Volume 10 - Issue 2

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Volume ten, number two I March 19, 1977

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The Trouble with Law School

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The New Journal

- TheNewjournal Volume ten, number two

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Corby S. Kummer Editor-in- Chief Jennifer Allen Executive Editor Daphne Cbu Armand LeGardeur Designers Beatrice H. Mitchell Publisher Editorial Staff: Lisa Barlow, Aaron Betsky, Owen Brown, Bob Drain, Therese Feng, Webb Keane, Sarah Kreimer, Peter McCormack, Larry Ma, Lori Marian, Mariko Masuoka, Peter Pokalsky, Ann Pollack, Dennis Shasha, Alex Stille, Lucy Chase Williams

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Comment recently received/rom a History T A on a paper: Junk, junk, junk.

Platitudinous, shoddy, overwhelmingly thought-less.

If I didn't know you could write sense, I'd be scared for you. Since I know from your midterm that you're capable of putting one word after the next in logical sequence, I'm annoyed and insulted. If your pomposity hadn't been so funny, I'd be angry, too.

Just what sort of b.s. is this essay?

What in God's name are you trying to say? As I see it, you've given me a two-bit travelogue, a fourth-rate historical sketch, and an ostentatious kiss on T. S. Eliot's collected works.

For shame! I'm supposed to read this?

There is so little here, I don't know where to tell you to begin- except from scratch. You have no sources, no thesis, not even a topic. I would flunk this essay and never lose a moment's sleep over it.

Do it again. And do it right.

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Capote said, "I always thought there was a difference between writing and typing." Now I know you can type.

Next time try to demonstrate that you can write.

Tramplin g gay rights

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contents

..... shoving me in the shoulder. He grabbed at my shirt, ripped the triangle off my coat, and pushed me aside as the huge crowd surged past us to cram against the two doors into the auditorium. I knocked into the girl who was selling tickets. As she put up a hand to steady me, I beard a final derisive shout: "Have fun with your girlfriend!"

When I described what had hap-

next day, they replied, "Can you t~~~;i~~~~~~~~~- imagine pened to some (straight) friends the that kind of thing happening

A friend of mine on the Yale Film Society staff and I were cordoning off people who had just arrived to purchase tickets, so that those who had arrived early could enter the auditorium first. This procedure is Business Staff: Caroline T. Mitchell, hazardous to everyone's health, but is Stephen D. Warner, Susan E. Amron From the comments on a piece in a the only fair way to deal with an journalism seminar: over-flow crowd. I was wearing the pink triangle I had been given at the Credits: Cover, Juliet Ching rm puzzled. I am not just puzzled Rally for Gay Rights, pinned to the pages 2 & 14, Yale Center for British that you wrote this thing in the ftrst lapel of the black tailcoat I had Art place, I am puzzled that you resurrented to wear at the Bump stage page 8, rected it. [The piece had in fact just show for The R ocky Horror Picture ollus<ratoOIU rrom Our Bodocs, Ounel•eo e 1976 by tbe Bosto n been written for the class.] It has a Show. The crowd that night was Women's Health Book Collccti''C, I nc . distinct air of having been fished out impatient and irritable; people pushed page 12, Judy Fox of a bottom drawer and dusted off. and shoved as the doors opened page 14, Nancy Ayres, T. Arzola You should have left it in the drawer. behind us and those on the stairs page 15, Leslie Roberts You should have locked the drawer. began to flood the auditorium.

Then you should have given yourself Someone tried to pick a fight with The New Journal is published by the New to the police. the friend who was helping me to Journal at Yale, Inc., partners in publication I know you exist, but where are hold people back, threatening to with the Yale Banner, Inc., and is printed at you? With the original quotation "break his arm." I beard someone Chronicle Printing Co., North Haven, Conn. marks restored there is absolutely joke that those on the floor couldn't Distributed free to the Yale community. For nothing of your's [sic] in here except get in because they weren't wearing all others, subscription rate $7.50 per year.

"Mr. Smith recalls,.. "Mr. Lytle says," pink triangles. I smiled, and felt Copyright e> 1977 by The New Journal at .. Roger Stander adds," etc. etc. etc. proud for what I thought we had Yale Inc., a non-profit organization. Letters etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. accomplished that afternoon. I looked and unsolicited manuscripts welcome. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. up to find several tall, strong-looking 3432 Yale Station, New Haven, Conn. 06520 tc t tc etc and etc males ski_J'Ooats, carryt'ng beer. One Phone 432-1328 or 436-8650 e T~~:n Cap~te was ~nee asked of them stabbed a finger in my what he thouRht of Jack Kerouac. direction and demanded, ..Why are --' • - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - you wearing that thing?"

Remembering the pride with which a gay friend of mine had responded 2 comment: two uach~rs r~veal warmth and understanding; pink triangle caus~s disto that question I said, "It's a symbol turbance; touring by thumb; adrift in the Silver Compendium. of my solidarity with my gay brothers and sisters."

Micha~l Czar 3 Against Humaneness He turned to his friends, then back r~flections on too much talent to me. ..Are you a dyke?" His voice was a mixture of disgust and curiosity.

Corby S. Kummer 4 Go by the Numbers "No. Do I look like one?" how you g~t in- or don't-to Yale LAw He considered that for a moment.

"Come on now," he insisted, tapping John Freedman 6 Meanwhile: from a first-year med student my arm with his Coors ...You're a learning and changing: what it means to be a doctor faggot, aren't you?" His voice was angrier.

Emily Procaccini 8 On Natural Childbirth- A personal account "Only my hairdresser.... " I smiled bringing out baby feebly, and I nearly lost the grip of my co-worker when the crowd pushed GrafMouen into us, impatient to get into LinslyI 0 Director Reviews N~ws Lackluster Production Chit. re-thinking undergraduau drama criticism "Yeah," he shouted, "Yeah, I guess you are a dyke, aren't you. You're Waltu Rieman 12 Stevens in Bloom wearing those boys' clothes there, Harold Bloom's latest work is one of his best huh?" He flicked at the lapel of my coat. His companions laughed.

Al~x Stilk 14 The Franchisers a r~vi~w of Stanley Elkin's new nov~/ "You're wearing boys' clothes too," Stnt~n Graves Deportment in Ropes a p~m I replied...Are you a dyke?"

Graphics Staff: Nancy Ayres, Jane Dickinson, Judy Fox, Karen Sideman, Bill Tarbell, Deborah Weiss

I March 19, 1977

at the Film Society?"

But it can happen anywhere and anytime, and that's a lot more disturbing.

Lucy Chase Williams

While hitching cross-country We sat for an hour in Salt Lake City before a beat-up Ford stopped.

It carried three men-a driver, thirty, and two eighteen-year-old passengers.

"California here we come," they shouted as we hopped in. They made it from Minneapolis to Utah by stopping for hitch-hikers along the way; they expected a tank of gas in return for the ride. When the roads were bare, they went to churches, begging money for food and gas.

Our new friends were headed for the West, "the golden land of opportunity." They had neither friends nor contacts out there, no money; they hoped to find work. They got their tank of gas from us, as well as a can of stolen transmission fluid from a gas station in Humboldt, Nev. If their car made it to the coast, they figured their problems were solved.

Whimsy or liquor-impaired judgment provoked a spontaneous trip cross country. A friend and I had friends and relatives along the way and a west coast destination. Our three-week journey started in Syracuse, took us to Los Angeles, and ended back in New York.

We climbed inside an over-heated Mercury outside Des Moines. While waiting at the next exit for the engine to cool, our driver re-arranged all the gear he had stashed on the car seats.

He put a knife that was open on the front seat back into his pocket, and stuck the rifle on the back seat into the trunk. I noticed an Air Force shirt stowed in the trunk.

"I've been transferred," he said, "from military police where I can carry a gun, to the mechanics corps where I can't. They caught me with a four-shot derringer, one with the serial number filed off. They didn't like that too much, so they took it away and sent me to another post."

He came from a tough section of Chicago, so liked guns; he carried one to protect himself on the streets.

"Some people get off on cars," he said, "I happen to get off on guns."

Some drivers never stop for hitchhikers, a few always stop, and some drivers make a decision on the spot.

We geared ourselves to that third crucial category. Playing for the appearance-conscious crowd, we considered our image ftrst. Rejecting the post-mortem hippie option, we set off with short hair and neat clothes.

Seediness would get us nowhere. (continued on page fifteen)

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Against Humaneness The Trouble with Law School

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by Michael Czar

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How can you kick a ~aw school whose dean will join your table at Naples' and listen with good humor as you ridicule the "telephone-book imagination" of a young faculty member? And when that dean, with a more serious good humor, will also discuss his frustrations in trying to keep up with developments in his field? How can you be ungrateful when the dean of student affairs will listen to your reasons for wanting to re-schedule exams, and offer to proctor them himself on a weekend? At how many other law schools can you knock on most professors' doors and be given much more than the time of day?

Yale is an enlightened place. Student representatives sit with faculty members on committees for educational planning, admissions policy, and student discipline. The course offerings are a model of social commitment. Alongside Bankruptcy and Antitrust, you can find such courses as Equality and the Law, Legal Regulation of the Biomedical Sciences, and Lawyers as Change Agents.

In addition to these riches, the law school offers still more educational flexibility: joint degree programs, clinical programs in neighborhood civil legal assistance, prison legal services, and mental hospital legal services. It even offers full-credit intensive semesters away from New Haven at the Center for Law and Social Policy, the Vera Institute for Justice, and almost any other place you can find a non-paying niche.

