Volume 3
Number 3
Orange and White literary Suppiement THE UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE Knoxville, Tennessee contents
editor CURTIS L. HARRIS
assistant editor ANNE DEMPSTER
art editor MALINE ROBINSON
THE WINTER WHERE THE BLACK HAWK FLEW 9 Maline Robinson (Honorable Mention; the Bain-Swiggett Poetry Award) SON OF SILVER Mrs. Pat R. Willis (Winner of the Robert Arnold Burke Fiction Award)
-
STATIC STILL LIFE Don Evans
10
11
SAINT JOAN: THE QUALITY OF TRAGEDY 12 Gustave Becker (Winner of the Eleanor Richards Burke Literary Award) EXPATRIATES 14 Allen Planz (Winner of the Bain-Swiggett Poetry Award)
advisory board Dr. Percy G. Adams, Associate Professor of English; Dr. Dale G. Cleaver, Assistant Professor of Fine Arts; Dr. James F. Davidson, Assistant Dean of the College of Liberal Arts; Professor James E. Kalshoven, Associate Professor of Journalism; Mrs. Carolyn Martin, Instructor in English ; Dr. Stephen L. Mooney, Associate Professor of English and Education; Professor Frank Thornburg, Associate Pro fessor of Journalism.
FOR ELIZABETH KITTRELL 16 Curtis L. Harris (Honorable Mention; the Bain-Swiggett Poetry Award) JUGS18 Anne Dempster SIGNS OF DANGER 20 James A. Sparks (Honorable Mention; the Bain-Swiggett Poetry Award)
THE PHOENIX
may
1962
The Winter Where The Blaekhawk Flew by IMatine Mtohinson
The little girls skipped in their dress of blue, Turned in a circle, and, single file, ran Into the winter where the blaekhawk flew. A place where the whistle and cat-call knew Silence like ghosts playing catch-as-catch-can. The little girls skipped in their dresses of blue. The cow-chime jingled and the shining new Penny was tossed to the blue ice-man. Into the winter where the blaekhawk flew. The ice on the tree-limbs, a terrible hue. Cast shadows of cold on the hawk’s tail-fan. The little girls skipped in their dress of blue. Feet crackling upon frozen droplets of dew Like the copper penny in the golden pan. Into the winter where the blaekhawk flew. They skipped one by one as the ice-man slew Each tender ringlet and seven-year span. The little girls skipped in their dresses of blue Into the winter where the blaekhawk flew.
V,
9
SON OF SILVER hy 3§rs. Pat JK. Willis
The street urchins moved back and forth to and from the grocery store on the corner, going with empty Pepsi bottles and nickels clinking against the glass and coming back drinking. They walked or rode bicycles. They walked with their heads up, looking around, or with their heads down searching the dusty sidewalks for treasure. Or they rode their bicycles in great circles, in and around the parked cars, sometimes running up on the side walks where they left corduroy prints in the dust. And they yelled at each other, stopping to examine themselves together or they waved to their images on the other side of the street. “Hey you, Mickey, I got a knife. My daddy give me a knife.” The red headed one sat on his front steps, and Mickey crossed the street over to him. Mickey didn’t believe the other boy, and he held his Pepsi high, swilling it in and smacking his lips loudly in his doubt. The red head, to convince Mickey, said, “Did you know my daddy give me a pocket knife?” “Naw. Where’s that knife?” Mickey asked, holding his Pepsi by the bottle neck. “In the house on the mantel piece. We could play mumbly-peg.” Red Head looked at Mickey’s Pepsi. It was nearly half gone and the brown foam floated sweetly on the top. “You ain’t got no knife.” Mickey caught him in the wide brown eye and then raised the bottle to his lips again. “I have too. My daddy give it to me. He found it on the street. Me and Sammy’s going to play mumbly-peg.” “Can I play?” Still a little doubtful, Mickey was almost finished with his Pepsi. “Naw.” “Get the knife and let me play. You want the rest of this Pepsi?” Frances liked to watch them. She often sat on her front porch and watched them. They had something she didn’t have, and she couldn’t quite call it by name. They had the street diplomacy of giving and taking away in one fine sweep. They seemed freer than herself and not free but bound by laws she did not know.
