Volume 1 - Issue 11

Volume one, number eleven I Apri114, 1968

The heart of the University: renewal or requiem?

21 The New Journal! Apri114, 1968

3

The Library: renewal or requiem

by Robert Grant Irving

7

Revisionism in Yale's history department

by Martin Griffin

8

To Surf, with love

by Brian DiSalvatore

10

Mr. Midshipman goes to college: a lesson in doublethink

by William Yuen

12

Books in review

14

Letters

In Comment: New action on the draft, and the Yale Repertory's Three Sisters miss the last train to Moscow.

Draft At the Resistance rally on April 3, Staugbton Lynd urged the university anti-war movement to get off the campus and to develop new strategies for reaching all the American people. One such strategy is draft action.

Draft action is partly rooted in the religious pacifist tradition that is recognized as conscientious objection by the Selective Service System. But the pacifist tradition is limited to a faith that demands a transcendent critique of human institutions. As escalation mounted in Vietnam, new groups began in Berkeley, Chicago, New York and Boston. They embody a variety of ideas and strategies, but they have two common aims: a desire to reach everyone who is "up tight" with the draft (regardless of religious or political belief) and a determination to do battle with the system which is generating the war in Vietnam.

Traditional draft counseling offices were passive, religiously oriented and severely restricted in activities; the new groups are activist, politically radical, and linked to a wide range of social and cultural movements. The Boston Draft Resistance Group trains new counselors in batches of one hundred, helps men avoid induction through a variety of deferments, searches out new 1-A's to talk to, holds mass demonstrations, and coordinates more than twenty community and university projects. The Berkeley area movement claims up to 30 draft refusers per week.

The organizers of these activities span the entire spectrum of dissent, from radical pacifists and Resistance members through political organizers and black militants to hippie drop-outs. Draft action confronts the war on two levels: the immediate level of saving men's Jives and putting pressure on the government, and the long-range level of transforming America's institutions from machines of concealed inequity to instruments for democratic values. Both tasks are still urgent; the recent possibility of negotiations in Vietnam has done nothing to Jessen the draft calls or to encourage a clear rethinking of America's world policy.

Four weeks ago the New Haven Draft Action Group opened its office at 241 Orange Street. It encourages new members and plans to offer expert counseling on draft Jaw and to organize at Yale and in the New Haven community.

Rand Rosenblatt Law School

Sisters Chekhov, like the weather, is what everyone talks about and no one does anything about. Among recent talkers is the Yale Repertory Theatre with its production of The Three Sisters. Although the company did manage to present the play, it wasn't able to exert much more constructive influence over the script than the Weather Bureau was able to exert over the month of February.

Ah, Chekhovl Who is to know what to make of this morose man who described himself as a physician who has "also written for the stage"? Acknowledged as a master of minutiae and a consummate dealer in details, Chekhov in a seemingly casual moment can illuminate a drab life and shed new light on the muddled efforts we all make to Jive together.

Only Chekhov could get away with appearing to ramble idly through the first act of a masterpiece: the Prozorov girls and their new friend Colonel Vershinin, like expatriate New Yorkers ill met in Grand Rapids, jabber mindlessly about the streets of Moscow where Irina played as a girl, where Olga and Masha became women and where the Colonel (he was a lieutenant then) fell in love. Through that casual but compact chatter of Old Basmanya Street, Chekhov creates his people and his world. He will spend the rest of the evening giving flesh to their hopes and disappointments, their confessions and compromises and, of course, their departures. In The Three Sisters, as in all of his plays, the master gives the history of people through carefully selected detail.

The long shot by way of the close-up is the essence of his art.

In its richness and complexity, The Three Sisters is probably Chekhov's finest work. In it one hears the themes of all modern playwriting, from O'Neill's obses· sion with family history to the ·distant rumblings of Beckett in Masha's toast: "Here's to our empty life, the Hell with it."

In a time when the production of classics and established works seems to be dominated by the thoughts of Jan Kott and the sound of music is acid rock, Chekhov is in danger of being forgotten; for not even the Yale Drama School could replace a samovar with a silver bowl of pot. Quite to the contrary, Chekbov au nature/ is proving a bit more durable than most of the classics.

If in the Thirties American productions of The Three Sisters seemed to be about Tusenbach and his aristocrat's myopic view of "work," and if in the Fifties, while we were all chafing under the glare of the Senator from Wisconsin, the play seemed to be about Natasha, appearing from nowhere to insinuate her nouveau fangs into the Prozorovs, then in 1968, at Yale at least, The Three Sisters seems to be a play about Andrey, the intelligent, ambitious and well-meaning man who would not--or could not- take a moral stand. Clearly, The Three Sisters reaches out of its own time and seeps into the contemporary consciousness, illuminating our lives and holding up to its own bright light issues that would have seemed like science fiction to the Prozorovs.

The Three Sisters does not offer opportunities for spectacular performances such as Kenneth Haigh's Henry in the recent Pirandello play. Rather it demands the collective unfolding of a company's skills; it calls for an ensemble effort in which all the performances are excellent

and no seams are allowed to show. The Yale Repertory Theatre eked out the Pirandello on the strength of Mr. Haigh's formidable performance. They apparently are not ready for Chekhov. That the production did not entirely hold together is not because it was "long," as the local paper would have it, but because its seams, in the form of two of the three sisters, were weak.

Of the three sisters, only Kathleen Widdoes as Irina succeded in generating excitement and the spirit of life. Rose Arrick, who made her first appearance with the company as Masha, was not quite so successful. Miss Arrick created a suitable outline: her Masba was bitter, cynical and full of herself. A good beginning; but although her early scenes were interesting, Miss Arrick was not able to meet the role's complex demands in acts three and four. Her performance held no surprises, caught no one off balance and finally made of Masha more a visitor from Peyton Place than Chekhov's foolish, yet sympathetic, crumbling lady. Jeanne Hepple . as Olga, the third sister, the aging spinster, managed to give a sense of desperation and resignation, but her voice is harsh and filled with repetitious rhythms and patterns that make all her lines sound alike.

The performances by the men were a little more consistent. Baron Tusenbach was Stacy Keach, who pranced through the first two acts with an eagerness born of sublime stupidity. His bewilderment at the events of the final acts made a fine counterpoint. Mr. Keach found a delicious humor in his role, and his enthusiasm in the early scenes was infectious. Barry Morse, making his debut with the company in the role of Vershinin, also found a gentle humor in his role. Mr. Morse looks disarmingly like a young Bernard Shaw, and even if he occasionally sounds as if he were doing a James Mason imitation, his command of the stage and its language is apparent.

The best performances came in the supporting roles. Michael Lombard's Andrey, all frustrated intellect and thwarted ambition, was superb. Mr. Lombard skillfully changed Andrey from an eager young man to a bitter middleaged one. Richard Jordan as Kulygin played the fool with enough sympathy to make it credible that, at 18, Masha might have married him. Kulygin was less a clown than a well-intentioned ass. It stands as Mr. Jordan's best work by far this season.

Paul Mann's Chebutykin was like a great rambling bear, slowly turning from warm and friendly to gruff and cynical.

That off-and-then-on-again member of the company, Ron Leibman, played Solyony.

He was handsome and quite mad, if a bit melodramatic.

Natasha was played by a student, Joan Pape, who held her own in some heady company. It is a rare opportunity for a student to play a role of this size with a company of this stature. That Miss Pape is capable of it augurs well both for her future and for the Dean's contention that his students will learn best by working side by side with the best.

The smaller roles were all played by students who were for the most part competent but, except in a few wellshaped moments, obviously apprentices.

Despite the damning gaps in the acting, there are some good things about the production. Most important, the play's continued on page 15

Volume one, number eleven April 14, 1968 Editor: Daniel H. Yergin Publisher: Peter Yaeger Executive Editor: Jeffrey Pollock Designer: Ronald Gross Photography Editor: Herman Hong Advertising Manager: Jeffrey Denner Associate Editors: Susan Braudy Jonathan Lear Circulation Manager: Jean-Pierre Jordan Copy Editor: Alan Wachtel Classifieds: William M. Burstein Contributing Editors: Jonathan Aaron Michael Lerner Steven Weisman Staff: John Boak, Paul Bennett, Peter M. C. Choy, Jennifer Josephy, Larry Lasker, Christopher Little, Howard Newman, Barney Rubin, James Scherer, WarnerWada Advertising: Joe Ambash, Bill Gerber, Jeffrey Harrison, Jon Hoffman, John Jeffries, Chris Moffit, Howie Newman, Will Rhodes, Edmund Robinson, Roger Sametz, Sam Sutherland, Steve Weise, Jeff Wheelright, Rick Wilson THIRD CLASS PERMIT: Third Class post· age PAID in New Haven, Conn. The New Journal is published by The New Journal.

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Credits: Cover: View of High Street facade, Sterling Memorial Library. Rendered by James Gamble Rogers, architect.

Edward L. Barnes, Architects: page 4, top Robert Grant Irving: page 4, bottom Sterling Memorial Library: page 3

31 The New Journal I Aprill4, 1968

The heart of the University: renewal or requiem?

by Robert Grant Irving This June, as soon as alumni reunions have disbanded, the steel forks of a power shovel will devour the lawns of Yale's Cross Campus. This spacious, grassy area, bounded by Berkeley and Calhoun Colleges and W. L. Harkness Hall, has for nearly forty years marked the center of the University. Now, unless voices are beard swiftly and clearly in its defense, the Cross Campus in its present form will disappear forever.

G~:>ne will be the impressive sweep of mamcured green that provided a carpet for band concert audiences, a playing field for exam-weary undergraduates and an appropriately handsome assembly point for Yale's Commencement processions and alumni parades. Instead the lawn will be reduced to a patch less than one-third the size of the present area, and this vestigial souvenir will be surrounded by mor~ than 3,300 square feet of glass skyhgbts and assorted species of ground cover and ornamental trees. Like so many places of historic interest and natural beauty, the Cross Campus will fall victim to indifference, compromise and short-term solutions. Ironically, its death knell wiJI be rung in the name of the building for which it has long furnished s~ch a splendid setting: Sterling Memorial Ltbrary. Tragica!Jy, the Library a distinguished example of Beaux ~ts sensibilities and planning, will itself not escape unscathed.