Then there are the formal, semiformal , and informal student organizations: Moot Court, Barristers' Union; Environmental Law Association, Yale Association of International Law· Law Women's Association, Black Law Students Union; law school football, law school basketball, law school baseball. This is just part of the wealth. Only someone wrapped in his own cloud could not find a place in the sun at Yale Law School.

It is not easy, then, to make any criticism of the law school intelligible to others. I admit that I don't know of any improvements in the structure of the law school that could change my criticisms. The collective activity of students and faculty-not the institution alone- aJso constitutes our ..legal education." The listening. prodding. parroting. and showmanship in the classroom; the earnest discussions in the hallway afterwards, sometimes with the corralled proMichat!l Czar is a third-)lt!ar student at tht! Yalt! Law School.

fessor, the endless library whisperings about the ..fair" or "equitable," the "allocation of risk and costs," "conceptual frameworks," "distinctions without difference," "irrebuttable presumptions"-this is part of the process.

The library whisperings metamorphose into the constant babble of the dining hall. Serious-minded intensity of effort, hardly checked by the hours in a day, is lavished upon student activities. After all, it is within the power of Yale Legislative Services to draft statutes that will overrule the Burger Court on defendants' rights, harness the CIA, and guarantee dueprocess hearings for disciplined gradeschoolers. And the Moot Court prize case at the end of each term always seems to promise "landmark significance." And your humor--don't forget it, but sharpen it into legal humor. Yet do we really want to hear again about respiratory estoppel as an appropriate remedy for unconscionable fools, or about third-party suicide as the solution to an annoying roommate?

It all seems a process, early initiated and continually accelerating in the course of three years, of "being conformed"- and then striving to conform, and helping one another to conform. One acquires "professional" motivation and values, even appropriate "personal" (if a person remains to attach them to) speech, manner, and drives. This process continues despite the richness and flexibility of the institution and despite the oh-sointeresting backgrounds of students, from Peace Corps in Africa to theology training in England. It continues despite the diversity of outward direction, whether it be radical criminal lawyering, neighborhood storefronting, public sectoring. or that traditional failure of the imagination, the law firm.

The institution is distinguished from the experience as a whole, which I would distinguish from the individual and decent human beings each of us knows. One professor must have seemed the "grand old man" for the past thirty years and will probably remain in his prime for another thirty. He likes to int!_oduce his discussion of jus lt!rtii by calling it "one of those black tags that lawyers use to distinguish themselves from human beings." With obvious glee, he will explain that be "invented" a part of assignment law by coming across a couple of cases " quite by accident" one day and including them in his casebook. He does all this with no care for adulation, with no high and serious conviction that the legal world could not have done without him.

Rather, his self-amusement intimates that his life's work is at once an advance in the legal world and. something of a peculiarity in the face of everyday life.

Another professsor has found his way to Yale through the upper reaches of the Justice Department and the corporate world. He can speak with reserved conviction about equality and fairness in the context of political and civil rights. He seems not to see legal injustices that ought to be legally righted, not to see rights in conflict as the business of life, not to conceive of tbe good in the IU'St (contimdd on pagt! St!Ven,'

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The New Journal

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Go by the Numbers

by Corby S. Kummer

Susan Hanley (no names in this article are real, at the subjects' request), assistant to Dean Williams, is the one woman on the present comYale Law School is harder to get mittee, but does not feel she is a into than any other in the country. token.

"Out of five members on the Incoming classes number 165 from panel one's a woman and one's a 3500-4000 applications yearly, in comblack. That's the way it worked out. parison to Harvard's 500 from 8000.

Everyone would make it on his own A recent survey in New York, howmerit." ever, rated Harvard over Yale in Hanley is tall and thin. She smokes prestige and chances for the b~st jobs. a lot and nervously twists her long But it's nicer to go to Yale than black hair. Still, her manner is proHarvard, students and faculty say, fessionally poised; she's accustomed because of Yale's size and less obto fielding questions, especially from viously harried atmosphere. Other students. Her background makes her touted advantages like the nonmore sympathetic to many students competitive Law Journal (in order to than most other readers. She went to work on the school review elsewhere, Wisconsin as an undergraduate, and . students must rank high in their took a Ph.D. at Yale. "I look at my classes) make life less strained. Did friends from college and see how the good things I'd heard about Yale much less luck they've had, although mean that creative, interesting people they're as good as I am," she says. went there? To find out how classes "Students shouldn't be disadvantaged are selected, I interviewed five past by where they are, although the other and present members of the admisreaders are more inclined to adjust sions committee. their judgments according to undergraduate institutions. The best grade Yale is unique in that its own point average (GPA) anyone can do faculty rather than a trained admisanywhere is a 4.0. You don't know sions staff reads student folders. The what they would have done elseDean of Admissions reads through where. each ftle as it arrives. He culls 1000"It's reasonable that readers like 1200 over the course of the year for a things in students that they see in panel of twelve readers, who rate the themselves. I have a higher degree of folders from one to five (a rating of empathy for people who have done five is most desirable) and send them things I have. The same thing must on. I wanted to know which parts of a student's ftle the readers found most happen to other readers." Class presidents and the like don't impress herimportant, and whether they looked and never have-she hadn't particifor their own characteristics in applipated in extra-curricular activities as cants as they rated folders. an undergradute. "They're not likely to add skills or experience. I'm more Corby S. Kummer decided against responsive to people changing careers applying to law school after writing than if I hadn't changed them myself, this piece for David Papke's seminar and contemplate changing again." on the American Legal Profession.

Hanley, who has taught history at Amherst, hopes to continue in college administration.

Hanley's unusual background accounts for her description of the law school as "interdisciplinarian." She refutes the image of the law students as corporate lawyers in training. "Students select Yale for its flexibility and non-competitiveness," she claims.

"They are motivated and self-disciplined." Earlier she described them as "interesting, hardworking, and grownup."

Hanley took her present Yale job at 31, years ago. "I wondered if I could enjoy the company of younger people. It turned out to be wonderful and intellectual. We talked shop endlessly. Nowadays the students get even better, I hear, in their capacity to understand, quickness and ability to relate creatively to material. The faculty is pleased, although their orientation is unfortunately and ominously toward the academic."

Lively and seemingly tireless, Hanley tours for Yale. She insists that Yale should recruit to "improve the fit" between student and school, although she admits that every school is trapped into traveling because of nationwide law-school panels from which they cannot be absent. Because she is not a faculty member, Hanley pays more attention than they do to folders, and devotes more thought to the admissions process. She wishes that readers would meet as a group.

"We should find out what values we share and to what extent, and give more attention to marginal cases."

One of her jobs is to read the folders of those who were narrowly rejected, to see if she strongly disagrees with any of the decisions.

"The ideal reader would look for what I do," she says. "I try to be the best I can be." Hanley looks for originality, variety, the "flash" of creativity in a student. If all the readers were like her, the committee might be ideal. But her background is far different from that of other readers, so her ideas of a good student are atypical. Compassion does not pervade the Law School faculty.

any case. Facility with words can also be feigned, or assisted. The student writing an essay feels called upon to reach for the loftiest sentiments he can express. These are not relevant criteria."

Gilner does rely on the quality of the undergraduate college to help him differentiate, as do all the other readers I saw. He pays little attention to the specific curriculum: "I'm inclined to suspect the so-called prelegal courses rather than the humanities," he says in a rare moment of unconventionality. Time spent away from school counts for little, too.

"The .simple passage of time does not mean. improvement."

In order to contrast the typical class of his day with today's, I ask Gilner if he respected members of his own law class (Harvard, 1950). "There is no human being I don't respect," he replies sharply, then continues in lawyer-like fashion, "I'll redefine your question to make it say what you meant." He goes on to say that the bottom of classes has improved, but he likes the classes "no more, no less. We waste less time working with sub-marginal students."

I ask if he likes the character of recent classes. "You don't mean personal character," he corrects me, although that's just what I meant. "You mean statistical mix, which creates the class group. By and large it is more interesting and provocative to teach interesting students."

The only thing Gilner cares about in admissions, he says, is to get the "top ofthe applicant pool." Perhaps Hanley had him in mind when she said the faculty's tendency was ominously toward the academic. "Given the chance I would change the admissions process, but I won't tell you how or why." On the way out I apologize for any questions he might have considered rude. "Your questions were o.k.," he says. â&#x20AC;˘â&#x20AC;˘you pressed as hard as you could. I didn't answer when I found the question inappropriate."

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Charles Lanford, Jr. seems a radical by comparison, although he is quite conservative. Of everyone I A poster on the door of Ivan interviewed he had the most Wall Gilner's sparse, cold office pictures a Street-like office. The oriental carpet roaring lion: "In our business the was lush; the Federal desk elegant. customer is king," it proclaims. DeLanford's manner is businesslike, full spite its hired-gun implications, Gilner of straightforward common sense and says he quit practice after six and one full also of underlying elitism. He half years "because I decided I wanted expects the best, and knows he'll get to write and teach more than I it. wanted to make money." Gilner anInstead of reading the folders of swers questions quickly and deliberthose who didn't quite make it, Lanford reads those of students to ately. whom Dean Williams has given his "You must go by the numbers on a highest rating. Students given a five file. Their objectivity is their beauty," are virtually guaranteed admission; he says. "Letters of recommendation Lanford reads their flies to see if he are of equal impressiveness, which is disagrees. Like Gilner he blends skepto say they are equally irrelevant. All ticism with empiricism, but he pays geese become swans. Essays seldom closer attention than Gilner does to make a difference on the plus side. the student's choice of courses. "I They show a profile of interests and the ability to put together words. The look at the guts in the transcript," he interests can be feigned and change in says, ..or look for something funny in .l

The New Journal

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March 19, 1977

it that suggests the student isn't that red-hot. The LSA T [law school board score] is the only objective piece of evidence we have. GPAs aren't that reliable. You know they're strong if from Yale or Harvard.