In her own days her running had been stopped at the six foot fence that walled the backyard which Papa had put up “to keep her in and the trash out.” She had felt little of what was going on outside that fence; but that little she felt intensely, peeping through the slits in the fence and feeling the ridges of the wood in her fingertips. Still, there had been a few things that the fence didn’t keep out, things that came swiftly to her as she watched Mickey and Red head in their bartering across the street. These things were those that she had done holding onto Mama’s hand. But they were good, not adven turous good but there they were, waiting to wink at you when you remembered them. She had entered a new place, although she had entered it every Saturday morning; but it was fresh each time, and as she walked with Mama through the aisles of the City Market, stepping over the puddles of water that stood on the cement floors, she could see the colored lady with her head tied up in a blue scarf, shelling beans and throwing the hulls on a piece of newspaper at her feet. She went there with Mama and held onto Mama’s dress be cause she had not held on, and somehow had moved away to look at the zinnias in the tin cans and then had come back and taken hold of a dress and looked up, but when the lady looked down, it wasn’t even Mama. Oh, she had been scared then, there had been some thing in her throat she could not swallow, but she had held onto the lady’s dress, looking up with the lady looking down, until Mama called her from across the aisle where she had been buying country butter. Then she had run to Mama, embarrassed because she could feel the lady still looking at her. The smells and sounds of the City Market were tingling and serious. She had never smelled them or heard them anywhere else. They were new and wonderful and always different, taking her unaware because it seemed that she never expected them, even when she walked through the arched door and saw the colored lady who always sat in the entrance of the old stucco building. She knew her by face
10
just as she could recognize the City Market when she passed it—^but they never spoke to her nor did she speak to them. She just passed them every Saturday morning. Live, caged chickens squawked and com plained about their cages. And once she touched one through the wicker cage and it pecked her finger. She pulled her hand out quickly be fore Mama could see her, before Mama could shake her head, the silent signal that she was doing wrong. Dominick, White Leghorn, Rhode Island Red, they all watched her with beady eyes, blinking every now and then, while Mama picked and made choices, and she felt sorrow for them secretly and worried about them and wondered how they felt about being eaten. And she felt ashamed that she would eat the one Mama was buying. Smoked meat curtained the stalls, and a man, a country man who had blood on his apron, looked over the counter at her and teased her with ice chips in his long, hairy hand. But she would back behind Mama so he couldn’t reach her. He dripped liver, thumped great chunks of red meat; he cut off pork chops for Mama, just right so she would buy them and he must have been very strong be cause he could hold a big ham up high; he could hold it with one hand and point with the other. And Mama chose, carefully, and she took her time, and then she crammed the brown bags down into her shopping bag and went over to the vegetables. Frances remembered that the City Market was wide and somehow ripe with the people who, sold there and with the people who bought there. They intermingled, yet remained distinct and separate and would go their own ways. Calm and dignity in overalls and print dresses waited before her, behind the stalls, and she stood before them looking. They did not hawk their goods but were ready to show them when the buyers came, and they would not press the buyers to select. A country girl, with an apron around her waist with pig tails and bare foot, would return Frances’ stare, and Frances secretly wanted to be the country girl; then Mama sedately exchanged her money for fresh grown peas, and the factions would part, but the country girl would remain for almost a whole week with Frances. Saturday morning became afternoon, and on their way from up town she and Mama would pass the City Market again, but then it would be silent and
empty and a bean would be left lying, a few dried vegetables, a sucked-out grape hull. And the wall of a fence could not keep this out, and she could take it with her and the back steps would become her market and she could see the buyers who came for her china berry beans. But once she found a way outside the six foot fence that kept the trash out. But then she had not realized that the little boy who lived in back of her was trash, that his daddy was a drunk who painted houses when he was sober, that his mother had big fights with his daddy. And when his mother’s eye had been sore, looking like Frances’ knee when she had fallen down the steps, she was sure that his mother’s eye hurt and wanted to ask about it until she heard Mama telling Papa that the Blands had been fighting again and that old Jim Bland had hit his wife in the eye. When Mama told Papa that, Frances couldn’t hear anything that made her believe that Mama was sorry about Mrs. Bland’s eye and maybe it was wrong for Frances to be sorry and may be she shouldn’t play with Jimmy Bland. But (Continued on page 17)
11
Saint Joan
the quality of tragedy by GusttBve Becker
In defending George Bernard Shaw as a tragedian, one is forced to admit that no really great play he ever wrote could be remotely classified as tragedy—with one exception. That exception is St. Joan. The reason that this play is an exception lies in the tragic elements of the story of the peasant girl who went to the stake for her beliefs. The reason that no other play was a tragedy is that Shaw concerned himself with social, material problems of the everyday world. Whether St. Joan is. great tragedy or not is subject to debate, consisting of applying the principles of good tragedy in particular to St. Joan to see how the play con forms or fails to conform to these principles.