Dedicated amid much ceremony 37 years ago this month, on April 4, 1931, as a personal monument to one of Yale's most generous benefactors, the Sterling Memorial Library has become inadequate to its task. Today no one can or does dispute the need for more space. Rather the central question is the manner of achieving this goal.

With the University unwilling to pay the high price for properties on York S~reet between Mory's and Broadway, the Ltbrary has chosen two sites for immediate construction: the large inner light court in the stack area, and the western half of the Cross Campus, between the north and south courtyards of Berkeley College.

The proposed light court addition will not affect the general appearance of the present Library to the casual visitor.

More obvious and intrusive will be the insertion in the main entrance hall, or nave, of a lighted information desk and of a stair leading to the new underground areas. The stairway will be surrounded by a thick glass wall three feet high, in the center of the Library nave.

The unsightly shelves of indexes which currently choke the towering ball and impede its normal circulation pattern are a temporary expedient which dramatize the library's needs. The stairway will be permanent and irrevocable. U executed as f!.obert Grant Irving, Yale College 1962, a graduate student in the History of Art Department, specializing in British and American architecture, and holds a master's degree from the History Department. He has studied on a Fulbright grant at Cambridge University and at Balliol College, Oxford, from which he received the graduate degree of Bachelor of Letters.

IS

planned, it will spell the demise of the unencumbered vista down the nave intended by the original architect, James Gamble Rogers, 1889. In 1928, Rogers, a personal friend of the donor, John William Sterling, 1864, indicated the importance of this generous public space, when he wrote thal the nave should be " large and imposing, to give the best first impression and the best last impression."

The obvious alternative, of course, is to place the stairway and information desk in the side aisle to the north, where staff offices are now located. Upon descending the stairs, one would be within two steps of the ramp leading to the underground areas. This solution, according to University Librarian J ames Tanis, 1941, is structura!Jy feasible and was his own first intention.

The reasons for its rejection are instructive. According to Tanis, the New York firm of Edward Larrabee Barnes, the present architects, argue that the nave site is "more straightforward and direct"; that to appear "logical" the entrance must be on axis with the rooms under the Cross Campus, and that the Area Studies scholars who intend to use those underground rooms have said that the side aisle placement would make their work area appear too "peripheral."

The wishes of these same Area Studies professors dictated the skylight system which will dominate the altered Cross Campus. East Asian, Southeast Asian, Russian and East European scholars, who will utilize the 60,000 square feet of faculty offices, seminar and reading rooms and book stacks beneath the Cross Campus, have insisted on having "natural fight" for their study area. Fears that the absence of direct daylight will induce claustrophobia have apparently been expressed by a sizable minority.

These arguments, ironically, have been countered in an elaborate portfolio of pictures and text prepared by the University itself for potential donors to the Library scheme. The text implies that the interior light court is now obsolete since its "original function of providing light and air to the stacks, seminar rooms, departmental libraries, and other facilities which surround it on four sides has been rendered unnecessary by the advent of modern lighting and air conditioning."

Sophisticated new methods of artificial lighting, a vast improvement over the old bulbs and bare fluorescent fixtures will furnish illumination for the scores of ' windowless spaces, new and old, in the book tower. Artificial light, unsupplemented by daylight, has also been considered adequate both psychologically and functionally for the proposed underground Historical Manuscripts and Yale Publications Rooms.

But a similar solution for the Area Studies facilities has been rejected. Instead, sixteen skylights, each eight feet wide and twenty-six feet long, and arranged in the surface of the Cross Campus in two rows of eight, will provide daylight to the new reading rooms below. Even this daylight will be insufficient and will at all times require supplementary light. . Thus f.uncti?nally unnecessary, the skyhghts whtch wtll drastically alter the Cross Campus appearance are the result of a>sychological anxieties about closed ~paces. Yet elsewhere in the same library, tmproved artificial lighting devices and air conditioning have been thought sufficient to render such fears negligible and obsolete.

41 The New Journal I Apri114, 1968

Tentative plans by the architectural firm of E. L. Barnes call for 16 skylights. The lawn, only 34 feet wide, will cover less than one-third the present area.

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One alternative to the projected plans is a wholly underground library without skylights. Another alternative, shown here, illuminates both floor levels with a light well system similar to that used in the Art and Architecture Building.

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Indeed, immediately north of the Beinecke Library and a scant few hundred feet from the proposed construction, the Yale Law School's International Law Library is an example of a successful underground facility that boasts no system of natural lighting. Tastefully lit by artificial means, and with only average ceiling heights, the library has produced no complaints of claustrophobia. On the contrary, faculty members and law students have commended it for creating an atmosphere free of distraction and conducive to extended periods of serious research and study.

Elsewhere similar underground libr"aries have won high praise. The Johns H opkins University built its required spaces wholly underground. No massive skylight system mars the sweep of its lawns and the setting of its building. The underground reading areas have won accolades from both students and faculty, according to Robin Winks, a Johns Hopkins Ph.D. and professor of history at Yale. Likewise, Harvard's Fine Arts Library, including faculty-student carrels, is located beneath the Fogg Museum, without access to daylight. At least one Yale art history professor, who has used it frequently for research and writing, has expressed his enthusiastic admiration for the library as a place for concentrated work.

Similarly, carrels at the Duke University Library are without daylight, but in the opinion of Gaddis Smith, a Yale history professor who formerly taught at Duke, they are wholly satisfactory for study and research.

Despite such precedents at both Yale and other universities, a skylight system is nevertheless part of the Sterling Library scheme as currently projected. The nature of the glass to be used (covering an area of 3,328 square feet) is as yet uncertain.

Probable breakage of the low-lying skylights by wayward missiles has posed a difficult problem for the architects.

City codes regulating skylights require the use of wired glass which has the disadvantage of being easy to break and a genuine nuisance to replace. The architects prefer tempered glass, as it is stronger (although a rock or brick can break it). When broken, the tempered glass will shatter into small gravel-like bits which will not cause injury to the readers below, unlike the shower of sharp pieces of wired glass. But, according to the architects, necessary compliance with city codes may result in the use of a double layer of glass-tempered above, wired below. This double layer, to be tinted a dark color, will effectively distort and reduce the overhead view of sky and ornamental trees originally intended for the benefit of claustrophobes. Frequent maintenance will be required to clear the gently sloping skylights of snow and city soot in order to retain this rather unnatural upward vista.

The skylit Cross Campus addition planned for immediate construction is situated between the two halves of Berkeley College, but eventually a lecture hall and other underground facilities (presumably skylit) are planned for the area bordered by Calhoun College and W. L. Harkness Hall. Continuous subsurface connection will thus be provided between Sterling and the proposed Social Sciences Library, to be located across College Street on the site of the Elizabethan Club, the Treasurer's Office and the Department of University Health.

Entrance and egress will be provided by '

S I The New Journal I April14, 1968

NOW IN PAPERBACK! a series of covered stairwells or stone pavilions. Construction of this later addition will mean the removal of the trees in the eastern half of the Cross Campus.

At the west end of the Cross Campus, adjoining High Street, the architects intend to build, in their words, "a beautiful E uropean-type plaza," faced with Belgian block paving. The present yew hedges will be eliminated. The architects hope eventually to negotiate with the City of New Haven to extend the plaza across High Street, making it some 22,500 square feet in area. The.re will be two trees.

I n keeping with this "European emphasis," small trees, possibly lindens, will be planted between the skylights in the central area. These will be pruned to form a small canopied mass beginning some six feet above the skylights and rising a maximum of fifteen to twenty feet. The architects also feel that the projection of artificial light from the skylights at night will "enliven" the Cross Campus.

The prospect of a Cross Campus aglow like a jukebox has already been labeled "garish" and "nightmarish" by one professor. The fundamental problem of drainage in the area, the architects admit, is one of their "biggest problems." And no solution has been reached.

Most intimately affected by the projected scheme is, of course, Berkeley CoJiege. Several proposals under consideration by the architects and Yale include the elimination of the Cross Campus gates of Berkeley or their alteration, upsetting the whole circulation pattern of the courtyards. Other proposals envision a pavilion in the Master's garden as a public entrance to the north court, matched by a pavilion entrance into the Fellows' garden on the south. The architects have pressed for this solution, because it would eliminate the few stairs between the adjacent courtyards. But it would also sizably reduce the Master's garden, as would a projected library fire exit.

Plans for retaining the Berkeley tunnel, which connects the north and south courts, call for making it both narrower and deeper. Final proposals await a University survey of the passage.

Steel piles for the new library will be driven down just outside the Cross Campus walls of Berkeley. The architects say they may have to excavate the Berkeley courtyards in order to install the electric conduit and other services for the new library.

Though the plans have yet to be presented formally to the Fellows of Berkeley College, the Master of Berkeley, Charles A. Walker, professor of engineering, was first shown the detailed drawings in mid-March, only three months before the beginning of construction. While acknowledging the Library's needs to expand, Walker considers the proposals be saw in March to alter the surface of the Cross Campus and the fabric of Berkeley "nothing short of an outrage.·· "Ten years from now," he says, "persons at Yale will wonder how such a thing was seriously contemplated. This is dearly a case of architects out of control."

Professor Louis Martt, chairman of the F aculty Advisory Committee for the library, shares Walker's concern over the alteration or removal of the Berkeley ~liege gates. "This proposal," MartZ said Ill March, "which was only shown to the "'Faculty Committee recently, is certainly a

case where the architects will have to be closely watched."

Martz's committee was appointed in September, 1967, more than two years after proposals to expand the Library were initially contemplated by the Library administration. This is the first year, said Martz, that there has been a fullfledged Committee on the Library.