"I view courses like History of Art skeptically. If you see something like bongo drums, you don't pay attention to an A in the course. Things like German and Calculus are hard. English is always easy- 1 could get A's in English courses any time I wanted.

Grade inflation makes it hard to tell who has what. We hate pass-fail courses. The trend back to a more stratified system is a good thing." ("I'm on the conservative side," he admits.)

Nonetheless Lanford claims he looks for "something unusual" He calls letters of recommendation " unreliable. They often hide dullness." He has little patience for essays on why a student wants to be a lawyer- "it gets to be one hundred thousand times uplifting society. Your eyes glaze over. We took a student last year whose GPA was a 3.4. He was a bluecollar worker who'd worked his way through college. He'll be a good alumnus. If we had more places to play with, we could admit more people who hauled up their socks after their first year, or people who've done interesting things. You know, a few more oddballs. Eccentrics often do well here. One tried to save New Haven ¡ "

Lanford is pleased with incoming classes. "We've 'eliminated' the bottom half of the class statistically, as the administration keeps saying.

We've always been more selective than ~a~ard [Lanford's alma mater], who elimmated a third of the class after the first year by failing them. I don't see any dismal conformity here.

A few students are lemons. An ideal first year class wouldn't include the five or six goofs we get.

It's normal to want to duplicate yourself unconsciously, I guess," he says. He later adds that he likes people who have taken a year off, because he did. His practicality includes rationalizing the system of having faculty readers instead of a full-time admissions staff. "We think it makes a difference. The candidate feels he gets more attention. Faculty reading is good with alumni children too." The last point may be the most' important. "Other than that, random selection might give as good a class," he says.

Lanford isn't cold, exactly, but he's very businesslike. "I can't think of a job I'd like better," he says of teachinj. His idea of teacher-student relationships corresponds to his reason for having liked Harvard: "If my teachers left me alone, I'd leave them alone." He still thinks "it's more pleasant" at Yale than at other schools, although he will readily list ten other schools that would give as good an education.

"I want good students who will be good lawyers," he says. Lanford dislikes working on admissions, however. "I got sweet-talked into reading folders. You do need a good mix of readers, though. Otherwise the class might be stodgier-or nuttier." As I leave, he says, "They say Yale and Harvard skim off the cream. I like to think we skim off the butter."

Jack Crain, too, is proud of Yale's classes. He was head of the admissions committee for several years. At first he spot-checked those who were rejected. "I didn't fmd anyone who had the remotest chance of getting in." Crain is brash. He loudly hails people who pass by the hall, and paces around the room ("I've been sitting around all day.") His office suggests a locker room, with its industrial furniture and scraps of paper taped up in odd places. Crain strengthens this impression with his constant bantering and his coach's drivingly frank manner.

Crain wants a good team made up of "top students." For fear of losing students to Harvard he moved up admission time during his administration for the best candidates. To find out who was really tops, Crain wrote to colleges asking for their grading curves. "We'd check a Yale 3. 75 against a Stanford one. Well, it was a lot easier to get that GPA from Stanford than from Yale, so the number of Stanford people we accepted decreased. We had to explain this to the readers, or they might make horrendous mistakes. ..The problem is fmding out who's really brilliant. You can't tell from the file. One Yale student was widely regarded as brilliant. We had to turn him down because another student had a better record. His college

master was angry, but once we showed him the records he said he'd do the same thing. The student had a few bad grades- Bs. A few too many Bs among the As can ruin you. More grade differentiation would help. I mean, how are we supposed to know?"

Like other readers, Crain discounts letters. "The paternalistic faculty can't bear to be frank, and competes for superlatives." Essays? "Some are illiterate. They can expose the candidate immediately. In general they're not worth a lot, just 250 words of what the candidate thinks the reader wants to hear. I know of kids who've lied about their interests just to conform with fads. I don't put much faith in attached papers, either. One student plagiarized an article of mine and didn't even give me credit in his bibliography."

Crain doesn't agree with tl)e readerreplication theory. "You have too much trouble trying to differentiate between the candidates to worry about looking for people like yourself. Students all look so similar. The thing you seek most is academic potential," Crain says, echoing Gilner.

"That's the hardest thing to manufacture in a file. Other characteristics they suppose we're looking for can be manufactured easily.

"The minority policy changes with each dean," Crain says. "The present process may look like mine. I said that we should take students according to their academic potential. My system," he says pointedly, " was good."

The present Dean is Ted Williams.

He's the only black on the committee, but his position of authority may make him count for two. The black and the woman on this committee are the workhorses, the people who do the admissions scutwork. Williams must read each folder from beginning to end, then decide whether or not to pass it on to the other readers. "I don't eliminate people. I look for people."

Williams keeps an extremely tight schedule. He values his close rapport with students (he is in charge of student activities), who pop in and out of his office as we talk.

An unusual painting opposite Williams' desk, painted by a student, shows him as an oracle-like figure to whom students offer up diplomas. In a photograph over his desk he strides

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The New Journal 1 March 19, 1977

Meanwhile: from a first-year rned student I walk down the hall and am flanked by a gallery of little ghouls, bottled fetuses whose genes turned traitor or whose primal sea soured.

As I look at these unfinished creatures, rudely stamped, I see an element of pure humanity, of life and beauty and potential even in this degenerate flesh . Embryology aside, I wonder what has happened here.

by John Freedman

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It is the first day at Yale medical school and time to meet my cadaver.

Eighty-three years old and her flesh is like rhino leather. She lies pickled in formaldehyde, a corpulent octogenarian who, in an act of love, gave her body to us. My knife is poised for that unkindest cut. It's not a person anyway. It's a stiff. Wait-even in the cold gray eye of death I spy life. I must quit this necropolis.

John Freedman is a first-year student at the Yale Medical S chool.

forward to shake hands with Lyndon Johnson. A label underneath commemorates the date. He seems a young man impressed with the progress he has made, although it's bard to tell where he wants his ambition and energy to lead him. ..I like someone who's tested himself completely, who's stretched his limits of thinking," he says, crumpling unwanted mail as we talk. "Someone who's had the courage to take challenging courses, although he may suffer from it. Someone who takes organic chemistry, for instance, although he's not a pre-med. He tackles bard courses to get a quality education." Williams strove for the same thing. He went to college in Iowa and came to Yale Law. "A splendid individual can come from a poor school," be says- adding that expectations for achievement will be higher than for an Ivy League student.

Though Williams must read more why-I-want-to-be-a-lawyer essays than anyone else, he maintains that the essay is important. "It's the one thing the applicant does for us, and it can become a point of distinction. The faculty generally shares this view," he says optimistically.

Like everyone, Williams stressed the differences among Yale law students. ..They're as different as they can get, if you expect them to study in the same room. Diversity is the class's strength. Students are alike only in that they're able." Or competitive? Still, Thomas says Yale is more "congenial" than other schools- ..but you lose none of the intellectual rigor.

It's a more relaxed place to live."

I step into the Intensive Care unit and watch the machines flash and hear them beep and click and keep people alive. Consciousness is a luxury here. The colors seem strange.

The noises and smells, even the doctors and nurses seem strange. Now I understand: this is an antechamber of the afterworld, a place where life and death meet and mingle.

I'm in the Emergency Room on a Saturday night. The gods are acting like wanton boys again: to smash a face has been their sport tonight. I hope the surgeons can un-smash it.

The little boy who's been charred so bad his flesh is falling off in chunkscan anybody help him? Yes, thank God. But it is hard knowing that I cannot help him, not now. It is the lot of the ftrst year medical student to bear witness and be unable to help.

I am told that what weighs on me now is inconsequential compared with what is in store. This seems logical.

But beginnings are difficult, and it seems that what I see and feel now cuts so deep because I have not yet developed the emotional armor that comes only with time. I wonder if armor is what I really want. I think of the Pendragonian surgeon who drags a string of souls behind him, and I shudder.

Nothing is so deceptive or alluring as a good surface. In terms of careers, the surface is our image of a particular profession, or our idea of what a professional does. This, I admit, drew me to medicine. Through reading, summer work in hospitals, and conversations with physicians, I sought to find out what the profession was all about. I see now that it is impossible to understand from the outside. To become a medical student is to penetrate the patina of image and plunge In the first year at medical school beneath the surface into that sulwe have little time to think. What phurous and often bitter stuff which seems to be the central dogma of the is medical training. first year curriculum has a strange The road ahead will be difficult. pedagogical twist: learn the facts now, Tenacity will be of primary importhink later. In devoting ourselves to tance. It is a tenacity which will not amassing information, we supposedly come easily, one that cannot be eked acquire that depth and breadth of out of a hypertrophied super-ego. knowledge that will make us great Selfishness will not help; thoughts of thinkers later. money or prestige or preferment wax No matter that it is boring and trivial in the face of life and death. A tiresome, that there is precious little good part of the spectrum of human subtlety in what we do and no more anguish will become my stock and than a smattering of synthesis- other trade. I feel now that only a deep and than the bio-kind. We all love to hate abiding love for the science and art of healing wiJJ make what I will go the first year, but its very nonthrough worthwhile. intellectuality is an incentive, for we bear that next year will be different.

