Volume 5 - Issue 1

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Volume five, number one/October 10, 1971

an interview with Chou En-Lai

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• Volume five, number one October I 0, 1971

3 .Striking Out 6 An Interview with · Chou En-Lai

12 One Man's Mead Editors: Richard Conniff Su:t.anne Wittebort Associate Editors: Joel Rogers Ron Roe! Executive Editor: Michael Csar Designer: Judith Fletcher Business Manager: Ray Rund Contributing Editors: Jonathan Marks Stephen Thomas Sam Miller Dan Mcintyre Leo Ribuffo Michael Lerner Steven R. Weisman Staff: Rachel Hooper, Kiki Gordon, John Gussman, Su:t.anne Wofford. Roople Hacher, Tom Joseph, Kathy Lally, Dee Siegelbaum Publisher : Paul Goldberger

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The New Journal © copyright I 971 by The New Journal at Yale, Inc., a non-profit corporation.

Telephone: 776-9989 Letters are welcome. Unsolicited manuscripts should be accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope.

Opinions expressed in the articles arc not necessarily those of The New JournaL

The New Journal Yale is back, likewise The New Journal, and while the first was perhaps inevitable, the second - for financial reasons - was far from it. But anyone can tell you how hard times are in New Haven.

The question, then, for the uninitiated-and the absent minded, is: what is The New Journal. \'.'e are first of all a publication of the Yale community, financially and editorially independent of the university. Published every three weeks, The New Journal includes interviews, reviews, news commentary fiction, photography, and fine graphics. The New Journal serves as the only university-wide medium for intelligent debate and is wont, when it finds muck, to rake it - in honest, carefully researched articles. We think it is worth your reading time.

You may, we hope, also think The New Journal worth working for. We need assistance in every phase of the magazine's production (freelancing welcome). We have no heel and we ate open to suggestions and innovation.

Call us any time if you'd like to help.

With this issue, Volume five, number one, The New Journal passes into the hands of a new generation of editors. We are optimistic. Two years ago, one of our editors wrote, "We may well fail," and that is still possible.

But we disagree with him when he adds that in this "existentially draining world even the thought of failure is . invigorating." Bah. Nothing could be worse.

Of course, anything could be warmer than that; but still, the Health Center makes a real effort to create an inviting space, even if it doesn't fully succeed.

The new building gets high marks for effort. The facade tries to be dynamic with its.varying pattern of window arrangements; unfortunately, the whole thing ends up looking like aLe Corbusier facade that someone put a sander to. It is too flattened , too smooth.

The architects - Helge Westermann-Richard Miller Associates of New York made a good try at reducing the impact of the building's enormous bulk on Hillhouse Avenue, a street of low scale that cries out for non-monumental construction. Their solution was to lower the building by one floor on the Hillhouse Avenue side, and place the bulky volume in the rear. From the street this gives the effect of two wings, though this isn't reflected in the plan of the building.

Alas, this one, too, doesn't quite come off. The ·bulk of the rear "wing" is just too imposing; it dominates Hillhouse from either end of the street.

More Poured Concrete Last week a sign on one of the front doors of the new Health Center on Hillhouse Avenue read "Please Do Not Use - Handle is Broken."

The sign was in refreshing contrast to the slick, cool, mechanical perfection of the rest of the building. Like its immediate predecessors on the Yale architectural scene - the Cross Campus Library and the Becton Engineering Center - the new Health Center is not the warmest of buildings.

But while the Health Center shares the antiseptic atmosphere of Becton and the Cross Campus Library to a certain degree it is, a far better building. On the one hand, it lacks the sense of being overdesigned that the foolish rubber stamp window pattern of Becton gives to the facade of that building; on the other hand, it lacks the utter sterility of the Cross Campus Library.

. woods, indirect lighting, and not-toofar-out 'designer" chairs. It's a formula that calls to mind The Architects' Collaborative among other firms, and it's really Yale's first exposure on full building scale to this sort of design, not quite like the cool corporate modernism of Reinecke or the rough-and-tough modernism of the Art and Architecture Building. It's something oddly in-between, and somehow , from the heavy woods and cinder blocks, a strange sort of warmth and elegance emerge.

The patients' rooms on the infirmary floors llre simpler. (One of th

Love us or hate us, wonder if we hold nothing sacred, but speak out.