Martz feels the Cross Campus plans should come as no surprise to the Yale community. His committee has been meeting since autumn with groups that wm use the new space: the Area Studies Committee, the Concilium on International Affairs and the staff of the Historical Manuscripts Room. "None of us has hesitated to discuss the plans with his friends," said Martz. "The designs have achieved considerable publicity." Nonetheless, there have been no public meetings, and Tanis has not sent copies of the designs to every professor in the University, as did Andrew Keogh, the librarian when Sterling was being planned.

In fact, not more than a handful of persons has seen the architects' most recent renderings. At an April 2 meeting of the History Department with Tanis, for example, not a single drawing of the Cross Campus proposals was shown to faculty members.

The expansion under the Cross Campus will provide just a fraction of the space needed, Martz adds. The area under the Cross Campus, moreover, is to be flexible space. Martz suggests it might even be used for something other than Area Studies when the Social Science Center is completed.

"I'm actually a bit surprised to hear that there is any disagreement about the skylights," Martz said. "Our committee hasn't really heard much opposition"perhaps because almost no one in the Yale community has been shown the plans.

Caught in the cross-fire of conflicting desires is the University Librarian, James Tanis, who is, ironically, a graduate of Berkeley College and currently a Fellow.

While anxious to consult with interested parties, Tanis, unlike his predecessor, Keogh, feels public discussion is not practicable or useful. "A circularized questionnaire to faculty about needs and priorities is simply not relevant to our expansion," he said recently.

Tanis's concurrence is essential to any of the architect's proposals. Together with President Brewster and Edward Barnes, the chief architect, he makes the crucial decisions, despite the existence of an elaborate bureaucratic filtering process.

Reservations, for example, on the part of President Brewster (and one or two members of the Corporation) about the original Cross Campus design-ranks of prominently raised skylights covering the entire central area between the Berkeley courtyards-killed it.

Other important details, unlikely to attract the President's attention. wiU be primarily the responsibility of the architects and Tanis. An example is the proposed connection between Linonia and Brothers and a projected Reserve Book Room on Wall Street. A connecting door in the north end of L&B has the double disadvantage of destroying the beauty and symmetry of that wall, with its handsome stone fireplace and mellow paneling, dominated by a portrait of Elihu Yale, and transforming the restful atmosphere of the reading room into a thoroughfare to the new Reserve Room. The necessity of connecting the two rooms at all has

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been questioned, and alternative proposals are being considered by the Librarian.

Designs are still in a flexible state for the entire library scheme, but final decisions on the Cross Campus spaces, currently scheduled for construction between mid-June, 1968, and September, 1969, will be made this month and next.

Much of the final decision-making will depend on detailed cost estimates. Many of the Library administration's original intentions have already been scrapped through lack of funds. Tentative cost for the entire scheme is $10 million, with about $2.5 million allotted for the Cross Campus expansion. The need for funds is acute, and donors have not been forthcoming, as the opportunity for personal monuments is not obvious in a project that is essentially an expansion of an alreadyexisting memorial building.

Thus the form of the Cross Campus Library is still subject to negotiation, although Barnes's office is proceeding at full speed toward completed construction documents for a skylit area. The month of June is, in their own words, their "incredible deadline." If excavation of the Cross Campus does not commence in June, 1968, it must be postponed until the annual summer dispersal of students and faculty in June, 1969.

U costs prove too high, or if sufficient public objection is raised, the less expensive, safer and aesthetically preferable alternative of a wholly underground library, without skylights, may be adopted.

Other alternatives exist. If natural light is insisted upon, the Library could provide for a light well (commonly called "moat" at Yale) at the base of the Cross Campus walls of Berkeley, between those structures and the present walkways. A local construction engineer has pronounced the proposal entirely feasible, and a successful precedent exists at Yale's Art and Architecture Building. There a two-story light well on Chapel Street illuminates both the Art Library and the Graphics Department below. An ingenious skylight system at the base of the well (with no vulnerable flat surfaces of glass) provides access to natural light for yet another story. A similar system on the north side of the Art Library lights two subsurface levels.

If used in the Cross Campus in lieu of a skylight system, a light well arrangement would have several important advantages.

It would enlarge the library, permitting the addition of another entire level of reading rooms (or a mezzanine), where the present cumbersome skylights permit only one level. It would provide floorto-ceiling windows and the natural light which is demanded by some Area Studies scholars. Finally, placed at the periphery, it would alter the appearance of the Cross Campus only minimally.

Approximately eight feet wide in each case, bordered on the surface by a low stone wall and suitably landscaped with shrubs and vines, the light wells could be made indistinguishable from similar arrangements which already exist on the east and west sides of Berkeley's south court.

The point is this: alternatives to the present plan do exist, and they could be worked out by the current designers. It must now be asked whether the architects' initial commitment to skylights and the University's hurry to begin excavating this June (rather than in 1969) have not left these alternatives unexplored. Decisions permanently affecting the physical

appearance of the center of the campus require not haste and "incredible deadlines" for architects, but thorough consideration.

Among those who would most like to see an alternative to the proposed disfigurement of James Gamble Rogers's masterly Cross Campus design and Sterling Library interior is Allan Greenberg, a local architect who received his Master of Architecture degree from Yale.

Greenberg is currently working on two important projects which, like Sterling, involve additions to existing twentiethcentury buildings: Paul Cret's Superior Court Building and Don Barber's Supreme Court Building, both in Hartford.

"A destructive and antagonistic attitude toward most buildings constructed in the first thirty or forty years of this century regrettably prevails among many architects today," Greenberg said recently.

The view which equates traditional Beaux Arts edifices with waste and degeneracy was first proclaimed by the Austrian Adolf Loos and reinforced by the dicta of the influential Bauhaus group of architects and artists. As the critic and historian Sir John Summerson has pointed out, the Bauhaus attitude has been endorsed and enforced with a puritanical zeal during the past thirty years. An intense distaste for and even fear of ornament, like that found in Sterling (and of course in earlier buildings), has led to its ruthless extermination.

"This same insensitivity,'' said Greenberg, "unfortunately prevails in the designs for a stairway (originally an escalator) in the main nave of Sterling, in the recently abandoned mezzanine plan for the Main Reading Room, in the plans to knock a door through the north wall of Linonia and Brothers, and in the needless destruction of the Cross Campus-which no sensitive architect could unabashedly pronounce an 'ugly, lifeless void.' " "It is particularly regrettable," he added, "that such a lack of accommodation toward existing buildings and spaces should be exhibited by the architectural firm which has charge of Yale's Master Plan."

Greenberg's thoughts are echoed by Wesley E. Needham, Curator of Tibetan Literature in the University Library, Fellow of Trumbull College, and former architectural draftsman to architect James Gamble Rogers. Needham worked for Rogers on four important buildings at Ya1e, all given by John William Sterling: the Library, Trumbull College (originally Sterling Quadrangle), the Law Buildings and the Hall of Graduate Studies.

"Mr. Sterling's will," Needham recalls, "left his estate to Yale for the erection of 'at least one enduring, useful, and architecturally beautiful edifice, which will constitute a fitting memorial of my gratitude to and affection for my Alma Mater.'" As it turned out, the estate, over $29 million, was sufficient to endow professorships, fellowships and scholarships, and to provide buildings for the Law School, Graduate School, Medical School, Divinity School, Sheffield Scientific School and Trumbull College.

But the executors of Sterling's will conceived of the Library as his principal memorial, and Rogers, as Sterling's personal friend, bent every effort to make this a reality.

"An artistic masterpiece is a creation which is entire in itself," Needham says.

"It is something to which nothing can

be added and from which nothing can be subtracted without destroying the integrity of that first conception. It cannot be emphasized too much that the Library and the Cross Campus were carefully planned as an integral whole. The Cross Campus is important as the approach and setting for the Library.''

Needham points out that Rogers intended the Library to be approached from the present walkways at the margin of the Cross Campus so the building would be viewed obliquely and picturesquely, its entrance porch and book tower seen in an active play of movement against each other. The building was to be seen fronta1ly only as one came to High Street, whereupon the book tower would recede more modestly behind the handsome details of the entrance.

The present banal scheme to move the walkways virtually to the center axis of the Cross Campus is, Needham feels, "an unthinking destruction of the entire original intention."

Needham's remarks recall the dedication ceremonies in 1931, when John Anson Garver presented the building's symbolic key to President Angell. Garver reminded his audience that the Library was planned and erected only after Sterling's death. "The vision of this crowning memorial was never contemplated by its donor. Under the spell of its strength and beauty and great spaces, one feels that Yale, in turn, is in some measure showing its appreciation and gratitude for these rich and enduring benefactions."

Sterling died a bachelor. Today no member of his family remains to protest what he would surely have regarded as the desecration of the ample nave and splendid setting of his memorial.

Unless someone else assumes that task, and asks postponement in order that alternatives may be considered, the very heart of the University will be irrevocably changed. Some argue that Yale cannot afford the time necessary to alter its present plans. Actually Yale cannot afford haste. Expenditure of millions of dollars is contemplated. As President Brewster himself has written, "The Library, of all the institutions of a university, is the one with the most pervasive effect upon the quality of the entire institution." If this is indeed true, can Yale afford m akeshift, short-term solutions made under the pressure of "incredible deadlines"?

If Cross Campus excavation and construction are postponed until June, 1969, the architects, the Librarian and the President will have time in which to consider and reflect unhurriedly upon the multiple a1ternatives to the present designs. In this way, the appearance of the Cross Campus and the fabric of Sterling may be preserved for the future.

Otherwise, as now planned, Yale's immediate gain will be 60,000 square feet of library space at a cost of $2.5 million.

But the long-run cost will be great. The University will mutilate a treasure, a masterpiece of craftsmanship and integrated planning. It will lose the last opel! space, the last great expanse of lawn in the center of the campus. It will lose, in effect, its very core--its heart. And that, by anyone's standards, is a bad bargain.