The strategy that failed Hamlet is the right one for us: the readiness is all.

The limited number of students in each class frustrates Williams, but he says "I can overlook my annual disappointments when people I want don't get in. I can take the abuse I get. It's not like we're turning them away. I can't feel very so.-ry for someone who must goJ to Harvard." ..Relations with students keep me going," Willia ms says. He is unlike the faculty readers, who seem not to want to see students except in the classroom. They are in fact remarkably impersonal and academic. They want hard brilli2nce. Gilner and Crain concentrate on statistics; Lanford calls anyone the least bit unconventional a ..goof" or, euphemisticaJJy, "eccentric."

The members of the admissions staff take a more personal approach, but it may be in vain. The lack of communication among readers keeps alive such iJJusions as Williams' (and Hanley's) thinking the essay counts for a lot. Their humanity can make little difference in the end: they are outnumbered.

The faculty members know what they want. Admissions work for them is an incidental annoyance. The admissions staff members work harder; their turnover rate is high because the job is usually one stop on the way to something else. The work is too frenzied for anyone to last long. "I kid my colleagues to glamorize it," Williams says ... But trip after trip makes me sympathize with political campaigners. The work gets hard."

Williams pauses, looks at the ceiling. "Still," he says.

the road with Armstrong tires

The New Journal I March 19, 1977

I

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seem first to have our talent and then to seek our "causes of justice" in order to display it.

The Law School is a distinct community within the University.

I fear sometimes that it is this perverted private motivation, multiThe level of talent and ambition produces a degree of intellectual plied on a grand scale among the probing and assertion which may disquiet some students, but which graduates of law schools where talent runs high, that is responsible fo~ the others will find agreeably provocative, even taut. The atmosphere spread of law. Yes, law should hav_e seems to be conducive to the development of those verbal and something to say about the allocatton analytical skills which are widely held to be essential to a wellof scarce medical resources and about norms for human experimentation in educated lawyer. the biomedical sciences. And, no from the Yale Law School Bulletin doubt, the hue and cry of environmental lawyers is welcomed by those who earlier stood without legal allies against the Alaska wolf kill, highway faculty members who stand out as mazes, and sewer sprawl. But must Against Humaneness prima donnas, a few others as brillaw presume to incorporate within (continued from page three) liant bores. We even have a conitself all fields of knowledge? Must we instance as legal justice. I suppose he tender for "the second best third-rate flatten all aspects of human existence just has a human eye. In the inevilegal mind" and a couple of would-be into a legal conceptual framework? table complexity of good and bad, he sardonic wits. Most students, howCan't law serve without acquiring? sees the unnecessary bad which one ever, would not view the faculty as I cannot accept law's claim to be can help alleviate. He believes that in defining any character for the internal queen of the sciences. I am not some of this the law can play a part. life of the law school, let alone a entirely persuaded that public schools And he stands ready to play his part, hostile one. The faculty has receded ought to handle the discipline of fifthnon-legal as readily as legal. and the students have stepped forth graders with a "due process model" A third-year student at the Uniinto dominance. Our aggressive energy (notice of cause, opportunity for a versity of Chicago Law School asked now charges the atmosphere. bearing, representation by formal or me whether it was the students or the We preen ourselves in self- imporinformal counsel, and so on). Even if faculty who defined the character of tance. We declare, more loudly than such a model were appropriate, I am Yale's collective experience. I anany teacher, that the display of one's certain that it would come nowhere swered quickly that it was us, the own talent, the blank assertion of self, near the essential concerns of educastudents. He was surprised. He and the unrelenting never-doubting tion. Similarly, I accept that there are pointed me to an essay by Duncan are the stuff of a lawyer. To deaden unavoidable legal questions to face (Funlcy Dunlc) Kennedy, then a Yale the character, to strip the personality, when family, friends, and physicians law student and now a Harvard proand to hew the unencumbered talentexercise responsibility over a chronifessor, in the Yale Review of Law and that is the ..legal education" for which cally ill patient. But I refuse to Social A ction (Vol. I, No. 1, Spring we are responsible. To be a lawyer is presume that, by defming legal duty 1970). It was entitled "How the Law to want such talent as will defeat that and freedom with respect to that School Fails: A Polemic." of others. All has been staked on patient, we have grasped the imponKennedy spoke primarily against talent, and all will be bargained away derables of life and death and estabthe arrogant hostility of teachers for it. lished human morality. toward students and the emotional Is all this just aesthetic repulsion at It can be countered that one will harm they inflicted. To him, the the collective experience of law never bear lawyers claim such things faculty defined the character of the school? I am not sure. I sometimes in so many words. But the unspoken law school- and much of it was bad. wonder whether the increasingly perassumption of self-importance gives vasive rule of law in society isn't also He wrote: the lie to this. Acquisitive talent a growing tyranny by the likes of pervades endless conferences on "La_w One of the first and most lasting lawyers nurtured at Yale. I wonder if and Education" and "Law and Medtimpressions that many students have there can still be any ideal in the law cine" as well as the stream of trendy of the law school is that teachers are that is recognized by lawyers as some- articles on the "legal implications" of either astoundingly intellectually selfthing outside and greater than themthis or that. Even a casual conversaconfident or just plain smug. Many of selves. tion prompted by a news story invites them seem to their students to be Maybe there really was an ideal of the acquisitive ploy: Attach the legal preening themselves before their divinely ordained natural law in the phrases, work the words around, and classes. In most cases each gesture middle ages. Maybe nineteenthsubject another piece of life to your seems to say: 'I am brilliant. I am century common-law lawyers did knowledge. Because you've learned to famous in the only community that believe in an evolution and preservado this act so well in the law, you matters. I am doing the most difficult tion of values in an historical ideal of come to believe that law is worthier and desirable thing in the world. and the law. Today we at law school seem than all else. One comes to believe doing it well; I am being a Law to appeal to nothing less than a sense that because he can do it well, law Professor.' of justice, no greater than the ~wye~ deserves to formulate the questions, in whom it is found . The new tdeal Kennedy further complained that "a elicit the answers, and state the truth stands or falls with the lawyers them- of life in all its fullness. vast amount of destructive energy selves. It is not something to which does in fact go into the teaching of We have spread the word well. they aspire. It is an expression of law as presently practiced." He adBright young hordes of college graduthemselves. mitted the students' complicity in the ates are now applying to law school.

If contrary to legal inclination, we creation of the law school atmo"I must understand law to be an can 'separate the quality of justice sphere, but believed that ..most imeffective urban planner." ..Journalism from the successful assertion of a pressive of all is the group's subis my goal, but law is so involved in talented lawyer's sense of justice, then everything." "Of course English literamission. . . . They accept the imwe might see that quality is dependent ture goes to the finer aspects of lifeportance of what they are about largely without question, and lay . more on the simple decency of la~­ and I will be as refined as ever in my themselves bare to the tender meretes yers as human beings than on thetr private interests- but I want a larger of the teacher with an astonishing talents as lawyers. It is a cliche to say audience than a classroom full of that talent must serve decency; then humility." students." Our new lawyers seem to My Chicago friend thought that why must the world seem topsy-turvy have started the conforming process Yale Law School must indeed have before entering the door. While urban at Yale? progressed. Kennedy's polemic of In the course of our "legal educaplanning, journalism, and litera~ure tion" something happens to that sense may fall by the wayside, they wdl not 1970 seemed to him still true of Chicago but very different from my of justice. As one teacher told an be disappointed by law school. They insulted class at the end of last year, criticism of law school. No one I will learn the skill to match their knew here had even beard of the he could see no passion in his acquisitive impulse. essay. It seemed strange then, and still students. Presumably, we are urged to I have been told that any prodoes now, that the essay should have serve with passion within the la~, and fessional group, scientists or acabeen held as Truth by a Chicago to commit our skill to that serv•'7·. In demics for example, can be arrogant student but totally ignored at Yale. fact we have the dry lust of •'?'1~•­ and narrow, and that lawyers are no Had Yale become that enlightened. or tive talent. Such blind, exclustve unworse than the rest. Many of us have did we just stop caring, doubting? portance is placed ~n the developheard dire warnings about reducment of talent that m a crazy tumI think Yale Law School bas tionist science vanquishing the buchanged. Of course we have some around of common moral sense we

7

manities. Science would leave nothing sacred; it would destroy all mystery, would dismiss what could not be explained or quantified. This, bowever, is precisely what seems different about science. It does reject or ignore some things. While it may lay claim to all real knowledge, it will do so by excluding what does not fit into its world and not be colonizing other fields of learning.

Law, on the other band, would be the ugly mirror of all life. Lawyers would do what no philosopher, physicist, or poet would feel himself fully capable of doing; they would claim to respond to the entire multitude of most basic human concerns. Apart from all other professions, law presumes to speak the language of humaneness with the voice of skill.

Some might say this essay only echoes the fear that ..The last temptation is the greatest treason: To do the right deed for the wrong reason." If law is meant to do some good- and there is enough unnecessary social evil to last a millenium of lawyers' livesthen the successful assertion of justice must be more important than the possibly venal motivation of lawyers.

The purity of law as intellectually conceived will not accomplish what humanly motivated lawyers can.