Vigorously. We'll do the same.

Richard Conniff

Beinecke Rare Book Library

DUH

But in their attempt to relate to the street, however awkward, WestermannMiller showed themselves far more sensitive urban architects than Marcel Breuer at Becton. The Becton Center tries its best to overrun Prospect Street, instead of cooperating with its cale.

The new Health Center should work well with Robert Venturi's projected Mathematics Building across the street, the subject of cruel and undeserved attack in last week's Yale Daily News.

The gentle curve of the Math Building's facade should perfectly complement the sharp straight lines of the Health Center. (The Math Building, in fact, succeeds in doing what the Health Center couldn't: creating an interesting, yet modest, facade that could work itself into the complex fabric of Hillhouse Avenue.)

Inside, the Health Center is a bit more traditional and a bit more successful as well. The interiors are "standard modern" - almost a bit cliched, in fact, with cinder blocks and concrete matched with stained

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first students to spend a few nights there said "It's sort of like being sick in a room at Howard Johnson's Motor Lodge.") But bright colors, good views from many of the windows, and new furniture make the rooms an elegant step up from the old infirmary - in fact they are probably an elegant step up from most regular hospital rooms.

Almost all the furniture and equip. ment in the Health Center is new. In fact , just about the only holdover from the old Department of University Health building - without them, no one would feel at home - are the maguines. Like always, they're all six months old.

Paul Goldberger

Clean Machine Bart Guida , New Haven's diminuitive mayor, proved in last month's Democratic primary that the meek shall indeed inherit the earth. A humble, almost corpse-like man, ever amazed along with his fellow townsmen that he can win, Guida captured a clear majority of the votes cast in the three-way race and, by so doing, shattered the dream of New Haven's 'reform· democrats led by Hank Parker.

Winning was the reformers' last dream : the others had been discarded as excess baggage in the drive to win.

The desire to return government to the people, the desire to make New Haven a decent community, the hope of encontinued on page 15

•

3/The New J ournal/October 10, 1971

Graduation day at Yale this year was no picnic. It seemed at times more like an old-fashioned sit-in. Twelve people were arrested and several hundred Yale workers tried to shut down the graduation. They tried to stop the academic procession by bulldogging their way through a double cordon of -; New Haven cops. They didn't make it. But they put on a show which starred, among others, National Welfare Rights Director George Wiley, civil rights leader Father James Groppi, and both the 1970 and 1971 Presidents of the National Student Association, hardly a normal union strike force. Of course, Yale's workers hardly constitute a normal union. In fact, they're not really a union at all. They're a movement.

Yate workers went on strike April 30. During the spring, the campus reverberated to much noise on the subject, and virtually no understanding whatsoever. Despite Yale's reputation for radical chic, no one could figure out why the union was striking. Most people assumed, that the union was going out over traditional bread and butter issues. After all, it just didn't make sense that the union was striking over "job security."

Frcun late January through graduation day, Yale's management representatives and union leaders had been deadlocked over that very issue. The union demanded a management guarantee that Yale would not place more bursary students in "union jobs."

Management countered that, as a "matter of principle," it would not limit its rights to employ students. The union observed that management could fill up "union jobs" with bursary students through attrition - when a union man quit his job, it would go to a student, rather than a worker. Management argued that it couldn't protect future workers by "freezing" their job slot , just so the union could preserve its size. "We're not in the business of welfare," said Managemenl, to which the union replied, "we're not looking for handouts, we're looking for a fair shake," and went out o n strike. Yale was then confronted with the curious spectacle of workers whose own jobs were protected by Yale's no-layoff guarantee, agreeing to strike essentially for the sake of union solidarity.

The few people at Yale who followed the facts this far, and chose not to bail out behind the surreality of the situation, immediately focused speculation upon the union's charismatic leader, Vincent Sirabella. They surmised that Sirabella wanted to preserve union job slots simply to featherSherman Chickering (SBC '62) is cu"ently working on a book. His writing has appeared in the Saturday Review,-Tbe New York Times, the American Scholar, Harper's, and the Rolling Sto ne.