71 The New Journal I Aprill4, 1968

Revisionism in Yale's history department

by Martin Griffin Martin G ri/fin is an assistant professor II1Ui director of undergraduate studies In history.

The day after the Department of History announced the new changes in its undergraduate curriculum in January, the Yale Daily N ews carried an editorial congratulating the department for "a wise and imaginative restructuring" of the m ajor, resulting in "sufficient flexibility" for "the most specialized or the most catholic of minds." Such "thoughtful, creative curriculum planning," the News continued, was a compliment to Yale students' "academic maturity and integrity." ¡ Substantial changes in the curriculum of the H istory Department might be expected to attract the News' attention; History is Yale's largest department, with over 100 faculty members and affiliates, about 300 undergraduate majors, and for 1968-69, course offerings to the number of 130 terms. Yet if the News' attention was almost inevitably attracted, its praise is usually not easily won. The unanimous endorsement of the new program by the department and the enthusiasm it evoked from the News suggested that both teachers and students considered the changes to be judicious and timely.

Timely, certainly. The present program was barely five years old, but particularly within the past year it had increasingly become a focus of reflection and restlessness. Discussions among the faculty, particularly the junior faculty, exhibited a growing discontent with the pedagogical implications of some of the requirements of the major. In May, the Student Advisory Committee, beaded by Professor Robin W. Winks, had presented to John M. Blum, then Chairman, a long and reasoned critique of the undergraduate program, making recommendations that were directed neither at the faculty 's teaching nor at the department's offerings, but rather at restrictions against the students' fullest access to opportunities already available within the department. Most important, in the spring, Professor Henry A. Turner, Jr., a former Director of Undergraduate Studies in History, bad applied for and received support from the Moore Fund for a systematic and encompassing examination of the teaching of history in Yale College. His recommendations, grounded in part on his survey of history programs at other American universities, were to become the basis of the reforms enacted the following fall.

Everyone acknowledged that the chief barrier to reform was the departmental examination. How far it hampered the teaching of history in Yale College is only now becoming fully apparent. But last year it was apparent enough. In April, the Course of Study C ommittee voted to propose in the fall that departments be allowed to devise alternatives to the standard two-day, four-hours-per-day examination that had been required in Yale College since 1937.

The examination was unsatisfactory, of course, not per se but because of the degree to which it determined the entire structure of the history major. Any history department must be concemed that its students' schedules show both specialization and diversity. But because Yale College required a two-day examination, the History Department was obliged to translate this concem into a requirement that each student display equal competence in two areas of history out of eight, defined geographically. This amounted to something like demanding two majors, and it committed the under-

graduate program to a geographical division of historical fields that was both confining and old-fashioned. It is true that the department's offerings were abundant, and that the eight areas, of which the student had to pick two, covered almost the entire earth. But anyone with a scintilla of imagination can slice 100 courses in more than eight ways. Thus a student who wanted a perfectly sensible and not very daring topical specialty, like intellectual history or social history, or a completely respectable chronological one, like nineteenth-century Britain and Europe, was discouraged and sometimes actually prevented by the structure of the major from pursuing it.

The restrictions that the examination thus imposed on the department's free utilization of its resources were a comparatively recent phenomenon, the result of the growing depth and diversity of the resources themselves. The 1967-68 Programs of Study catalog took 15 pages to list well over 100 terms of history courses, somewhat fewer than a third of them in non-Western history. In 20 years the number of courses had almost doubled, and the proportion of non-Western courses to those in the traditional field had tripled.

This expansion of the curriculum was a function of an impressive growth in the size of the staff from about 30 in 1948 to about 60 in 1960 and to about 100 in 1967, a signal that the department had aggressively and spiritedly determined to make its province the entire globe and its business history in all its manifestations.

Such a determination issued from a host of factors, chief among them a post-war intellectual reorientation of the entire nation, and closer to home, the University's decision in the Fifties to support area studies programs on an ambitious scale.

This was the background of this fall's reorganization of the history curriculum, after the Yale College Faculty had approved the Course of Study Committee's proposal on the departmental examination in early November. The fundamental question which then faced the department seemed straightforward: By what administrative machinery could the department best employ its resources in teaching history to undergraduates? Like many simple questions, this one masked complications of some magnitude. What, for example, is history? No history department worth its hire would be able to answer that question with one voice, but two propositions were self-evident, and on them Professor Tumer based his recommendations. The first was that whatever else history is, it is written; and the second was that, as Turner's proposal declared, there is a "vital distinction between history as the events of the past and history as the discipline of historical inquiry." That distinction, he added, was one which the present major had failed to convey to many students, and one which could be conveyed, in his judgment, only by allowing (or requiring) each student to write an independent historical essay.

He therefore proposed that beginning with the Class of 1970, the department require an historical essay from each senior. He recommended a maximum length of 50 pages. on the well-known grounds that it is easier to write 100 pages than a polished essay of 50 pages on the same subject, and in order to emphasize the department's conviction that, as the 1968-69 catalogue declares, ..precision, revision, and conciseness are essential to good historical writing or, for that matter,

to good writing of any sort." The faculty unanimously endorsed this proposal, and did so with full knowledge that it would mean additional work for everyone, since each essay would receive individual supervision from a member of the faculty in the area of the student's topic.

Besides the historical essay, Turner made another proposal: that each major be required, during his junior year, to take a seminar in a subject of his choice, both to deepen his knowledge in his field of concentration and to prepare himself for the writing of his essay during senior year.

This recommendation met with instant acceptance. By last fall there was not a member of the faculty who did not realize that the department's seminars were probably its soundest, most popular and most productive courses, thoroughly tested by development and growth over a number of years. Under the rubric of History 80, History 81 and History 85, these seminars had increased from about seven or eight a year during the Fifties and early Sixties, to more than 20 during the academic year 1967-68. Admission bad been competitive, sometimes intensely so.

Students liked them for at least two reasons. One was that the standards enforced in the seminars were professional, and the s<udent of the "New Yale" was increasingly at least sub-professional in his approach to his studies. Another reason was that the seminars were both participatory and personalized and thus agreed with certain other pedagogical ideals of present-day undergraduates. Instructors liked such seminars because they permitted teaching from one's strengths and research interests and because the students in them tended to be unusually hard-working and responsive.

Obligatory rather than optional seminars meant that the department would have to provide more of them. The answer to this problem was at hand. The substitution of an historical essay for the departmental examination freed the staff of History 89, of whom there were thirteen, for new seminars. History 89 was a mandatory reading program for history majors, defined not so much on its own terms as in terms of the examination, for which, inter alia, its purpose was to prepare seniors. Well-intentioned, wellmanned, theoretically well-cqnceived, it had from its origin been unpopular with both faculty and students because of its inescapable role as a "prep course for the comps." With the abolition of the examination and consequently of History 89, the department was in the enviable position of being able to make a requirement which it could enforce with excellence and variety, one which possessed demonstrated appeal to both instructors and students. The new seminars are called History 91, and next year there will be well over 30 of them. Their function, in Professor Turner's words, will be to give students "a thorough grounding in the subject matter, while at the same time providing them with the skills required to write history," each instructor being left substantially free to determine the most appropriate ways of achieving these objectives in his own seminar.

The historical essay during senior year and the History 91 seminar during junicx year are thus the core of the department's new program. Mutalis mutandis, the essay-seminar combination bad defined the old Intensive Major, which was discontinued because any distinction

continrud on fJ48e 14

8 I The New Journal! Apri114, 1968

In Which our Hero lashes out against the evils of Vase

It's hard to tell someone who has never surfed what it's like. I know what it's like.

I have known the waves, and I have participated in the ritual. It is a ritual, repeated endlessly in winter and summer, threatened only by outsiders and school.

Usually three or four of us go surfing together-"The Group"-hard-core surfers from the low-rent, high-motivation district of a small Los Angeles suburb.

An alarm clock can scramble brains at five in the morning, but with effort you can be on the road in fifteen minutes.

The hour trip to Ventura passes quickly with stories of the night before. The morning fog begins to clear and the sun rises as we ride through Ventura on the way to Doc's point. If the surf isn't in good form, we go to the Donut Doctor in Carpenteria and then hustle back to Doc's or wherever the surf is best. A couple more cigarettes, a few songs on the radio, and it's time to take the surfboards down to the water and head out into the foaming waves. Oh God, the waves.

During the long talks surfers have on warm summer nights, they often discuss the problems of overcrowding, but generally surfers recount past surfing experiences and attempt to explain the sport's appeal to the individual, attempt to explain just what it is about the waves.

This is where they get themselves in trouble, because the sport cannot even be explained by those closest to it.

"HelJ, it's funzoo, that's all."

"I don't know man, surfing's a feeling, a groove."

Good surfing is art. It is an ephemeral kick for most surfers, a hobby for others, and for a few it is a search for wisdom, a religion-the watery pantheism of a group indifferent to all except the sea and its waves. To non-surfers this devotion may seem bewildering. But they just don't know what it's like.

Look around you. College life, both academic and social, is all right, but after a while you get fed up to HERE. When the sun is warm, Yale becomes so much like a pay toilet it scares me. I have no time Bryan DiSa/vatore, a sophomore in Yale College and a surfer since the age of nine, is the owner of more thanJorty issues of Surfer Magazine.

for library tans. The same goes for after college. How many people can look at themselves and say honestly, "Wow, I'm happy, I'm doing exactly what I want with my life''? Surfing gives you, among other things, a good perspective on life.

Really, most people today are losing big, and they never realize it.

Surfers are romantics in a world that has little time for such people. They live for the waves, and little else matters when the surf is good. "There were these three bitchin' girls from Newport that we met who invited us to their apartment Saturday night. We knew we could get 'em. Potentially a good scene. But we went to Pipes that day, and the surf was bonus. It ' stayed glassy all day with perfect shape.

Well, we finally got out of the water at eight that evening. We had blown the whole thing with the chicks, but who's complaining? You can always get laid, but you just don't find good surf that often.. " The surfer travels miles for that instant beneath the curl, within the wave. Only rarely do surfers bring girls to the beach.