I can only reply, suggestively, that relying on one's successful talent hardly seems the way to assure that justice, not some slant verbal form of it will win out. I don't thinlc that we ' fall back on the hired-gun tbests, . can even if we dress it up into the "adversary process." To admit that the brightest arguments ought to be advanced from each side does not assure that the decision-maker, himself trained in the pursuit of talent, will have the humility not to blind himself with the vision of the new, striking law he might write in his decision. To look at our "legal education" will not answer where be could have learned to see the complexity of good and bad as something more than a challenge to his analytic powers.

Outside the glamorous context of trials and appeals lie the broader fields where the likes of Yale graduates, I bear, become touted makers of policy. In business, government, and increasingly in the third sector of non-profit institutions, we must acknowledge the great opportunity to ally the thrill of talent with effective power- without the pretense of the adversary process.

Both within and without the law, I wonder whether we will espouse some just causes not for their justice but because they are fashionable arenas for the display of talent. I see no assurance that just causes will always be the fashionable ones. I wonder if we would buck fashion more if our "legal education" bad not let us so . easily bury decency under accomplishment. And even if just causes do always remain fashionable, even if lawyers are selflessly motivated, even if they succeed astoundingly, how much humaneness will we aU lose by having justice in our grasp and the simple good gone from our imagination?

8

The New Journal f March 19, 1977

On Natural Childbirth -A personal account )

-J

by Emily Procaccini There we were. Six women lying on the floor breathing in and out in rhythm. And there alone sat my husband, watching us all with incredulity.

"These are exercises? My child will be the result of these?" I could hear him saying. It was hard to believe that the exercises we were taught would help labor, but my husband and I dutifully followed the six classes in preparation for childbirth. When labor began, I was grateful that we had attended.

My husband had asked only one thing of me: "Please don't wake me up at two in the morning to go to the hospital!" It seemed an easy request, but at around one o'clock the contractions came at five minute intervals. We bad been told not to phone the doctor until this spacing continued for an hour. I lay there, breathing in through the nose and out through the mouth-quick, short breaths high in the chest- until an hour had passed. They had not slackened. At exactly two I woke my husband. His first response was, "Are you sure they're contractions?" I had to admit I wasn't sure; I'd never had them before. We called the doctor to report, and to ask what contractions should feel like to my husband. He replied that during them my stomach should become so hard my husband could bit his hand against it and have it bounce off readily. We left for the hospital at 2:30.

At the hospital I was taken to a small labor room, given a hospital gown, and placed on a movable bed.

Emily Procaccini recently gave birth to Piero Procaccini.

My husband was allowed to stay with me during the entire labor and delivery to help me remain relaxed and calm during labor. A machine next to the bed measured and recorded the baby's heartbeat and the contractions.

The nurse strapped around my waist a belt attached to it. For a few hours my husband and I amused ourselves with the machine, watching the contractions reach a peak on the paper graph and then subside.

Then the nurse announced that my contractions had slowed down. Instead of becoming more frequent- as they should-they were coming at seven minute intervals. A resident doctor came in to break my bag of water; as she did, I felt a gush of warm water spread over my legs and the bed. Being in labor was like being in a submarine, plunged into the depths, and yet being able to hear and see with a periscope the whole world above sea level. The room seemed enormous and at times crowded with people. The nursesâ&#x20AC;˘ insistence seemed overly forceful, their personalities excessively stubborn.

I still did only short, light breathing. I occasionally sucked on ice chips, since one's mouth dries in labor because the mouth constantly breathes. A new nurse came on duty and decided that the belt monitor for the machine was not recording the baby's heartbeat well enough. The resident reached inside to attach an electronic clip to the head and the heartbeat bleep on the machine went back into action.

My contractions began to get stronger and more frequent. I began to hyperventilate. To prevent it, I breathed into a paper bag. I switched to "pant-blow" breathing. My husband told me which parts of my body to relax. The nurse noticed some irregularities in the heartbeat and asked me to tum on my left side. The irregularities did not correct themselves, so again the resident was called in along with what seemed like fifty other people, and fmally also my doctor. They kept talking about "cords" an4 I asked what they were.

They explained that if the heartbeat

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stops for any length of time, the umbilical cord could be wrapped around the baby's neck or could have gotten twisted in some way. They were concerned about the baby getting oxygen since the monitor registered some heart trouble.

Before deciding to perform a Caesarean section, they inserted another clip on the baby's bead to make sure the irregularities were not due to a faulty clip. As soon as the new clip was on, the heartbeat resumed its regular pulsation. The anxiety about a possible Caesarean did not relax me. As a result, when the doctor checked on my dilatation, I was only seven centimeters dilated (full dilation is ten). He gave me something to speed up my contractions and said, "You probably have two more hours to go." Could I make it?

The main problem is fatigue. Labor for the first child is usually so long that one becomes overtired. One loses the strength to endure the more frequent overwhelming pressure on the body, or the strength to breathe slowly and in tempo. Fatigue and the fear of hurtling out of control prevent many women from completing childbirth without anaesthesia.

Many women now opt for only partial anaesthesia, "peridural" or "epidural." This usually numbs the area from the waist down without making the woman unconscious. If she takes a peridural, she can remain aware without having to deal with the pressure of contractions. But since the drug passes to the child, the peridural can also prolong labor. The mother who takes one cannot participate as fully in the delivery since it often prevents her from pushing along completely with each contraction. I had been determined not to take anything for labor.

I had the urge to push, but since I wasn't fully dilated I might tear my cervix. The nurse asked if I wanted to take some Demerol to relax. I said no. Each contraction required full concentration. I grabbed my husband's wrist to relieve the pressure. I had to switch to the method of holding my breath and then blowing out at the end of the contraction. My husband's wrist was sore for a week afterward.

The New Journal

I

March 19, 1977

A particularly difficult contraction started and I didn't concentrate on breathing; I had been listening to the nurse talk about the clip to my husband; the wave rushed through my body and engulfed me; I began to gasp, as though crying for air...Relax this leg-relax it!" my husband said. I " wanted to push, but had to hold it in.

A different nurse came in the room and s~id, "Slow down your breathing, slow 1t down!" I hated the nurse at that moment for being so rational, but later I was grateful to her. She made me slow down and concentrate on control. The next contractions were easier to take.

The contractions were stronger by now though, and I felt very tired after each one. My nurse said, "Would you like something to relax you?" I asked if this would help dilate the cervix faster. "Yes," she said. My doctor came in and measured my cervix.

"Half an hour more," he said.

"Half an hour?" I repeated, in between contractions. "Will the contrations get any stronger than this?" .. No," he said. "They'll be as strong as the contractions you've been having."

I calculated roughly and guessed I would have five more contractions in half an hour. "Oh, I can make it through five more contractions," I told my husband. "I don't want to take anything." It seemed only a few minutes until a new doctor hurried in.

"O.K., she's ready," he told the nurse.

"Have her push a few times before we go into delivery."

I finally got to push. The contrac-

tion came. I raised my legs, took a deep breath and held it. I bore down as hard as I could and pushed until I felt blood rush to my cheeks. Finally there was a reason for all the other contractions. Finally there was work to be done, and I knew how to do it.

All the unpleasantness and discomfort disappeared. The baby's bead crowned. They wheeled me to the delivery room. In the hall I began another contraction... May I push?" I asked . ..Go ahead, breathe in, hold your breath, bear down, push as though you were going to have a bowel movement." In between contractions they transferred me to the delivery table and set up my legs in the stirrups. My husband appeared wearing his mask and green surgical pajamas and sat down beside me. The new doctor said, ..Only two more contractions and we'll have your baby's head out- we're trying to feel which way it's facing. Push hard now- is a contraction coming?"

"No, yes, now it's starting."

"O.K., push down hard along with it." I pushed until I thought my bottom would split.

"O.K., relax now and wait f"r the next contraction- you're doing fine.

We're going to cut you to give the baby's head more room to come out- we'll give you novocaine for the cut."

The next contraction began. I took a deep breath. "Push," my husband shouted as he held up my head.

"Push, push!" I pushed hard for the excitement in his voice, but the head didn't show on the mirror above me.

The doctor said, "We're going to use forceps on the next push."

"Do you have to use forceps?"

"They won't hurt the baby. We don't want the baby in the canal for too long a time-we think his head is facing up." This was an unusual

9

position and made it more difficult to push him out.

They inserted forceps into the vagina around the baby's head. The next contraction came. I pushed and could see a red, squinting face coming into the mirror. "With the next contraction you can push out the shoulders and the rest of the body," the doctor said. I was close to tears with excitement. The body slithered out along the umbilical cord, a beautiful silver blue color. They whisked the baby away to the warming table as soon as they cut the cord. It was 11:28 a.m., nine hours since we had left for the hospital.

"You have a boy."

"Oh, it's a boy!" I turned to my husband and hugged him joyfully.

"Does be have five fingers on each hand and five toes on each foot?" I asked.

"He's fine." As soon as the pediatrician had examined him they wrapped him up. My husband held him in his arms. We talked to him as we waited for the placenta to come out. .

After one more contraction the placenta was expelled. The doctor sewed up the episiotomy. That took about twenty minutes and was the most painful part of labor, particularly since the novocaine wore off. All three of us went back to the labor room together. We stayed there for about a half hour before the nurses took the baby to the nursery. My husband went home to feed the dog.

I was left in the room by myself for awhile and I felt at peace with life, pleasantly tired. I was happy that I had gone through the delivery with complete awareness, and had participated so actively in the birth of another person. Life seemed cyclical At that moment, I bad just helped to complete one of its most beautiful cycles.