Striking Out Sherman Chickering

bed his own pocket - despite the fact that a union composed of 1157 largely unskilled workers would have trouble keeping a midget in breakfast cereal; they speculated that Sirabella's mayoralty campaign was¡running on an antiYale ticket - despite the fact that "campaigner" Sirabella hardly raised a Yale-related issue off campus; they proposed that Sirabella was simply a demagogue ego-tripping off his workers - despite the fact that the man issued a number of statements which by all rights should have damaged his following. Nobody managed to get hold of Sirabella's number, but they were right about one thing; the man indeed is the one responsible for creating an impossible strike.

Sirabella accomplished the impossible because he had two all absorbing problems and two all powerful assets to deal with. The problems were that his union was not a union and that a good many of his friends were a part of New Haven's growing I 0 per c~nt unemployed. The assets were that he is not very good at collective bargaining, and that his opponent at the bargaining table was Yale University.

Sirabella's union is not a union because it never got itself together as Yale moved in its modern management team in 1966. Before 1966, the workers wallowed pleasantly, if penuriously, in the security of Yale's plantation paternalism. The new team, Photographs: Ann Goodman

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composed of Operations director John (Jack) Embersits (Yale's 1957 Football captain) and employee relations director Leonard Marcus changed all that.

They instituted the following practices among others: training programs which stressed upward mobility and tended to accelerate the progress of the newer employees (especially the non-whites); promotions based on merit as much as, or more than, seniority; university wide, rather than divisional, job security, which meant that employees in one division could move to another division without loss of seniority ; competitive pay scales, which in some cases differentiated among previously homogeneous job classifications, and which tended to foster intra-divisional competition. Along with these modernization moves, of course, came a battery of well-trained supervisors and efficiency experts. Suddenly, workers were thrust into the twentieth century and forced to compete, both with each other and with the full power and growing sophistication of Yale's management. In industry, modernization of management is traditionally matched b)' growth of the union. The union serves to replace the collective security lost to managements efficiency and standard of accountability. At Yale, the union didn't grow: Out of desperation that followed the aborted strike of I 968, the workers brought in Sirabella from Local 217F, the Hotel Restaurant and Bartenders Union to try to catch up with management. After two years on the job, Sirabella condered the task nearly hopeless, esecially in the face of Yale's May I ontract deadline. Since the academic ear ends in May , a strike poses no ubstaritive threat to Yale's services.

Vithout an effective strike threat, and "ithout concomitant worker coheion Sirabella knew that he could neve1 wpe to develop an effective leader;hip training program, an updated ~rievance procedure, and bargaining )arity for his workers. He knew his :Vorkers would continue to feel in>ecure, divided, and impotent. Then in January of this year, Yale had inadvertently provided him with a device by which he could mold his workers into an effect strike force.

Publication of a report on Yale's new Deferred Tuition Payment Plan indicated that Yale expected to "democratize" the University by expanding employment of needy students in bursary jobs. Sirabella immediately raised the spectre of students descending en masse on workers' jobs. While Sirabella did not say that students would take away jobs held by current workers, the distinction became blurred. Workers did have real reason to fear that increase in bursary student co-workers because students tend to have different work patterns and commitments, thereby lowering the morale of the regular em-

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The emergence of a youthful opposition, Kenneth Ken is· ton argues, was the most startling event of the 1960's.

Nothing in liberal social theory led us to expect that the most privileged children of the world's wealthiest nation would revolt against the society that created them. To understand the origins and the meanings of this unprecedented dissent, Keniston says, requires a new analysis of industrialized societies, of the life cycle, and of the relationship of psychological and of historical change.

K~nnt'lh K~niston,

Professor of Psychology, D~­ of Psychiatry at Yale M edical School.

IS th~ author of The Uncommitted: Alienated Youth in American Society and Young Radipartm~nt

cals: Notes on Committed Youth.

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THE YALE CO-OP n Broadway New Haven

Daily 9 : IS- 5:30, Thursdays Until 9

ployee. Interviews with workers on the picket lines indicated that many thought that student employment threatened their positions - a real fear only to the extent that Yale has been known to practice "Jaterlll flnhtion," a shufflinj of a worker to a less desirable job in o rder to make room for someone else. So, the punitive threat acted as a sort of red herring, despite Sirabella's above-board handling of it. That Sirabella needed a red herring is clear; if he had tried to mobilize workers along the real issues in union parity, such as grievance pro· cedure, the facts might not have been persuasive. If he had tried to bread and butter his workers, they might have been up for a strike, but would have left themselves as impotent, di· vided and leaderless as before. Given the dilemma, Sirabella was blessed with the straw man of bursary student power. His workers in their extreme in· security thus followed him out on strike.