The surfer, standing at an altar of fantasy and freedom, before the waves whose beauty, pleasure and challenge are sufficient, needs no women. At night wine flows and the women are numerous, but they are not part of the individual mystique of surfer and wave.

"Which would you rather have-a six-foot day at Malibu or Raquel Welch?''

"Well ... how many waves do I get?"

Not many sports can ask such a formidable question. Perhaps part of the surfing mystique stems from its Spanish heritage. By the late 1950's, many California surfers were heading south, into Baja California and beyond, to Mazatlan and La Paz. The life--one of sun and vino. The pace-"Lento, senor, Iento."

They came home besandaled carrying botas and serapes. The bullfights in Tijuana added another aspect to the surfers' symbolic life. Their boards became a synthesis of cape and sword, sliding smoothly along the wave; their footwork the ballet of the torero.

If surfing. is art and ballet, it is also rhythm, the movement of the surfer on the face of a shimmering green wall. A continuous flowing, one part falling into the next. The effortless dignity of an athlete blending with the waves' fluctuations. The

nebulous, quixotic life of the surfer, with each wave different from its predecessor, grabs hold of you and rarely lets go.

Phil Edwards, shaper for Hobie Surfboards and probably the best surfer alive, laughs, "Surfing sells you down the river.

You are gently jazzed until you die."

Once this feeling bits you, it is impossible to sit at a desk in Dirt City. You can never again view the industrial (or academic) empire you are a part of without regret.

A few days or weeks out of the water and you snap. You look at insurance company calendars to see if the seascapes have any rideable waves. There is no time for the super-sophisticated, bored, "Ohgawd-Irving-where-is-it-all-going-toend?" attitude. Surfers are jazzed, "plugged into life," a life revolving completely around surfing.

Surfers generally live in the present, for the present, their existence only slightly overlapped by the near past and future. But the ancient past of surfing is of interest, if only to demonstrate that it is not a new kick. When Captain Cook arrived in Hawaii in 1778, he was amazed by the bronze, nude pagans riding waves at Waikik1 on ten to eighteen-foot boards.

When the Bounty arrived in Tahiti, the crew saw ... surfers. Oceania was crawling with them.

Surfing was the central activity. The harvesting was forgotten if the surf came up. It was so much a part of their life that it was a part of courtship, with special privileges given to a man and woman riding the same wave together. This attitude toward surfing was Ka Nalu, the study of the wave. It was a path toward harmony with nature, and nature was God. By the turn of the century, Hawaii was becoming a popular tourist attraction.

Among the tourists were California businessmen who saw the exotic appeal surfing had for the mainlanders. Boards were rented out and haoles, with the help of a beach boy ("$2.50 'n hour make-a-you 'n wahine damgood sufurs ...hokay?''), could ride to the sands of Waikiki and write back to Wichita, etc., to teU their friends about it. But this surfing was hollow. Ka Nalu was to remain submerged for a decade or two longer.

By 1912, surfing hasi come to California, and the businessmen's efforts had turned the tourist flow from a trickJe to

a torrent in Hawaii. The sport was on the rise. This increase in activity was slow because of the 125-pound redwood boards used at the time, but the nucleus of dedicated surfers was growing. The depression came, and "There's no jobs, so let's go surfing." A small group of co11ege men lived on Southern California beaches with the Ka Nalu mystique maturing until the war came and scattered them.

During the war, a skinny misanthrope with a crippled arm witnessed surfing for the first time. An engineering student at Caltech, he studied the "orbital flow of water particles" and watched the waves.

He built a new surfboard-designed to fit the wave, light and maneuverable-and added a fin for stability. The war ended, and the surfers returned. The Bob Simmons Era was born.

These surfers were not teenagers, but upper-class intellectuals, good-looking and tough, or as Dave Rochlen says, "solid guys who had this sport to themselves."

On their new boards they raced ahead of the curl, always following Simmons.

The cripple was their leader. ("Like the guy in The Fountainhead .... He was a man ... Neither gave nor asked quarter from anyone. 'Screw all you guys,' he'd say.")

They went to the Islands, and came back to California, restless men with a hybrid Hawaiian-Malibu way of life.

In the years 1945-54, surfing's Golden Age was reincarnated. The shacks sprung up at Windansea and Malibu, the men were lean and tough, oblivious to the writhing metropolis a few miles away.

"I knew Blackie August," Rochlen recalls. "Lived in a cave at Palos Verdes Cove. He had a forty-gallon oil drum with a spigot for heat and light. He lived off nature, eating lobsters and stealing berries." The men were alone for the most part, living for the waves, enjoying life as the ancient Hawaiians must have. But things were changing.

In 1954 a newspaper estimated there were 1500 surfers in the Southland.

The number soon doubled and tripled.

It had to. Can a Kansas summer compare to one in California? Simmons was no longer alone. The city was upon him. ne beach became a place to bring your girl and hoot with your guitar. Surfing was 00

91 The New Journal I April 14, 1968

·ety and strikes a blow for the Legions oftheJazzed.

longer anti-social. Jan and Dean tell it like it was: I'm gointa Surf City, Gonna shoot the curl.

Gonna check out all the parties For a surfer girl.

The men were out of place, Simmons most of all. Many went to Oahu's north shore, to escape the crushing hordes for a few more years. But wherever Simmons turned, he felt hemmed in: "I like to think that with quantity comes shit."

In 1954 at Windansea, the storm surf came. Simmons drowned under one of the waves. It was, in a way, almost mer!=iful that he died before he could see what has happened to s urfing since then.

A new shack appeared at Malibu, but the original occupants had gone. Mickey Dora, a bridge between the two eras, expresses the thoughts of those who lived with Malibu in the early '50's: "Life is too short. Why make anything of it?"

If the previous years were surfing's new Golden Age, these were its most colorful. "Nobody worked, our hair was long.... I guess we were pretty grubby.''

This group was younger, from 20 to 25.

The days of style: the Dypso Calypso, the Quasimodo, el spontaneo, Tubesteak, No Pants Lance, Isaac and the Perves, the Fiasco Kid, Beakus and The Bag were their names. Malibu was loud and wildHoly Communion with Thunderbird wine and Langendorf bread, bullfights at Tijuana, beer and Gidget.

Gidget, a "girl midget" as the story goes, 1ras sent by her father to pump the surfers at girl-free (not girl-less) Malibu for material for a novel. The girl's father llnelled a winner, and in 1957 Gidget &ppeared. The bestselling novel turned Malibu inside out, eventually covering it 1rith thick brown muck. Today it is the Mecca for all the fat tourists renting boards and tasting the good lifeanother dying world.

Gidget was made into a movie, and IUddenly everybody was surfing. The 1r00dies rolled up and down the coast hipway, filled with a new breed. Malibu 1ras a wasteland filled with mindless status leek:ers (average age: 16). The Doras IOd Tubesteaks were pushed back to make I'Oom for the mob. The ANNETTE PllNICELLO ERA had arrived (electric

guitar fanfare-pan to 25 Hollywood fakes running into Lake Placid yelling "Surf's Up!"), with the Malibu regulars crying at the confusion of their lost world and laughing as they picked up their checks for riding in the surfing shots of Beach Blanket Bingo. For many, a bottle of peroxide to bleach the hair replaced the sun; others cruised the streets with neverused boards on the tops of cars. "I don't surf'' was equivalent to "I don't wash."

There was almost total acceptance of surfing among youth. The new kick. The adults were appalled at the long-haired hordes engulfing towns, raping and burning. Most of the trouble was caused by the people who had hopped off the set of "The Wild One" into "Gidget."

These were the periphery, the moscas, many of whom have since traded their surfboards and wax for beads and grass to impress the tourists on Sunset Boulevard, and can be seen as the extras for The Trip today.

From a few isolated rebels, surfing bad developed into a fad which engulfed American youth. Finally, inevitably following Hollywood, Madison Avenue discovered the gigantic market. Hungry surfers rode waves for the Pepsi Generation, sprawled themselves on Hamrn's Beer billboards, and rode into America's living rooms on shows like "Surf's Up" and "Wide World of Sports."

The surfboard industry is now a multimillion dollar business on both coasts with a lot of manufacturers producing up to six thousand boards a year. Like baseball and golf equipment, surfing bas its signature models. Models with catchy names trap the novice with their "incrowd" connotations: The Hustler, Da' Cat, Super Ugly, Blue Machine. Wax, trunks, surfboard racks, interchangeable tins, and even hand tins (to make paddling easier, of course) are available.

Surfing is becoming "sophisticated,"' but for the few who really love the 'q>Ort, who would be out in the water even if the world bad never heard of surfing, all they need is a board, trunks, wax and waves. (Note that sun is not included.

I remember more than once huddling over a fire with a few friends, shivering in the California winter with blue knees and numb feet.) Surfers tend to congregate where other people are not, and rarely

bring suntan lotion, college or fraternity sweatshirts, transistor radios or the other essentials of a Fort Lauderdale Survival Kit to the beach.

The surfboard, of course, is of prime importance, the surfer's one real love.

You often see battered cars at the beach (nothing seems quite so incongruous as a Cadillac with a surfboard on top), but rarely will a top surfer ride a board that isn't in excellent condition. A ding (a dent or shatter in the board) causes much swearing, a wrecked board breaks a surfer's heart. I remember the summer in Mexico when our car spun out at 70 mph, destroying my new board. Upon regaining consciousness and crawling through the front window, I went directly to the board and bemoaned its splintered remains, completely forgetting my friends' condition. Surfers try to be like other people, but they always slip up.

With all the publicity given to surfing during the last few years, the California coast has become a fiberglass ocean.

Everyone wants a part of the glory. But just as Yale is the acne-faced masturbator sitting alone in his room on Saturday night as well as the sports-car driving, frat-rat, ass bandit, surfing is not solely composed of the muscular, tanned deities of the waves. A friend of mine recently sold his board to some fourteen-year-old kid.