and characters. This form of dramatic style is the one against which the drama of Shaw’s time revolted. The “New Realism” rejected ex ternal reality for a new, internal, psychological revelation. This latter is particularly true in St. Joan. The fate of excellent tragedy at the hands of producers who insist on elaborate scenery, “real water in the river Loire,” as Shaw acrimoniously describes it, is adequately seen in the examples of many classics of drama and fiction, of which Hollywood has destroyed all the inner subtleties of character, innuendoes of plot and idea, and has forced the whole literary creation to go galloping to its doom with a “cast of thousands.” These extrava gances, the grossest examples of Romantic ex cesses, are precisely what Shaw avoids in St. Joan by omitting a staged burning, or a coroination at Rheims, or Joan leading the army. Instead, he works, as indeed he always does, on the characters, on the spirit of the age: in short, on loftier themes.
As for many of the classical principles, they may largely be disposed of. Unity .of time, action, and place are not necessarily requi sites for, or even attributes of, good tragedy. That Shaw dismisses them because of the temporal, spatial, and active exigencies of the play is clear. Shakespeare would have done the same thing. In fact, he discarded one or more of the unities on more than one occasion in his tragedies. The classical length of the play is not important, although Shaw states in his preface that he is adhering to the “well-estab lished classical limit” of three and-a-half hours of stage representation. Stage realism, a Senecan characteristic of natural, live depic tion of events on the stage (especially blood letting and other violent action), is avoided in the Aristolelian and Shakespearian traditions as unwise. The reason for this avoidance is the very clear realization that all the realistic design, costume, real animals, and especially violent action happening on the stage are mere trappings and ornament for the greater ideas
In general, tragedy may be said to dwell on these loftier themes, involving the meaning of existence and the fate or destination of human beings, as in this case, driven by inexplicable forces to do (from an inexperienced viewpoint) meaningless or even dangerous acts. In Joan, the determinism involved is related to the im pelling nature of the voices she hears. The action becomes tragic because she trusts the voices so implicitly that the Inquisition can ac cuse her of self-sufficiency and pride, whereas in reality, she knows neither one. In fact, her voices came to her as a result of her religious values, and are symptoms, as such, of the in fluence of the Church. Shaw states that heretics and saints will always be lumped to-
12
gether by the misunderstanding people as dangerous or insane, because of the inherent spiritual opposition to this world that saints or heretics evince. From this point of view Joan conforms to a very important precept of great tragedy: the conflict between the will or action of the hero and the wills or actions of others, or with circumstances. This problem is made obvious by the crux of the play. Joan’s conflict is of will: personal, individual will versus the corporate will of the Church and its representatives ; her will is also in conflict with medieval circumstances in general. Shaw claims that the problem of the indi vidual versus the society is of paramount im portance. And so it is for tragedy, because the individual, though inspired by whatever high, eternal, obviously true impulse, is always sus pect to the society because of the individual’s means of discovering that impulse. That there are no more open visionaries and revolutionary idealists today than there were in the past testifies patently to the narrowing and stratifi cation of our own society. Joan’s society ele vated many mystics and visionaries to saint hood before they were burned, but these blessed probably were of less blunt and militant nature than the Maid; surely their visions were not openly antagonistic to the Church Militant. Thus the blindness with which Joan pursued her path from victory to death may be said to be her “tragic flaw,’’ another important ele ment of good tragedy, and one which works with circumstances to bring about the eventual catharsis of the play. The cathartic effect is, in theory, supposed to relieve the audience of the burden of the tragedy by the hero’s realization of this flaw, by the death of the protagonist, and by the working out to ultimate conclusions of all the threads of plot’. In Joan, the catharsis logically comes with her death'. There can be no other result with the given policy of the Catholic Church and the Inquisition stated so clearly as to avoid any possibility of her es caping that fate, as long as she remains