The issue of student incursions was ideal in one other respect, as well, one without which Sirabella could not have managed his union, mayoralty, or civic campaign: it simultaneously posed a threat to the already established pool of jobs for unskilled workers in the New Haven area and cast Yale in the role of villain. By posing the threat as a matter of public policy, Sirabella generated support which was to prove crucial in the later stages of the strike .

Meanwhile the workers out on strike were having understandable difficulty hanging on to the reason why they were striking. Yale's management was reaching the workers with mailings and personal appeals which kept underscoring Yale's guarantee that no existing employee would be laid off. The cognitive dissidence evidently became distressing, especially when coupled with loss of pay and no appreciable support from the paltry union strike fund. Workers either laughed in the confused silence or dismissed Yale's unassailable object with: "Those SOBs think they're so damn smart." The very logic of Yale's position came to undermine confidence in management's honesty , a tendency which was accel· erated as Sirabella began to make use of his assets at the bargaining table.

The concerned Sirabella was simultaneously fighting for the existence of his union and for the future of un· skilled workers in ew Haven. He came across at the bargaining table, tn the words of a management negotiator, "a civic leader rather than a labor leader." Some proposals favored existing workers, some dealt with future workers: some tried to turn back the clock to plantation days, some to achieve instant parity with management. Yale's negotiators, logi· cal to a fault , bridled at Sirabella's seemingly mercurial proposals. In response Yale gave Sirabella's cause an

essential boost , by insisting that Sira· bella be logical and by insisting that Yale be allowed "to keep its options open." This last phrase, more than any other, Yale position, led credence to workers' fear that Yale could not be trusted especially with its no-layoff guar-Jntee.

Now as the strike wore on, Yale's negotiators gave Sirabella an even more crucial assist. Embersits and Marcus became increasingly exasperated and as a result, oversold their position to the workers. Letters to employees provided phone numbers of union leaders so that workers could talk sense to them: a table of cumulative wages lost during the strike was sent out. Instead of favorably persuading the workers. the mailings pushed more of them into the position that Yale could not be trusted. The workers began to feel less afraid for themselves and angered toward Yale.

This feeling was amplified when strikers and Yale students successfully blockaded the power plant, halting fuel deliveries and forcing the university to shut off hot water on the campus. Student support displayed in this enterprise and in raising $15,000 for the strike fund boosted morale. "Beat Yale" sentiment increased even further when an impressive array of area leaders signed a petition of support which condemned "Yale's insensitivity to community needs." By reaching the community on broader issues such as unemployment, Sirabella had largely neutralized the power of Yale's logic, its prestige. and the anti-worker pre· judices of its liberals. But. as a Sira· bella aide said, ''We never really thought we had any hope at all of beating Yale until the Friday night meeting."

On the Friday night prior to gradu· ation, Sirabella delivered a speech before 600 of his workers in which he announced plans to disrupt Yale's grad· uation ceremony. The kicker to his speech was his estimate that West Germany's Chancellor, Willy Brandt, who rose to power on the backs of the labor vote, might not show up for fear

of the disruption and of being called a "strike breaker," inasmuch as he was elected by labor vote. The cheering crowd broke up singing labor movement songs and vowing to bring Yale to its knees. In the aftermath of this threat, Yale settled with the union on the remaining job security issue, the corollary question of a reduction in waitress jobs due to student "busing" their own trays. The issue .was settled 1 -- or rather tabled - as the bursary student question had been, with Yale agreeing to submit the question to a joint management/union study committee. (note on tape to check fact) One of the issues was submitted to the joint management/union study committee and the other was submitted to some sort of committee of binding arbitration. While management contended that it gave up nothing of substance, Sirabella and the union believed that Yale had backed down on its "matter of principle." That they had ·;on a victory through their show of mu<;cle Friday night. They were not spurred on to seek even greater reward through holding to their original plan of disrupting commencement.

The greater reward to be sought, of course, was a wage increase Now that Sirabella has secured the essentia] solidarity upon which he could build an effective union, he was ready to go for what amounted to reparations.