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Natural childbirth is not natural. If it were truly natural, there would be no need for a special term. Natural childbirth consists of an artificial shell of learned responses which help a woman through labor.

Labor is usually divided into three stages. The first stage can last from eight to ten hours during which the cervix dilates with regular contractions. The second stage can last from one and a half to two hours and is the pushing stage, the stage when the cervix is completely dilated and the baby moves through the birth canal and is born. The third stage of labor lasts ten to twenty minutes and consists of the time between the birth of the baby and the expulsion of the placenta. Perhaps the hardest period of labor falls within the first stage, called the transition stage. It occurs when the cervix dilates from seven centimeters to full dilatation-ten centimeters. Transition stage contractions are very strong. They sometimes last a minute, with intervals of two minutes.

"Real" natural childbirth might be painful in many cases, but in "natural childbirth" methods there are three steps for eliminating the discomfort of labor. Fear often causes tension which then causes pain during a contraction. The first step, then. is to

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reduce fear of childbirth by educating the woman about her body and the functions of contractions in aiding the baby's passage down the birth canal.

The second step is to eliminate muscle tension other than the tension caused by fear. The third step is to eliminate the feeling of helplessness and lack of control which contributes to tension and pain.

Exercises are prescribed for these last two steps. Since two things happen to the body during contractions-one's muscles tense in response to the tensing of the uterine muscles, and one's breath tightens in response to the pain of the tension- two types of exercises are recommended: relaxation exercises for muscles and control exercises for breathing.

The exercises are also utilized to eliminate discomfort by requiring the woman's full concentration. Since the brain can register only so many impulses in a given instant, intentional concentration on certain controlled impulses can eliminate the recording on the brain of the impulses associated with contractions and their possible pain. In more concrete terms, if one's brain is busy concentrating on breathing and relaxing, no pain impulse has a chance to imprint itself on the brain. One doesn't feel any pain.

It is the same principle which applies when one cuts oneself, but is too busy to notice until later.

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10

The New Journal

Director Reviews Daily News Lackluster Production

(f\ler man ...

indicate the difference between Yale's large commitment and enthusiasm for sports, and her continuing uncertainty about whether the arts deserve complete moral- if not financial-support. Yale Daily News Arts Editor Allison Silver put her finger on it in an article (3/ 8/ 77) where she discovered that the laughter of students who. work on residential college productions has an edge. One sees more sneers than smiles.

It is not clear that the several writers under Ms. Silver's current supervision, the reviewers of the Daily News, have dreamed of the role that t?ey ~ght play in redeeming a Situation replete with bad feelings.

Not that they are insensitive to the fact that something is peculiarly wrong.

Often with a Watergate-like confidence, the Daily News points an accusing finger at a director, actor, or even at Shakespeare in an effort to excoriate the villain. This might have cathartic good effects if the pretender were indeed a villain and if he would lie down and quietly expire. The Daily News is betting against great odds that this will happen. Many of the actors and directors are shrivelled up, no doubt, by reviews, but they manage to live on in spite of it. It is possible to pursue another course of action and, incredible as it may seem to you and I assure you that it is incredible to me, I will now take the risk of describing this course to you, ch"er /ecteur.

f March 19, 1977

painful awareness. They were willing to admit, as Marie might have admitted herself, to not knowing very much about Sicilians, and to not especially caring one way or the other. When Marie remarks that "the choreography of the final death scene is s~perb," she leaves us wondering if she 1s not among those who think about choreography and pacing even when the moment is superb.

Closely related to detachment is the familiar mechanism of shifting attention from what was done to what might have been done. This tactic presumably spares the reader the dulling process ("it would be unfair and dulling to plot" ( 11 / 6 /76)) of hearing about the actual production.

It allows the reviewer the liberty of expatiating on his own good ideas.

Many reviewers calmly adopt the fiction of protecting the interests of the playwright. "Miller's tragic reality is obscured by this very intensity."

We begin with the attitude that (4/ 6) Sometimes the playwright theater is easy. Whenever I read a speaks his intentions through the review that makes the "right way" mouth of the reviewer: "Brecht's sound "easy," I know I am reading a characters simply do not taste their novice. Again and again the director cigars."' (2/ 25) A reviewer might realizes that he is in the dark about assume the intimacy of passing judgmany things. Yet he presents a strong but complete concept to actors ment on an up-and-coming dramatist as the reviewer of "Winter's Tale" ' and techtes who will understand and dialogue does in calling Shakespeare's evaluate his words in unforeseeable "dull." (4/ 8) ways. When he is in the heart of Generalizations often leave us a bit conflict between immediate needs he dizzy.

A r~view of the Long Wharfs is expected to be-and often is~ool­ "St. Joan" mentions in passing that headed about it all. The actor faces "interpretation is not a question of the demands of the director, the

by Graf Mouen transformation but of realization." script, the set, and his own needs in Later, the review admonishes that preparation for performance. The techies face long evenings of continu- "Long Wharf productions do not suffer from the anxiety of the groundSitting next to me are the suitcases ous work, regulations governing the less search for novelty [as do Yale in which I packed everything when I use of the space, and living with Rep productions]." (3/ 11) agreed to write this article. A tinge of severe financial restrictions. They reThe attitude of detachment, ideas excitement eggs me on as I break a ceive little recognition. No defeat is ~bout what might have been, speakresolution not to publicize my feelings ignominious. Don't believe them if about play reviews. But my fingers they tell you that directing is obvious mg from the dead playwright's point of view, these can be symptomatic of are poking anxiously at the typewriter or that good acting is a cinch. only one thing: the poor critic's innokeys now that a cab is on its way.

Margaret Layne's review of "Fourcent response to the need, as ¡he When those who are producing, play" (4/ 8) is reassuring in its effort perceives it, to evaluate at all costs. studying, and reviewing theater at to recreate a sense of last minute Counterpoint.

Point out the good and Yale are already bristling with indigexcitement and panic. nation, to raise one's voice is to Next, the attitude that poker-faced the bad. Above all, evaluate critically become a new target. So be it. My detachment plus a strong sense of the and fairly, but evaluate.

The effort to make everything come difference between good and bad bags are packed.

Mention Williamstown, Drama 40, theater is the key to theatrical insight. out in the wash by tying some of the good to some of the bad and then or Yale Drama School to serious Yale If you refuse to participate in the adm?nishing us to go see it is pulling undergraduate actors and you will illusion because you have lost your rabbits out of the hat. No one is soon discover strong feelings, based ability to believe childishly, then you fooled by statements like "Despite on insecurity, about their talent in really cannot pretend to be a good some sloppy acting and uninspired relation to these training grounds. audience member-let alone a good direction, 'Adaptation' is well worth Auditions, with their almost public critic. Participation is mandatory. any audience's participation." (2/ 11) competition, produce many jealous When Marie Colvin claims, in her Or, "Excellent acting offsets an unfeelings. Comparing Yale dramatics to review of ..A View from the Bridge" even script and combine to foment a athletics reveals on the one hand a (4/ 6) that "we remain painfully aware worthwhile evening." (3/ 28) These are basic feeling of fellowship and mutual that they are performing; they are the consolation prizes awarded by the respect and on the other, disappoint- students uncomfortable with the ment and frustration. This might naturalistic dialogue rather than emi- critic who is naturally beginning to sicken of the evaluating process by grant Sicilians in a Brooklyn slum," the end of the review.

Graf Mouen (Yale '75) is artistic one suspects that most members of director of The New Stage in the audience did not suffer this Asheville, N.C.

11

The New Journal f March 19, 1977

Embarrassing to the cast, disillusioning to the general reader, I do not beHeve that passing judgment is a source of gratification for the reviewer. I am in fact the mad radical who beHeves that most reviewers do not even consciously intend to do much evaluating, but that old theater terminology traps them-words like timing, comedy, balance, characterization, pacing, convincing acting, lighthearted laughs, hilarious effect, stylization, professional standards, and phrases like "the diction and rhythm of speech" (2/ 10), "fast-paced sequence," "flow of the narrative" (3/11), "bringing life into rather colorless roles" (3/ 4) are poisonous language.

Reviewers must give up any trust in these deceptively simple terms, since they conceal many important issues.

"And it's timing that made it [work?].

Successful timing in both delivery and transition. ., (2/ 4) Behind a term Hke "good timing,., I see the characters or the audience being encouraged to jump to conclusions, or an actor's awareness moving quickly and discreetly from his emotional to his physical environment and back again.

"Good timing" might be spiritual agility and preparedness without having to leave behind personal values. In another context, "timing" is dogged determination and unflinching repetition of the same response.

"Convincing acting" is an even larger concept. It probably has something to do with the actor's level of excitement, the clarity of his vision of his ultimate values and objectives, his ability to convey a personal message relevant to the play, his modest immediacy in relationship to the audience.... Who knows bow we come to suspend our disbelief? I am baffled when a reviewer claims that the actin wa$ "unconvincing" and

lets it go at that.

Talking about all plays in terms like pacing and characterization is like talking about all sports events in terms of running and passing. Between the moment of intense participation in seeing a production and that of putting one's impressions down on paper, there might come the careful examination in thoughtful detachment-free of predetermined word-packaging-of the intangible though powerful forces that shape theater. The critic can shed light on what is murky, and he can interpret and integrate into our experience that which is clear.