militantly individual. This quality prevents Joan from attaining great tragic heights, be cause Joan herself never comprehends the reason for the antagonistic position of the Church and the consequent punishment ad ministered. Witness the lines after Joan is asked if her statement of recantation is true or not: Joan: It may be true. If it were not true, the fire would not be ready for me in the market place. These lines and the subsequent action of sign ing the document indicates Joan’s fundamental lack of awareness of the basic conflict. Instead, the action is shunted off in Joan’s complaint about living in prison for the rest of her life. She subsequently burned, thus fulfilling the tragic demands, but we are left dissatisfied because she has not realized why she must be burned. At any rate, Shaw has, at least in a tech nical sense, justified another requirement of great tragedy in Joan’s death. But Shaw can not stop with Joan’s image as a militant indi vidual, dying because of that individualism. He must ruin the whole structure of his piece by insisting on an epilogue in which Joan’s spirit comes back in a somewhat jollier version of her old self. In spite of Shaw’s apology, show ing Joan’s reputation in the world after her death, it seems to me that the flippant mood and the rapid scenes go far in destroying the cathartic effect. Who can reconcile the tragic Joan, having died because of her own ignorance and the intolerance of her persecutors, coming back to address King Charles the Victorious as “Charlie”? This mixing of moods violates our sensibilities, and our feeling for this drama as tragedy is rudely vaporized. It is as if Shaw, in this epilogue, could not admit that any forces could overcome the individual, so a dishonest addition to the story had to be added. Shaw, the advocate of social reform by human action, elevated Joan’s “voices” to an important po(Continued on page 19)
13
EXPATRIATES
by jXllvn Ptans
Bells on the hills, deep in the blue woods of winter, hounds run wild animals all day, vi but when last light quivers upland and scars the earth with shadow under a sky turned steel, the dog that took a deer’s life comes back to me dragging his belly, blood still on his chaps. Around here bullets fix deer killers. But I can’t undo those years of training by darkening eyes where two green fires leap. I send him off and walk through trees as still as metal, while on the deer’s quick grave, on snow bitten dark by throe and blood, the dusk descends, a fossil shoal of sound. The deer is dead, the dog is living, and I who am a killer too must take a killer to my heart. I came back here hating the city where love’s frictions breed raw cancers, not bold sons, into the wilds, the big grip of forefathers, to be primordial, or decay; to hear the hunt and forget what quarry the city keeps. But the country withdraws like a spring that dips down under rock to run through the caverned hearts of mountains—gone where I cannot go. Now let this drive, the killer’s hate, erode me, corrode the flesh I walk with, loose the body from its lining, the body I never knew or saw, which in its darkness went its own way warm in pain and parting, so that I, within the forest grove and upon the city green may touch the flesh undying.
14
A business killed my father. Other fathers die, families and forests overturn and the dirt of our flesh steps forth like dusk to obscure the oaths we made the day they died, their simple deaths in circumstance. A father is but a shadowed form of what a man might have been—yet a magnificent intimation of what a man might become! Locked in the sear and stitch of flesh I know the mind humbler than the heart seeds suicide if no leaf torn from fatherhood finds loam. The heart is all possession, molten genesis, thrusting upward through raging origins. Damn the dead if the loss can’t become the love, if the killer can’t become the man. Fastest in the bastard earth the deer’s carcass quickens, now among the angry and the anguished who still bare teeth to dark, among those of whom it’s said life not love consumed them. Now let love have them all, and we nothing, proud of our evaporating light. For men must share what they have labored, be it poem or dam, food or blood, birth or death. Rage alone is not enough, not rare enough for journey to honor earth with exile: ride the eagle’s shoulder down all the valleys of the world, hear hills ring winter in the land’s wild heart, seed explode in soil, and vindicate all those who went down wordless before the tyranny of circumstance.