He told Yale that he would now discuss the union wage demand, which he ~ had refused to discuss while matters of job security were on the table.

Much to Yale's surprise SirabeUa stuck to a demand for a 42 to 68 per cent increase, depending on job category.

The higher percentage increase should be awarded the workers in the lower pay grades, said Sirabella, the same people who were sold out in the J 968 strike settlement. Management obviously expected the union to fold up its case, especially given the financial squeeze in the advent of the automatic strike breaker built into the summer recess. But SirabeUa did better. He knew he had sufficient momentum. He knew that he was working

with the issue which every worker u~­ derstands - wages. He set about dramatizing the gap between Yale's offer of 6-12% increases and the National Welfare Rights Organizations figures for the minimum annual requirement of.a family of four ($6500) - a figure that would be reached if Yale met union demands halfway. Yale meanwhile based its offer on exceeding slightly the results of its own labor market survey and that of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Again, Yale's position was the "correct one.'' And again Sirabella was the one who accommodated a perceived socio-economic need of his constituency.

On the eve of a threatened reunion disruption, Yale settled with the union on the wage issue. The union was granted an average 30% increase over three years (plus cost of living increases). Again the union considered Yale's concession to be a major victory, though Sirabella graciously muted the crowing. And again Yale contended that sweet reason remained triumphant.

Now that the strike is over it appears to have raised a number of questions concerning the future of Yale and New Haven: Yale is the largest -employer of unskilled workers in the New Haven area. Does it therefore have any particular responsibility to address itself to the plight of the working poor?

2 Yale has provided moral leadership nationally on many of the nation's most pressing issues. Does not the spectre rising unemployment and decreasing opportunities for unskilled workers raise the possibility of a comparable leadership opportunity?

•

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3 Yale's constituency is almost exclusively nationa) and "upper class," the union's constituency is local and "lower class." In time of rapid social change, does this precarious in,terface imply changes for all modes of institutional behavior?

4 Yale's chief negotiator, Jack Embersits, maintains that modern management needs a modern union. "I prefer to negotiate with a strong union," he said. If that is the case, why does Yale insist on maintaining the "automatic strike breaker" built into its May I contract deadline?

President Nixon's national Security adviser, Henry Kissinger, once noted that absolute security for one power means absolute insecurity for its neighbors. This axiom seems to explain better than any other observation the origin and the nature of the Yale worker strike.•

Open, 11:30am til 12:30 am, Sunday,Thursday and Friday closed Saturday evening

An Interview with Chou En-Lai

2

Prepared by t he Yale Chapter of the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars and Edited by 'The New Journal' This tex t is excerpted from tape recordings m ade by members of the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars Friendship Delegatio n to Ch ina during thei r four hour interview wi th Prem i er Chou En-Lai on July 19 in the Great Hall of the People, Peking_ As Chou himself pointed out, there i s lots of room for error and m isquotation in an interview of this nature. " Maybe I will say something wrong, or t he interpreter might interpret wrong."

Therefore h e expressly stated "If you are going to show your recordings when you get back to the United States States, you must make a statement at the beginning and say there are bound to be some wrong statements in this recording."

The following transcript was sent

by Paci fic News Service and CCAS to the New Journal. CCAS was founded in 1969 to struggle against the complicity of the Asian studies field in supporting A merican domination of Asian societies.

The May 4th Movement of 1919 was a series of large scale militant demonstrations organized b y students, workers, and merchants in all major Chinese cities. The agitations were set off by decisions taken at the post-war Paris Peace conference which turned German commercial concessions in the Shantung Penins1,1la o ver to Japan.

Chou En-lai: We welcome you. It is

rare t hat we are able to meet so many young American friends. We hear that you are a young generation of scholars.

We have heard that you think the present youth movement in the United States is similar to the May Fourth Movement in China. I was a participant in the May Fourth movement and meeting you, it seems that I have gone back 52 years. But I don't think it's exactly the same. Perhaps you also have a bit of our Red Guard Movement in your movement now. Is that so?

CCAS: I think that's a very good analysis.