The would-be surfer drove up with his family, bought the board, and couldn't even lift it onto the car.

Often, after fighting for position on a wave, at the same time trying to avoid three or four other surfers, I dream of an isolated ~ach in western Australia.

Nobody is within a hundred miles of me except a few friends, enjoying the waves by day, the beer and conversation by night.

I wonder what it would have been like to surf in nineteenth-century California, or twentieth-century California with everyone gone because of the bomb.

Everyone except me and a quiver of surfboards.

Surfing is the kick. that can cure you of your complexes, real back-to-the-womb stuff. It can give "inner peace," a sort of wet transcendental meditation. Putting one's self next to nature, all is forgotten except the waves. It is a contest with few rules and many rewards. As Mickey Dora says, you can "live and ride nature's

waves, without the oppressive hang-up of the mad insane complex that runs the world."

Few except surfers know how the eyes strain for the first look at the ocean, and the endless conjecture as to what the surf. will be like; afterwards the satisfied reflection over a good ride, the warm, tired, healthy feeling after a day's waves and an anxiousness for tomorrow. It's an exclusive club. Phil Edwards calls nonmembers the "legions of the unjazzed."

Yale is teeming with legions of the unjazzed.

This may seem over-idealized and maudlin to the mayonnaise-pill people of Yale, but this is Surfing. These are the feelings of surfers everywhere. This is why we pity people spending summers in New York, Chicago and St. Louis. There's not a hell of a lot to smile about today, but surfers have found something.

These are incredible times. Thank God for a few free waves.

"Full steam ahead, Poughkeepsie!" said President Alan Simpson, as he announced to his faculty that Vassar wasn"t moving to Yale. After vigorous applause, a profe~~r ro:.e to say be felt ..uniquely privileged to be at this historical turning point.'"

"You bet it's a historical turning point.·· muttered a teacher to his colleague. "It's just like the day the Romans let the barbarians cross the Rhine."

The Vassar-Yale Story Inside Out In the next issue of The New Journal

10 I The New Journal! Apri114, 1968

Mr. Midshipman goes to college: a lesson in doublethink

by William Yuen As a result of recent student and faculty criticism, the status of Yale's Reserve Officer Training Corps and Naval ROTC programs is now under investigation. In accordance with contracts between the University and the secretaries of the Army and Navy, Yale grants credit for courses taken under the military programs, and also provides the military with classrooms, drill fields, offices and office equipment, storage space, heat, light, telephones, maintenance, janitors, and secretaries, all free of charge.

The Student Advisory Board recently recommended that credit for military courses be denied, and that the military be charged for its use of Yale facilities. The Course of Study Committee is now reviewing the recommendations, and the Yale Corporation is planning to review the University's relationship with the military.

Mephistopheles offered knowledge, power and material pleasures to Faust if he would sign away his soul. Faust developed some reservations about his bond, but he managed to ignore almost all the warning signs. He didn't get quite what he expected.

The United States Navy approached me with a similar deal: Knowledge-a four-year scholarship to any of 52 top colleges; Power- the opportunity to command and lead men and ships; and Material Pleasure- join the Navy and see the world. I accepted, and the Navy has supplied the benefits. The price: surrender of my soul to four years of active duty.

Faust could have appealed to God, but I have no similar recourse.

I tried to break the bond, but the Navy does not give up without a fight. My attempts to resign from NROTC were stifled. I was treated like a heretic, a wayward sinner who would ultimately see the light and return to the fold. The only way to separate m yself from NROTC was to flunk naval science, a seemingly impossible task. But I managed. I failed both the fall semester final and a special re-exam, thereby immediately making myself liable for a maximum of two years' active duty as a Navy enlisted man.

As of April 1, 1968, I have been formally separated from the Navy and my appointment as Midshipman, USNR has been terminated. Although this is not a discharge, the Navy has decided not to keep me as an enlisted man and hold me to the two years' active duty requirement stipulated in my contract.

I came to seek disengagement from the NROTC because I could no longer, in good conscience, voluntarily accept the responsibility of ordering subordinates to perform tasks that I find reprehensible, and because I could no longer condone the presence on the Yale campus of an organization that inculcates authoritarian and militaristic values in students . While I consider myself a conscientious objector to the Vietnam war, I do not consider going to jail a positive solution to the problem. I will probably surrender to a call to active duty, but not until I have exercised all legal means of protest.

When I came to Yale, the decision to join NROTC seemed logical. I graduated from Punahou, one of nine private, nonmilitary schools in the country that require Junior ROTC . In my senior year I won the outstanding cadet award and placed first in the state NROTC college aptitude test. I was like a lot of other relatively immature boys who are overwhelmed by a $4000 annual education bill and want to make it easier on Dad ; an NROTC scholarship seemed the perfect way to get both a commission in the Navy and a free college education.

I had never questioned the purpose, ideology or even educational policy of the military; and there was no one to point out the dangers. Junior ROTC was like a game that everybody had to play, complete with uniforms and toy guns.

I did not realize that a liberal arts education and a military education would be incompatible. The former encourages the student to question and criticize in his search for the truth, while the latter preaches a fixed truth and discourages innovation. The two disciplines are mutually exclusive, producing intellectual schizophrenia.

William Yuen, a senior in Yale College, is majoring in history.

I first began to question the implications of my involvement in NROTC last year. During my first two years here, even my closest friends described me as a militant fascist. But the absurdity and immora lity of our military involvement in Vietnam and its adverse effects on domestic policy made me reconsider my commitment to the Navy. After spending half of last summer playing world policeman on ships of the US Sixth Fleet, I was convinced that the authoritarian and irra tional military mind is a distinct threat to freedom of thought and action in America rather than the guardian of our liberties and defender of the free world.

The military man tends to see all issues in terms of h arsh opposites. People, nations and causes are seen as either good or bad, friendly or unfriendly, Free or Communist ; the military concept of reality is the only concept of reality. The moral code is based on discipline in defense of lofty goals; freedom , individual liberty, private property, law and order. But to defend freedom in the abstract, the military man must give up most of his persona l freedom, for the maintenance of order always outweighs any concern for the individual. To sustain the morale that e nables the US to maintain a perpetual state of military readiness throughout the world, the military man must convince both himself and the rest of the country that our way of life is constantly menaced. Naval Leadership, a book used in Naval Science 402 at Yale, articulates this divine mission: To the people of the United States fall the moral duties of supporting freedom and the men throughout the world who are trying to gain it or regain it for themselves and their people. This support will take many forms, all involving a certain amount of sacrifice. All of these will divert energy and money from the increase of the American standard of living. The stabilization of the standard of living may be compensation in itself because it has been demonstrated by history that civilizations usually begin to decay when the way of life of the people becomes too soft; that is, when the standard of living becomes too high.

The American people ... must feel a debt of gratitude to God for providing the great natural resources which have contributed to the overwhelming power and force that can be mustered in support of righteousness and freedom. America has no choice but to become protector of the right in the world.

The NROTC freshman is presented with a quasi-intellectual background for the military ethic as he studies naval history. Man's progress is revealed as a continuous development of better techniques and weapons of destruction.

Naval history is the continuous struggle for control of the seas. For instance, freshmen are taught the doctrine of sea power as preached by Alfred Thayer Mahan.

Until he became a professor at the Naval War College in 1885, Mahan was against an American colonial empire, "not only to save the expense of the large navy that would be necessary to protect them, but also to avoid the dominance of a powerful military caste over the democratic processes of government." But as he studied Britain's rise to world dominance, illusions of grandeur and glory filled his bead. He decided that the United

States possessed all the prerequisites for being a great empire on the English model except for a government that understood and appreciated the value of sea power , and he began to agitate for a strong navy and the acquisition of colonies. A n avy was necessary to the colonies, and the colonies were needed to sustain the overseas navy. This circular reasoning is unfortunately still promoted as a valid scholarly basis for American naval power.

NROTC teaches Mahan's thought to establish an intellectual framework for future study, and this is the basis of a n NROTC education.

What does it mean to be a midshipman?

NROTC midshipmen are expected to comport themselves as officers. This means not only short hair and coat and tie, but also an unquestioning acceptance both of government pQlicy and of all regulations of the program. ''1be m ilitary is not a democracy," says an instructor .

A midshipman is not limited in the courses he may take, but be is prohibited from majoring in art, pre-medicine and some other fields. He is not discouraged from participating in extracurricular activities, but he receives a higher aptitude for the service rating if he is "more active in NROTC than in other campus affairs" or if be demonstrates "insatiable and boundless curiosity with regard to naval activities and extreme pride in the service."

Midshipmen are forbidden to express publicly any views critical of current national policy. I learned this after writing a letter to the Yale Daily News criticizing the NROTC program. "Naval officers," m y commanding officer informed me in private, "do not picket, naval officers do not protest, naval officers do not sign petitions. Such actions do not inspire loyalty in the men. If officers set a .bad example, the men will feel it is all right for them to revolt." This rule is not only a violation of the individual's freedom of speech under the guise of military expediency, but an intellectual crutch as well. While it may be justifiable for an officer on active duty to be muzzled, should a student suffer repercussions for writing a paper critical of American policy or participating in a legitimate demon¡ stration?

The content of NROTC courses is intellectually repugnant; yet Yale encourages the program by giving it academic credit even when its teaching and procedur es fall far short of the Yale norm. After the freshman course in naval history and sophomore courses in computer theory and psychology taught by the Yale faculty, the naval science curriculum becomes more of a trade-school course than a science. Courses in naval operations, naval leadership, naval engineering and navigation become exercises in regurgitation of technical data and filling out forms.

C ontrary to popular opinion, NROTC courses are not guts; they do require work and the grades are not unusually high.

But they are unique at Yale in that they require a minimum of creative thinking.