V,
15
For Elizabeth Kittrell furtis Ej. Harris
The afternoon smiles outside my window, Relaxing in the lethargic summer sun And breathing long, silence breaths Of sparkling, spotless atmosphere; Two chartreuse birds perch In a cylindrical cage And groom their feathers. Paying the lazy afternoon Not so much a compliment As recognition pays: They only perch And groom their feathers. Filling the bottom of the cage With droppings and shed feathers. Eata lunes Entences, esta martes, Pere hey esta E estoy. Perhaps tomorrow the wind will blow. Making graceful undulations In the tall, dry grass; And perhaps it will rain.
16
'•’W
Son of Silver (Continued from page 11)
it would be good to play with Jimmy if Papa ever left the gate unlocked. Jimmy had a wonderful horse fixed up on his porch rail and a string tied on it and a pillow to sit on it and her picture book horses weren’t like that and not as good because you couldn’t ride them, only play like you rode them, and that wasn’t good when Jimmy whose daddy hit his mother’s eye had a real horse or almost a real horse and Mama why can’t I play with Jimmy and ride his horse? Because you can’t and that ends it and you know your Mama won’t change her mind because she never did no matter how long you sat and pouted and how much paper you chewed up pretending you were a goat. Anyway, you were too ashamed to cry because Papa always pointed at you and said look what a fix her face is in. And you looked into the mirror one day and there it was, red and splotched up and screwed up like on Halloween when you wore a mask and jumped at Papa from behind the door. But you still wanted to play with Jimmy and ride his horse and you knew you would if you ever got the chance and maybe Papa was at work and Mama sitting on the front porch crocheting. And then the day came that you stood on the apple crate and tip-toed until you reached the latch and the gate swung wide open, and there you stood on the apple crate, scared but a good feeling scared, because there was the alley right there and just a few steps away Jimmy sat on his horse and rode all the way to Texas and back. Jimmy watched you but did not say anything. And you walked up his steps without even looking at Jimmy but you knew he had stopped riding and was back from Texas and was look ing at you straight and waiting. Then you walked up to the horse. Couldn’t you almost feel him shaking beneath Jimmy? You moved your hand down slowly feeling the horse’s neck and it was soft and warm to you. Jimmy got down off his horse arid all he said was “He won’t hurt you. He’s real tame. He’s the Son of Silver.” The Son of Silver. You wondered if you would ride the Son of Silver. The name just came right out of your mouth as if you had been saying it forever, the Son of Silver. The riding was wonderful, and the Son of
Silver was tame but he carried you and did not bump you. And you knew you were mov ing because you closed your eyes and the alley was gone and the ground under you moved and the trees around you whizzed by like rid ing on a Sunday afternoon with Papa driving. But then the Son of Silver brought you back. He must have brought you back because some thing jerked and there was Mama pulling you off the horse and taking you back into the yard and closing the gate and switching your legs until they burned like fire. And maybe you cried but not loud because Jimmy was watch ing you, and not because the stinging hurt, although it did hurt you but because the Son of Silver brought you back. And then you hated the Son of Silver and you hated Jimmy and before Mama dragged you in the house you screamed at Jimmy who still watched, standing beside the Son of Silver. You yelled at Jimmy, “Your daddy hit your mama in the eye and I hate you and I hate the Son of Silver.” Next day the latch was on the outside of the gate and only Mama and Papa could open it.