He can reveal what mi~bt account for the way people act at times, and the way an audience responds. He can provide the valuable insight of the reflective observer by suggesting how, as performer or audience, we might sharpen our sensibilities. He may merely tell us something we cannot see for ourselves or he might get us inside the illusion or behind the scenes to reveal our u~ounded preconceptions of what things are like by revealing his own. Adopting this course of action requires no more drastic a step than to give up the outworn jargon of reviews. They are no magic formulae.

It would be a step toward alleviating the profound distrust of theater that generates bitterness in the profession, and suspicion in the minds of bright Americans- some of whom are at Yale.

I bear the honking of a cab. What will I be thinking about? What directors think about: finding out where the tears come from, finding the emblematic, keeping eyes open to human nature, making a performance a Httle clearer, a little more inevitable.

But now I will grab these things and get out of here.

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12

Stevens in Bloont

by Walter Rieman Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate, by Harold Bloom. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, N.Y. 413 pp. $17.50.

W. H. Auden once remarked that a poet could count himself successful only when those who had never read his work expressed opinions about it.

If the same is true of critics, I suspect Harold Bloom has long been a spectacular success. The New York Times, for instance, gave one of Bloom's recent books to an academic whom the editor probably expected to be completely unsympathetic to Bloom. The result was one of the most disquietingly bad pieces ever to appear under a very famous name. To adapt a remark Bloom himself made about Milton's Satan, it is sad to observe most critics observing Bloom, because they never do observe him.

But if the Times is not the arbiter of success in these matters, the New Journal is much less so, and in any case Bloom has not always been denied his due. For the present book that due is very large; Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate is an extraordinarily good book, even for a critic whose earlier performances have led to the very high expectations one has from Bloom.

The book includes twelve chapters on Stevens's poetry, which is considered in the sequence of composition. Two chapters, the first and the last, consider critical theory. The two aspects are integrated with considerable success, which may stem in part from the design of the book as an interpretive work with an extensive theoretical adjunct rather than the other way around. Bloom's earlier "tetralogy of studies in 'antithetical criticism,' " as his publishers called it, was sometimes too impatient to get its argument under way again when faced with illustrations from difficult poetry. The result was some unclarity in the argument.

The readings Bloom gives here are lucid and convincing, particularly those of the late poems, which have been especially misunderstood in the past. The readings return to us with the alienated majesty of thoughts we should have had, and are almost an embarrassment to much previous Stevens criticism. One may well be grateful for the prescience Bloom brings to Stevens, considering even the best of what came before with considerable dissatisfaction. Previous studies range from the unbelievably bad to the qualified success. The presiding sin is the tendency to read Stevens's ironies as the central text, rather than as efforts to incorporate even his own large doubts into an encompassing vision of the American Sublime.

The New Journal I March 19, 1977

Bloom is more receptive than the other major Stevens critics to the expansive claims Stevens never ceased to make for his imagination and for his poetry as an imaginative vehicle.

He also understands the antecedents of these claims in Emerson and Whitman more thoroughly and sympathetically than his predecessors.

Moreovel", he writes throughout with an intensity equal to that of any of his other books.

Bloom's method of sustaining his judgment¡ that Stevens's egotistical sublime is more egotistical and more sublime than others had thought-or his method of arriving at that judgment-is intricately and persuasively bound up with the theoretical exposition in the first and last chapters.

The quick of the argument is in the last chapter. I recommend reading it immediately after the first chapter and then again after the twelve middle chapters. The argument is carried out largely as a respectful polemic against Paul de Man, J. Hillis Miller and Jacques Derrida.

Both sides of the quarrel will be grossly wronged in summary, but some account other than simple praise must be ventured for a focal

irreconcilable with it. And since in poems tropes depend upon one another, instability piles on instability, and the distinction between figurative and literal language becomes blurred.

Even the minimal "progress" a text makes by proceeding from one thing to another is not likely to be viewed as much more than another polarity to be revealed as arbitrary and stood on its head.

A deconstructionist will be concerned with taboo or forbidden histories and assumptions, and it is thus to be expected that the deconstructionist as exegete should find at his end a radical and irresolvable doubt about the possibility of meaning in a structure whose deepest, in fact whose defining, claim is that it does mean.

Bloom's own summary of his refutation bears somewhat lengthy quotation: "The limits of a purely rhetorical criticism, however advanced, are established by its inevitable reductiveness, its necessary attempt to see poetry as being a conceptual rhetoric, and nothing more. Rhetoric, considered as a system of tropes, yields much more readily to analysis than does rhetoric considered as persuasion, for persuasion, in poetry,

point of the book. In brief, decontakes us into a realm that also struction, which in various forms is includes the lie. Poems lie primarily the method of the three critics menagainst three adversaries: I) themtioned above, analyzes texts by conselves 2) other poems 3) time. sidering them as systems of inter"Why do we believe one liar rather dependent tropes, or substitutions, or than another? Why do we read one "figures of speech." To describe these poet rather than another? We believe tropes they use the terms of tradithe lies we want to believe because tional rhetoric. Their ultimate aim, they help us to survive. Similarly, we however, is to reveal the inadequacy read (reread) the poems that keep our of both the terms used and the tropes discourse with ourselves going.... described, and thereby to cast doubt For the deconstructive critic, a trope upon the poetic mode of thinking in is a figure of knowing and not of tropes. For instance, irony is the willing.... substitution of a (figurative) meaning "A deconstructive reading of a for a (literal) meaning which seems to poem must treat the poem's urging of contradict the first meaning. A rhetus, to whatever, as the poem's own orician of the old school might be questioning of the language of urging. content to say nothing more about it.

Here I cite John Hollander: ' But the The deconstructionist would point out urging of a work of literature, perthat it is impossible simply to concede haps accomplished by its formal authority to the figurative meaning as frame, is no less an act of urging than against the asserted (albeit ironically any other kind of exhortation. The asserted) literal meaning. analysis of urging and exhorting can We have two different meanings on no longer be properly linguistic. And, two different levels of discourse. finally, it is as such that it lies outside Hence an oscillation which cannot be the realm of poetics.' " resolved occurs. All tropes are so I find this wholly persuasive. vulnerable; indeed, all tropes could be Bloom refuses to demystify or desaid to bear some similarity to irony mythologize poems by taking their in that they displace one meaning mythology away from them and from with a meaning which is different us- which deconstruction constantly, from it, and hence to some degree despite the contentions of its ad-

herents, threatens to do. Poems may not be able to demonstrate anything save the problematic nature of their figurations, and troping as a mode of thought may fail of rigor. As Hollander implies, however, thought itself will then fail, but poetry is not called upon to do more than elicit our faith. The deconstructionists skirt a final no too insistently; we, like Stevens, demand after that a yes on which the world depends.

The "diachronic rhetoric" Bloom goes on to sketch involves three "Poetic Crossings" or moments of disjunction in figuration: the Crossings of Election, of Solipsism, and of Identification, which correspond to the rhetorical terms ethos, logos, and pathos, and to the Emersonian fate, freedom, and power. These crossings are introduced in the first chapter and used throughout the book. Like the six revisionary ratios, they are both stages in the development of a poet and characteristics of a given poem.

Thus we are told that Stevens negoti. ated his crossings in 1915, 1921-22, and 1942 ¡respectively, even as we are told that "Blanche McCarthy" evinces the crossings. The juxtaposition has the uncanny effect of offering us the poet's life as poet for an emblem of any of his poems.

I am content merely to note the merit the crossings show in their use, though one might wish that Bloom had explored a bit further his hint that recourse away from a merely rhetorical criticism is likely to be recourse to a criticism which interprets the will on at least partly psychological ground. Some notice, however, should be taken of what is really a highly condensed essay in the history of ideas in the last chapter.

This history marks Bloom's first serious attempt to venture an explanation as to why the various patterns he has set before us evolved as the patterns by which, and against which, Romantic poems defined themselves.

In the Anxiety of Influence Bloom offered a brief apology for his failure to discuss Shakespeare on the ground that Shakespeare "belongs to the giant age before the flood, before the anxiety of influence became central," a passage which Paul de Man criticized as embracing historical fallacies.

(Mr. de Man also suggested that Bloom should have progressed from identifying an anxiety of influence to an anxiety of representation, i.e. an anxiety of or doubt about troping, but Bloom has resolutely declined to change his bread into stones.)

We begin to see how prescriptive Bloom's maps really are, and one recalls his well-known gusto for the most pronunciatory canon-formation.

To wonder if Pope could be called a strong poet in Bloom's sense is to stammer and fall silent. If it is clear that a contemporary Pope is out of the question, it is by no means so clear how that came to happen, how an experiment in form stratified into an expectation and finally, at least for Bloom, into something very like a standard. Yet the expectation that a poem will show a clear relation to the patterns, even in its transgressions, is borne out to an extent almost dismaying, and almost exhilarating.

,.

Walter Rieman is a senior in Jonathan Edwards.

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·The - --New Journal I March 19, 1977 .

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14

The Franchisers ..No body knows about Stanley Elldn," I'd thought. To get a copy of his new novel The Franchiser, I had to place a special order. Having overheard, a one-eyed man in the bookstore approached me. "Elkin, huhT' he said in a conspiratorial whisper. .. Yes. You know of himT' ..I'll tell you son, I've got one eye left so I save it for what is really worth reading. That Elldn can really write."

The man was right. In his new novel, Elldn displays a bold creative energy. Like other novels such as Bellow's Herzog and Walker Percy's Love in the Ruins, it shows us man attempting to cope with a broken, decaying world.