Regulation of both subject matter and teaching lies outside normal faculty controls. Although they have not earned Ph.D.'s, naval officers on active duty are named assistant, associate and full professors by Yale. The unit's commanding officer is appointed chairman of the Naval Science Department. Content of the courses is determined by the Navy and is subject to modification only by the . individual instructor and the commandiDI

ll I The New Journal! Apri114, 1968

officer. The Course of Study Committee continues to award academic credit for naval science courses although it has no control over the content of these courses.

Some of the midshipmen share my opposition to American military and foreign policy and to particular aspects of the NROTC program. But they justify its presence and their participation in the program by saying that Yale should be permitted to produce her small share of leaders for the military establishment.

They share my fears about dominance of the mindless products of the service academies. But we differ in that they feel the only way to change the military system is to work within it. Anyone with the patience to endure the restrictions and frustrations and to emerge thirty-five years later at the pinnacle of the Naval heap will have made so many adjustments and concessions to the military system that he could be but a shadow of the liberal, critical, thinking individual he was at arad uation.

My own experiences on summer cruises have only served to convince me that democracy has more to fear from the men who man her defenses and the system they perpetuate than from any Viet Cong auerrilla fighting for his freedom.

The USS Charles Francis Adams is one of sixty-plus ships that at any given time compose the US Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean. The captain of the ship, a araduate of the Naval War College and an admirer of Yale history professor

Gaddis Smith, consented to give his eight embarked midshipmen a lecture on the goals of the US Navy in the Mediterranean. "The two purposes of the Sixth Fleet," he began, "are containment of Soviet naval power in the Med and keeping the peac~in that order."

The discussion moved to Vietnam and I found myself confronted by a roomful of hawks. The captain and my fellow middies from Annapolis believed that if the US pulled out of Vietnam, that natio n would be overrun by faceless yellow communist hordes. They all made references to the devious Oriental mind, the international communist goal of world domination and historical precedent--China had always been invading Vietnam. I tried to remind them that China's domination of Vietnam had always been tenuous and that both Viet Cong and North Vietnamese movements were nationalist as well as communist. The captain retorted with the Truman doctrine-the US should move anywhere to contain communism. An Academy stalwart, who had previously informed me that Filipino stewards (present on all Navy ships), although they might be college graduates, preferred to wait on American officers because they could make more money than they might as teachers in the Philippines, concluded our discussion by stating that Korea was the perfect example of an American-supported stable government-police state and all.

I knew when I was beaten, and I knew then that I had to get out.

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Every reader will share the shock of the moment when Marcus, contrary to everything his tife has stood for, commits a wild, irrevocable act. Every reader will be left wondering whether he would have behaved any differently.

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121 The New Journal! April 14, 1968

The Wayward Puritans by Kal Erikson 228 pages, John Wiley and Sons Couples by John Updike 458 pages, Affred A. Knopf Monkey on a String by Joseph VIertel 456 Pages, Trident Press

The Wayward Puritans

Couples

Part of every society is the constant search to define right from wrong, good from evil, normality from abnormality, etc. One mechanism whereby a society defines its position on various moral and legal issues is by promoting people to fill roles which test the issues.

These testers are called deviants, and this adjudication process serves to articulate the value issues for the society. Once the issues have been aired, the testers may continue to be viewed as deviants, or under certain circumstances, as heroes.

A case in point would be the recent developments o n issues which have concerned students intensely. One year ago, it was highly probable that a young man who burned his Selective Service card in defiance of the draft law would have been quickly singled out and prosecuted. Lately, however, because entire groups of students congregate to defy the Selective Service System, and because religious and educational leaders have sanctioned the burning of the draft cards, the incidence of prosecution is extremely low. Similarly, anyone supporting Eugene McCarthy three months ago was considered a deviant, but the New Hampshire Democratic Primary provided a public airing of the issues. Today the M cCarthyites stand vindicated, and certainly as time goes on they are no longer considered the deviants they Qnce were. The deviant in society forever takes the risks, and gambles against the odds, while the rest of society acts as the censor-the Liberal vs. the Conservative incarnate.

In The Wayward Puritans, Kai Erikson offers us a volume clearly wr itten and highly relevant to these current social situations. Employing the methodologies of sociology and history, Erikson extrapolates from the early Puritan exper ience certain modes of behavior which he postulates can be treated as an example of hu man life everywhere.

The study is based on the French sociologist Emile Durkheim's functional approach to society. One of the major postulates of this theory is that society can be viewed as a self-perpetuating mechanism, as an equilibrium-seeking entity, always tending towards homeostasis. Functionalists look at social behavior in terms of what that behavior contributes to the maintenance of a given society. Certain forms of behavior are termed eufunctional or functional if they make a positive contribution to society, and dysfunctional if they contribute negatively.

Within this framework Erikson examines the functions of deviance in a society. Can deviance play a positive role in a society? In Eriksons words, " ... does it make any sense to assert that deviant forms of behavior are a natural or even beneficial part of social life?" Erikson answers yes.

H is study is not based solely on scientific method, but is directed towards important scientific questions. It would be easy to praise or criticize the book on the basis of its methodological successes and limitations. On the one hand Erikson succeeded in .finding a community for study that was sufficiently isolated so that his data accurately reflected some of the internal dynamics of that society. On the other hand, the book may be criticized because the same isolation factor makes the society so unique as to make generalization impossible.

It might be more profitable to ask for what purposes society designates certain behavior as deviant. Erikson hypothesizes that the purposes are to identify and maintain social boundaries. One might wonder why, after making this observation, he failed to discuss its moral implications. Erikson alludes to the moral social value by suggesting that labeling of behavior as deviant is a positive benefit; however, he does not consider the labeling mechanism in the open.

If Erikson is correct in asserting that society labels an almost infinite variety of behavior as eccentric and deviant, then surely it is important to face the next intellectual task of questioning whether people can be sacrificed in their roles of deviants for the social purpose of testing boundar ies. Are there other methods of setting limits in social space? Is it possible that promoting a group of citizens into cr iminality is too high a price for society to pay?

Any restaurant or train-station bookrack has a novel or two about life in some sm all New England town where adultery is the chief excitement. I'm afraid that J ohn Updike's new novel, Couples, 'fill soon join them, pinkflesh-and-black-underwear cover and all.

But the life of Updike's novel may not be confined to the porno shelves. T he blurb on the inside flap of the cover gives a foretaste of what will happen if and when the book is taken up by college courses in American fiction.

It reads, "The circle of acqua intances is felt as a magic circle, with ritual games, religious substitutions, a priest (Freddy Thorne), and a scapegoat (Piet H anema)."

Which is a strange way to advertise a book by a novelist whose experiments with heavy symbolism have already earned him a great deal of unfavorable criticism.

The novel is, in fact, a serious attempt to deal with the ennui of suburban life and its opiate, adultery. Tarbox, the setting for this study of drained existences, is an old Massachusetts Bay settlement. Close enough to Boston to be within commuting distance, and yet far enough out along the shore to be a desirable "country" residence, it has been taken over by young professional couples and their playpen development houses.

Piet Hanema, somewhat reluctantly, is their real estate man and builder. At one stroke he gained both his wife Angela and his business from his father-in-law. The couple's marriage is pervaded by resentment of this arrangement. They use their sexual r elationship to fence with one another. Angela claims to be frigid with her energetic husband, who is a lready unsettled by confused guilts over the death of his p arents in a car accident.

As always, Upd ike is very successful in depicting the arrested young American m ale. With seeming ease Piet searches for peace of mind a mong the wives of the couples who make up his tennis-and-cocktails set. A variety of similar frustrations make them willing partners.

As an epigraph Couples has a quotation from Paul T illich's Future of Religions which describes the increasing apathy of professional people toward the formal processes of society. Tillich claims that this is a condition unfavorable to the preservation of democracy but favorable to the rise of religions. Updike's characters are seeking fulfillment of the kind that religion offers, but Christianity is dead for them. Nor does society offer them any acceptable forms of morality. In the background Kennedy is shot down in Dallas and J ohnson becomes President, but these events in no way interweave with the lives of Tarbox. On the night of the assassination the couples decide that it is better to suffer together than alone, and their commiseration leads to just another party.

Similarly, local politics are merely a diversion for the couples. When they become involved, it is because a cause happens to be fashionable. Their indifference and cynicism lead them to ignore public issues.

But they prove to have no alternative source of strength in their personal worlds. Personal r elationships provide no workable set of values. What love there is between these people is brittle and sour, so that each affair declines from the moment of its consummation. The attraction is the adventure, the assertion of freedom and the sense of plundering that each infidelity entails. But once the desire for these is satisfied, and it is very soon, the affairs degenerate into routines ruffled by petty resentment and conflicting demands. Experiment adds nothing: this is sex without conviction.

The mutual absorption of the couples is part of their conspiracy to maintain a fiction of youth. While their children explore the darkness of the woods, caught up in fierce antagonisms and profound anxieties, their fathers play touch football and basketball. At a party the adults make a cumbersome and pathetic attempt to Twist. The scenes of their "making out" belong to the world of Holden Caulfield.

Updike's writing throughout is as meticulously finished and self-conscious as ever. But whether by accident or design, it serves a fine purpose here. The adjectivally over-abundant descriptions are not erotic. They cover the love-making with a veneer of false lyricism, an intellectuality which discloses its hollowness. They render the barren tedium of a way of living that should be wished on nobody.

Ronald Barson

Tony Miles

13 I The New Journal I Aprill4, 1968

Monkey o n a String

The implications of a white man writing a novel about a black man have been argued back and forth in the past literary year in a dizzying sort of intellectual table-tennis.

The problem of resolving William Styron's responsibilities as either pure artist or as socio-political speaker in a lime of racial turmoil is made more difficult by Styron's pretensions of writing the "confessions" of a slave in 1830.

