their country. It is in the spirit of patriotism that many 'of us are prepared to go tO jail for our country. To oppose this war in silence is a crime. And while the government may put us in jail, it cannot make us criminals. We will meet at I :oo p.m. on the NEW HAVEN G RBEN. Please be there to support us; please join with us, in the name of America, to end this war.

Many are prepared to resist, but only with some assurance that their action will be part of a politically effective movement. To break

esistance

The war has reached such magnitude that it is no longer enough to withdraw our support.

We must actively work to prevent our brothers, American and Vietnamese, from killing and dying senselessly. It is a conscientious act to refuse to commit an atrocity; it is also a conscientious act to exercise political power to stop an atrocity. On April 3, young men throughout the nation will return their draft cards to the government, and write an explanatory letter to theit boards. Those not subject to the draft will stand with them in solidarity. By this act, they will serve notice on the American people that those asked to fight this war do not support it. They will demonstrate to the government, in a dignified and non-violent manner, that to continue in its violence, it will have to imprison many of the nation's privileged youth. And because virtually all next year's draftees will come from this stratum, they can withhold from the government the power it needs to increase its madness.

down the sense of isolation, to reduce the danger of acting in vain, The Resistance offers a pledge: one may agree to resist on the condition that the number of pledges.nationwide reaches a specified total (the pledge is graduated from I,ooo to I 5,000). If you are ready to resist now, along with the 2,000 others who have already done so, we urge that you sign the unconditional pledge so that we may include you in the nationwide tally. To obtain a pledge form, or to discuss any other aspects of The Resistance, please call Doug Rosenberg at 865-274I, or Rick Bogel at 562-8388.

Contributions are also welcomed, made out to The Resistance, and sent to 68 Norton St. Apt. 44, New Haven.

A Rally for Peace and Support Meet on the New Haven Green, Wednesday April3, 1 p.m.