17
JUGS
!*f/ x\nn«» M9«‘wnpsivr
18
Saint Joan (Continued from page 13)
sition for this very reason. They show that the kingdom of God is within every individual, and can never be seen in the incrused institu tions of Church and State. Essentially, that is why Shaw did not at tain the heights of tragedy: because he could not subordinate human 'will to chance and/or to determining forces beyond the individual. Thus, no final realization of the tragic human predicament is made by the audience. No arous ing sympathy for the brisk (and brusque) new Joan in the epilogue. From a final standpoint, that of the pleasure gained by the audience from the pre sentation of tragedy, three points may be made. First, a sense of order is restored. This comes about in the resolution of the conflict. Second, a kind of universal human fascination with death enables Joan to qualify as interesting and pleasurable in that sense. Lastly, the language of the tragedy must be poetic. If Shaw at tains, to a degree, the first two aspects, then it must be said that he generally fails in the last one. Although his language is stimulating, interesting, and entertaining, the source of these qualities lies in the philosophic, not the poetic, nature of his dramatic dialogue. In no sense can he be said to follow in the tradition of Shakespeare, Goethe, or even Maxwell Ander-
Joan’s inspired speeches are all of the philo sophical nature. For example, when Joan pro tested to the Inquisition for insisting that her voices did not reveal truth, but rather, that only the Church with its accumulated wisdom could reveal truth, she answers spiritedly: Do not think you can frighten me by telling me that I am alone. France is alone; and God is alone; and what is my loneliness be fore that of my country and my God? I see now that the loneliness of God is his strength: what would He be if He listened to your jealous little counsels? To be sure, this is a powerful speech. But its power derives from its thought, not its form or beauty of poetic expression. And this lack of poetry is a contributing factor in pre venting great tragedy from being reached. The best Shakespearian tragedy may contain the nucleus of a philosophic idea as profound as or profounder than Shaw’s; but the former will not work it to death, as Shaw does, to the ex clusion of concentration on how he expresses his philosophy. Shakespeare can express suc cinctly an undying truth and an undying poetry, as in the following lines from Caesar which could apply to Joan: The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars. But in ourselves, that we are underlings.
Signs of Danger by JfMtnvs Jk. Sparks
As you race lonely down a dark wet
street, Inside your head you meet her face, encountered first A week ago (a year ago, not more than a moment ago.) A neon sign blinks insistent pale blue light saying, “LOANS . . . Loans . . . Lone . . . Alone . . . Alone . .
in the black wet night.
Take a note (on paper): “This street is haunted and unsafe to get home by.” Staying warm and dry and simple in the house is safer.
Editor's Note: Mr. Sparks was also a winner of the BainSwiggett Poetry Award with his poem ''Randall Sharp Has Burned His Harp/f which appeared in The Phoenix last month.
20
ALL ABOLT. vision and revision
The numbers of entries in the literary contests were encouraging to the new editors of The Phoenix. Those numbers reinforce our belief that there do exist students on the Uni versity of Tennessee campus who are writing, and even some who are willing to have their work published. It always makes an editor happy to know that he has a source of ma terial with which to fill his publication. There was also, however, a discouraging fac tor about some of the entries. Although many of the entries obviously grew out of some variety of the “creative vision,” the “creative revision” by which the Muse must be accom modated was missing from some of them. In spite of the claims of the so-called Action Writers, every piece of written material must be revised and revised again in order to be worthy of the vision which engendered it. If it is not worth the effort of revising, it is not worth the effort of reading. So, to those whom the Muse visits: Write. And when you have written, revise, revise (a thousand revisions if necessary). But above all, write, and submit your work to The Phoenix. Curtis L. Harris The Editor.
WE INVITE YOU TO VISIT OUR PAPER BACK BOOK DEPARTMENT SEVERAL HUNDRED TITLES ARE AVAILABLE FROM . . . DOUBLEDAY PENGUIN-PELICAN GROVE PRESS MERIDIAN BANTAM COMPASS SIGNET-MENTOR POCKET BOOKS FAWCETT DELL HARVEST VINTAGE We will be glad to Special Order any titles not in stock
UNIVERSITY SUPPLY STORE Submit contributions to: CURTIS L. HARRIS, Editor
The BoxPhoenix 8669 University Station Knoxville, Tennessee
Please type, double-spaced, all ma terial contributed and include a personal sketch telling major, hometown, etc.
■*.'
^,'-
.:•'-
.:ji