Ben Flesh, the novel's hero, like Elldn himself, is dying from multiple sclerosis. The book is filled with the poignancy and intensity of a life with little time. This concentration of experience brings forth a comic celebration of the smallest givens of everyday life.

Ben Flesh is the unseen hand behind the chain franchises that ornament America, such as Howard Johnson's, Mister Softee, Fred Astaire Dance Studios, Colonel Sanders, and H & R Block. Flesh owns franchises in all parts of the country: the nights and days of the novel are spent in moving from

The New Journal I March 19, 1977

franchise to franchise, motel to motel.

The novel's restless movement shows Elkin's attempt to find a place for the individual in the seedy sameness of a mass-produced world.

Flesh's career begins when his godfather, Junius Finsberg, whom he has never met, calls him to his deathbed. Finsberg, who swindled Ben's father out of a fortune, went from being a poor tailor to designing costumes for the great musical comedies of the depression years.

From beneath an oxygen tent, Finsberg makes reparation for his swindle. He reveals a vision to Flesh:

\

\ \ ~~~

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Who would believe it? You weren't aborted, you didn't end up in a scum bag ... You outwitted whooping cough, typhoid, V.D. God bless you boy, you're a testament to the impossible!

glorifying superhuman nobility. In parody of Zarathustra's "I speak the Superman!" Flesh tells us â&#x20AC;˘â&#x20AC;˘I come from Fred Astaire. Everybody dance! ... Dance to the rate of prime The celebration of mere being interest itself." forms the central vision of the novel.

Although the book often rises again Flesh reaffirms this by the end of the to moments of terrific humor and book as it comes full circle to his own imaginative writing, it has difficulty approaching death. finding movement beyond its original While the franchising of life reduces framework. It begins to move it to its lowest common denomifrantically from episode to episode, nator- like MacDonald's, it barely turning the same trick too many satisfies the basic need for food times. .

Elkin makes us marvel at life, even at The messiness of the second half 1S this low level. By reaching everybody redeemed by the renewal of vision at basic levels, the chains of Flesh experiences while dying in his franchises ..structure life like scafTravel Inn. Listening to all the sex folding." Flesh is a modem prophet, through the motel's thin walls, Flesh an anti-Zarathustra, revelling in realizes that in spite of aU life's simple, squalid comfort instead of arflictions and disease, man cannot be

/

\

kept from loving: ..There's scarlet fever and muscular distrophy and Hodgkin's disease ... and still they smooch ... French kiss with their throats sore and their noses running."

It seems a shame that a novel so moving, imaginative and loving should be weighted down by the book's excesses and weaknesses. Yet Elkin's faults are generated from the excitement of his peculiar celebration of the ordinary, and finally it is this and not the faults that stay with the reader. Elkin convinces us that "the signs as they came on in nighttime Birmingham, all the blink-bulb neon and electric extravaganzas that stood out sharp against the sky, proved that every night Broadway opens everywhere."

Alex Stille

Deportment in Ropes

There are no trilliums here about you, no pentstemons, more likely belladonna, poppy, anodyne of root or pistil that roars in your head and spills you into sleep, amusing you with sleep.

No longer will I live among the names you have vacated, no more shadbush, toadflax, bee-balm, rather I will live with your slender stem withering in robes and with your eyes that reel, sick and abandoned.

1-

So also will I be empty of every other place: fencerows, bays of capricious grass, the whole wood alive with one song. Here, there is only disinfection, your dressing gown, or the cellar of your bed.

Better to have no name for you, only this terminal, below the black sweeping fan, where you are fettered and rave, mad with ftre and talking with fire, pleading again for what you saw and knew and once felt.

Steven Graves

BIRKENSTOCKS. ARE THE SANDALS THAT PEOPLE WEAR INSTEAD OF SHOES. Have you noticed7

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..

The New Journal

I

15

March 19, 1977

Hitching (continued from page two)

•

Our new driver had left New Jersey, got to Iowa City, and then decided to turn around and go back.

"I was on my way," he said, "moving to Colorado, when something made me do a U-turn." This driver began by asking us if we were Christians.

Next came a small booklet of apocalyptic prophecies; and then our driver's life history. Heavily into drugs for eight years including heroin, he renounced them all a month earlier after a session in a fundamentalist church. He was preparing himself for the tribulation mentioned in the book he gave us. He wanted to make sure that we knew about salvation. God, he finally decided, had made him turn around in Iowa so that he could pick us up and let us know about his happiness.

Even those that never stop for hitch-hikers feel a slight pang of guilt as they pass someone whose thumb is out. As long as the hitcher can provoke that pang, he and his art should survive. A seasoned hiker I know advertises a standing bet: he claims he can give anyone a twelve hour head start in a car from Maine, and he will follow hitch-hiking, promising to beat the single driver to California. His secret, he says, is a fat smile to every car. No one has taken him up on the wager.

Standing on a barren strip of land in Wyoming, we saw a Volkswagen bus. We hoped it carried the usual sympathetic VW driver. It was cold, getting dark, and we knew he would stop. He had his van fixed for living; a mattress, shelves, and a lamp arranged in the back showed him to be a traveller like the two of us.

After a year in college, he bad tried drugs, working, and wandering. When · we met, he had emerged from all but the last. In the three years since college, he had worked as a roustabout on an oil rig, a chef in a highclass restaurant, a mason, an electrician, an underground mining mechanic. He knew hitch-hiking; he once made it from California to his home in Massachusetts with just three rides-a standing record, be told us.

Outside Joliet, Ill., a tractor trailer pulled over for us. The driver carried 40,000 pounds of plate glass from Detroit to Denver. He was proud of his turbo-Charged Detroit 318 diesel, proud of his ability to shift without a clutch, and proud to be an independent trucker. He rambled on about life, the scenery, bow the foothills of the Rockies start in Iowa, and how, above all, "you can't fool Mother Nature." Nodding in agreement in his cab-over International, we let him talk all the way to Des Moines. "If I was young again," be said, "rd get me one of them vans, fix it up real nice, and then just travel across the country finding the women and the sun." At thirty-two be made a living doing the next best thing.

Our shortest ride took us 500 yards- our longest, 2000 miles, yet the cheap way to go bad its drawbacks. I bought a car one week after our return.

Bruce A. Murray

•

I can feel healthy wearing cowboy boots I was walking along Elm Street one morning recently, absent-mindedly stomping on pigeons, as I am accustomed to do, when I noticed a young bearded young man pacing back and forth in front of the post office. I felt compelled to address him.

"Excuse me, sir," I said, using my politest language. Fortunately, my politest language is English, which ·he seemed to understand.

"Yes?" he said.

"Well," I continued, ''I may be out of line with this, but there seems to be a rag on top of your head. I thought you might like to know."

"Rag my foot!" he replied, with more than a pinch of indignation.

"That's my turban!" I pinched him back and begged him to elaborate.

"Allow me to call your attention to my sandwich-sign," he said. At first I hadn't recognized the two boards as a sandwich-sign, not having seen one in many years- not, in fact, since they fell out of use, about a decade before I was born.

I looked at the sign. "Silver Lentil Compendium," it read. "Health Foods and Takti Shoes." It's only natural that if you're trying to advertise shoes and health food you want to keep your head wrapped in a piece of dirty cotton.

In any case, I've always had a soft spot for health, and certainly one for food as well. I must confess that I also wear shoes, especially on pigeonstomping days. So I asked my new friend where the compendium was located and ascertained that it was in the only natural location-the site of the old Saks store on York Street. I made tracks for just that place.

It was a beautiful store, appointed with plush carpeting and plexiglass shelves, and peopled by men without sandwich-signs. But they all did wear beards and turbans; some wore cotton garments that looked like nightgowns.

From large stereo speakers came the sounds of Hindu chants accompanied by a lone guitar. I was deeply moved by the message of this music, which seemed to be saying: "Buy a guitar and a chord book and you too can be a professional musician."

Soon I realized that this was no ordinary purveyor of footwear and food. In addition to tapes of music available for purchase, the store sold natural hairbrushes and tonics. One of these tonics was Joyja Shampoo, which is made from the juice of the joyja bean. It comes wrapped in a brochure with many "before" and "after" pictures. The "befores" all suffer from varying degrees of baldness, while the "afters" have full heads of hair. They also have different names and faces.

I passed up the many appealing health food delicacies. Even a tempting "Ruby Begonia Sandwich" couldn't lure 95 cents out of my pocket. I wasn't saving my hardborrowed shekels for a little bit of cream cheese mixed with dates and nuts and held in place by two shingles of whole-wheat bread.

Next to Ruby Begonia were the famous Takti Shoes. They looked very much like the shoes I had been wearing when I spontaneously broke my foot two years ago. When I bought mine nobody told me they weren't good for walking. I guess by now it's common knowledge that you're supposed to eat them.

I wondered how so many seemingly unrelated pieces of merchandise had

come together under one roof. But as I was about to chomp into a suede ankle-high boot that was on display, I overheard one of the salesmen mutter something about a theory connecting shoes with nuts, shampoo, bacteria and, I think "turbans."

A lovely theory rm sure. But if some people have a theory linking physical and spiritual health with anything that happens to trickle out of Asia, I have an even better one that associates well-being with holding onto my money unless I find something worth spending it on. So, with a sudden hankering for a Coke and french-fries and with a pair of feet in my dusty cowboy boots, I said "Good day" to the Silver Lentil Compendium and sauntered out.

Dan Leffel/

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