In Monkey on a String, Joseph Viertel undertakes what seems to be the same impossible task of white writing about black, and yet skillfully avoids the obviousness of Styron's mistake. Viertel's protagonist, Marcus Garvey Holmes, is a Northern black man who has "made it," i.e., has accepted the role of white man's Negro in contemporary American society. The novel is basically the chronicle of his growth from "black brat" in a Connecticut slum to ambassador to a newly emerging African nation. Against a well-documented, realistic background of ambassadorial politics, State Department society, and Crossroads Africa programs, Viertel guides his hero into a convincing world of white is right. "I'm a Negro, yet I have done anything a white mao can do."

By virtue of the unique background that Viertel creates for Holmes and the tightly constructed plot of extenuating circumstances and tantalizing opportunities alered him, Viertel evokes both sympathy .for Holmes and a ready-made rationalization for his actions. The author develops Holmes' unique character circumllantially: his father's occupation and his mother's very liaht skin color signal his embrace of the Tom role within tbe traditional framework of a hostile white society.

Viertel deftly defines his hero by his actions in the white perspective of the author, a society rife with hypocrisy, fear and guilt. For the most part, Viertel retains his artistic integrity in studying Holmes, for up until the

last pages Holmes is very much a white man whose actions are not only predictable but inevitable.

Beyond the complex interplay of events and circumstances which form the plot, Viertel feels compelled to give some psychological motivation to his hero. In doing this, the author exhibits his delicacy and dramatic understatement to their greatest effect and almost n1anages to free himself from the perceptual-and experiential-limitations of a white man. Yet at bottom Viertel seems to be begging the question. He develops the character of Holmes as a man so singly motivated by virtue of his confidence in the white system that he represses adult analysis of his motivations. Any objective alternative to Holmes' actions are voiced by stock characters divorced from his internal crisis, such as his father, the proud Baptist minister, his sister, the Afrointellectual, and Proby, the Negro militant. As a black I felt the strongest identification with Proby, even though Viertel marks him with the stigma of being communist, army defector, and militant African nationalist. It is only Proby, however, who pushes Holmes to the limits of his role as white man's Negro.

Ultimately, Viertel discloses that Holmes' psychological motivations are rooted in infant psychosexual preoccupations and childhood experiences. He masterfully accumulates the evidence of Holmes' desire to be recognized and possessed by a white woman. His mother was a beautiful mulatto who was often mistaken for a white; his sister, also light-skinned, was consistently favored as a child; and his first childhood playmate, Polly, was white. Holmes' obsessive desire for a white woman, a symbol for which he is willing to sacrifice everything~ven personal success-is ironically fulfilled by his disastrous marriage to a neurotic white girl, Robbi.

In the development of Holmes' relationship with Robbi, Viertel demonstrates tremendous powers of narrative and dramatic suspense; yet the author unfortunately succumbs to the traditional myth of white woman as

goddess. Holmes' disgusting, fawning Uncle Remus voice unconsciously establishes his position and identity with respect to Robbi. The sexual frustrations of their marriage place him at the mercy of her neuroses, and their travels through Africa offer experiences that corroborate the myth of the cold, aloof white woman secretly worshipped by black men.

This myth establishes motivations for Holmes' actions which in themselves reveal Viertel's second misconception. In his struggle for success as a West Point cadet, as a career army officer and finally as an ambassador, Holmes is made to endure h ardships imposed by the hostile or indifferent white society. Viertel implicitly suggests that his hero is a better man for having shaken his burden. The author offers a defense of Tomism in saying, Endure the sick white world and transcend.

In his startling, moving conclusion Viertel fuses his manipulation of events and his psychological groundwork to have Holmes suddenly and violently reject not only the white structure of which he is a part but all outward social involvement. The reader's personal judgment of whether Holmes ultimately succeeds or fails does not detract from the power and skill of Viertel's chronicle. As for Viertel's success, it is qualified by his limitations as a white author operating in a specific cultural background. Perhaps he is just as trapped as Marcus Garvey Holmes.

Charles Johnson

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continued from page 7 between Intensive and Standard Majors would now be irrelevant. In addition, the department decided to make no stipulations as to the specific subject matter of courses offered in fulfillment of the required twelve terms of advanced courses in history. The old requirement of four terms in each of two out of eight fields had hampered students' access to the variety that the department could offer; Yale College itself had recognized the justice of students' distaste for specific requirements when it had instituted the new guideline system, counseling the student "to design his own program for himself"; and the emphasis that the seminars and the historical essay place on individual exertion and accomplishment does not comport either theoretically or practically with such restrictions. The department therefore agreed to advise each student to construct a program of study that included both reasonable diversity and a field of concentration defined by himself in consultation with his adviser.

This program has the advantages of rigor and simplicity, and it has already been the object of inquiries from other universities and other Yale departments.

But it should be clear by now that the new major is grounded in the local history of a particular department with its own special goals and problems and that it ought to be regarded with extreme caution as a model for general curricular reform.

The program goes into effect with the C lass of 1970, and there are some stresses ahead. It is inevitable in a program so highly individualized that some students will experience individual disappointments, either in not being admitted to their first, or perhaps even to their second, choices of seminars or in not being assigned to the essay director they might especially want. It is inevitable also that some students will not take seriously the department's warnings about the stringency of the standards to be enforced with respect to the historical essay, so that one can anticipate a larger number of degrees than usual awarded in November, rather than June, 1970. In short, though the News was gracious in its praise, it may have been premature, for there are bound to be imperfections in any administrative contrivance. It is obvious that for this new program to fulfill the News' expectations of it, what is needed is good will and hard work on all sides, not least from the students.

Letters

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To the Editors: Not many film critics have had the guts to proclaim Bikini Beach an important cinematic event, but I think your Mopsy Strange Kennedy has done a disservice to her profession in her otherwise commendable review by writing off this rich and vital low mimetic comedy as mere unconventional tragedy.

Bikini Beach, Part One of the Annette Funicello trilogy presented by the Yale Record, is filled with the great forces that qualify it, I believe, as one of the denser works to come out of Hollywood and, even more important. as worthy of the critic's careful examination.

Northrop Frye, the distinguished literary scholar, has stated in his Anatomy of Criticism that "in contemporary movies the triumph of youth is sorelentless that the moviemakers find some difficulty in getting anyone over the age of

seventeen into their audiences."

Alas, what Mr. Frye tells us is often true, and thus many of America's best artistic movies have escaped the meaningful examination of scholars, who are almost always in their twenties at least!

1t is easy to say, for instance, that Bikini Beach represents an archetypal triumph of youth, but such a precept tends to exclude the film's other major victory. I am referring, of course, to the victory of the California-Surfer mode of rock-androll over the perverted and effete Liverpudlian mode, a triumph brilliantly and subtly executed.

First, though, let us examine the question of the mythic world of youth, established at the film's outset by the statement of Frankie (Avalon), cited by Mrs. Kennedy, that "all forever is right now." .

Tomorrow, he confidently declares later, is only "the day after today," and thus the film defines immediately the world occupied by Annette, Frankie and their friends. Surely the contemporary distillation of the pastoral motif, traditionally the vehicle for romantic comedy, is to be found in the eternally sunny beaches of southern California. The radical metaphor which informs this world is the bikini. From the opening scenes of the film, which depict the boys and girls traveling in their large truck to the shores of Malibu or thereabouts, the mood of festive gaiety, of eternity, is firmly established.

This idyllic mood is made all the more significant by the forces which oppose it, represented by Keenan Wynn, publisher of the Bikini Bugle and owner of the local old folks' home. Not surprisingly, this villain seeks to oust the youthful surfers from the beaches so that he may extend his old folks' home down the shoreline. We thus have the perfect example of conflicting forces, of the world of mutability and age encroaching on the world of eternal youth.

The film's conclusion, however, is not merely the victory of one force over another. Instead, the movie is a lesson in inclusiveness, for the ending provides the coming together of youth and age in a scene which features both the teenagers, Annette and Frankie included, and the senior citizens themselves, all dancing frantically to the strains of Little Stevie Wonder, who can certainly be compared to Hymen in As You Like It, as he invites all members of the audience, the young and young at heart, to join in the celebration.

At the risk of examiniilg Bikini Beach as a mere anthropological artifact, and in turn violating the principles of analytic criticism, it is necessary to pursue in a discussion of this movie what I earlier referred to as the conflict of forces in rock-and-roll "music."

The movie was made a few years ago, so it is not surprising that the archenemy of Frankie is none other than "The Potato Bug," whose long hair and decidedly British accent do nothing but suggest the Beatles. The Potato Bug is also a rival for Annette's affections, such as they are.

His singing (filled with the flavor of the Early Beatles, with its "ooooooohh, yeh, yeh" quality) entices all the female creatures of the Bikini World.

Frankie, of course, ultimately triumphs and drives the Potato Bug back to the shores of England. But here lies the great irony behind Bikini Beach, for viewers know that the ethos of Surfer-California

15.1 The New Journal I Apri114, 1968

style rock-and-roll, which finds its objective correlative in Frankie Avalon, was doomed to fail, despite the powerful statement of films like this one.

The position of this movie, as an assertion of one style of life, with its comic and rhythmic modes, is poetically beautiful and convincing, but historically inaccurate and misguided. This shortcoming does not detract from-in fact it adds to--Bikini Beach's vitality and luster because we are reminded, outside the medium itself, that nothing in this world is truly imperishable. This movie, with Frankie and Annette representing the ultimate paradoxical personae, is certainly one of the great cinematic triumphs of our time.

Steven R. Weisman Yale College

continued from page 2 delicate spine comes through largely undamaged, and the director, Larry Arrick, has not inundated us with the mock Moscow Art Theatre gloom so common to Chekhov productions in this country.

Mr. Arrick has taken the play from page to stage with apparent simplicity. As a result Chekhov is the winner, and perhaps that is the best thing about the Yale Three Sisters. For in the end, despite an uneven production that lacks the patina only time can bring to an acting company, despite the occasional moment that falls flat or the costume here or there that is out of place, the evening belongs to Cbekbov,

who will always be able to make us believe against our intellects that although Olga, Masba and Irina may never get to Moscow, there is still hope that you and I will make it.

Roger Girard Graduate Student

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