Chou En-Lai: I understand you' re the liaison officer. During the May 4th Movement in China we a lso liked to pick young women to be our leaders. For instance, my wife, Comrade Teng Ying¡Ch'ao, did that work when she was only 15. At that time, we had a majority of middle school students in the movement and the college students were only a minority. Now you are all college graduates, as in our Red Guard period. It is a Red Guard trend of thought that they don't like to be called 'minister' or 'section head' or 'director'. We must do away with the bureaucratic structure and call ourselves 'service personnel' of the people.

I t hink you have the same ideas. We see so me of your men wearing their hair long and growing beards to express dissatisfactio n with the status quo. There are two men here with large beards.

Those in the Red Guard movement liked to wear coarse clothes, army uniforms, and armbands and a lso clothes that had as many patches as possible .

You were asking why people weren't wearing the colorful cloth produced in the textile mills. It is because the custom today is to live simply and to wear simple clothes (as a symbol of discipline.) T he style of simplicity is also in opposition to bourgeois degradation.

Chou En-lai: You are righ t to want to go amo ng t h e masses of the Ch inese

people. There is not OJuch to talk about with us (laughter) - just the same o ld issues. You will see that what Mrs. Chou En-lai sa~ h as all been printed in the newspapers (laughter) and to listen to it is nauseating (laughter) .

Isn't that so?

CCAS: (CCAS exp resses a d esire to

see factories a nd communes not previously visited by Westerners) Chou: You a re right and I thank you.

We will arrange it. That's the right way to do things - crit icize us. It is also cr iticism for our Travel Bureau, and above them there is the Foreign Ministry . We welcome very much this spiritual help from you. It is " rectifying w rong ideas". That is Chairman Mao's wording. It is not brainwashing; it is rectifying erroneous ideas. I haven't thought of a way to wash one's brain yet. In a certain sense I would like to have my brain washed of the o ld ideas in my mind.

I h ave a lready passed 73. How can it be said that I have no old ideas in my head? I came over from the old so ciety.

In the o ld society, I wore a braid, a pigtail. But, of course, you can't see it on me now. In a ll the cities and in the great and overwhelming majority of the countryside you can't see that phenomenon any more. But I cannot say it has completely died.

Another phenomenon : there are a number of women whose feet were once bound. This is left over from the old society, the o ld system. So there are no people in Chinese society who have bound feet now? There still are.

This seems a very new experience for foreign fr iends, for instance the binding of feet is a phen omeno n which the old society should be held responsible for.

1 Chang Ch'un Ch'iao and Yao Wenyuan are both members of the Central Committee of the Comm un ist Party of China. Both were involved in· the " January Revolution " in Shanghai in 1967 an advanced group of the Cultural Revolution.

"

We were the ones who overthrew the old system. We have been persuading people not to bind their feet, but what about the old people? Their feet have already been bound, and you can· not cut off those feet, nor can they be restored to the original shape because the bones were broken. There is no way way to restore them. And we cannot attempt to hide them at home. Such an attempt would be reactionary. My mother had bound feet. But if it were not for her, how would I have come to be? My mcther herself cannot be responsible for having her feet bound either; she was also sacrificed by the old society.

When foreign friends take pictures of such things, you must investigate .to see from what point of view they conceive of doing so. For instance, if they say that this is something left over from the old system, and they show the picture of bound feet as a comparison of the old and new society, that is good. The new society always grows up upon the basis of the old society. If there were not the old, where would the new come from?

They are opposites; they are in opposition to each other. It's a dialectical matter.

Who are there among you who would like to talk about philosophy?

Later on you can have your say. But I haven't finished yet. (laughter) We stand on the position of the proletariat, and you of course are clear about that. As for our views we do our utmost to see that they are in accordance with those of Marx, Lenin and Mao Tse-tung.

You say that the youth are better than the older generation. We agree.

We say that those who come later become better. I am much older than they are, and I talk so much that there are bound to be flaws. It's not very favorable to be a Premier at such an advanced age. All right, don't let me be t1ie only one to speak.

CCAS: I would like to say a word first.

The aim of our trip to China has been to further the friendship and under· standing between the Chinese and American peoples. We believe that our main task w hen we return to the United States is to communicate to the American people the tremendous achievements and progress that have been made by the Peoples' Republic of China and the Chinese people.

Chou En-lai: You must add something to that. You must say that there has been progress made, but there is still a lot to work on. Otherwise the viewpoint would not be complete.

There are also some phenomena which are in the process of moving from the lower to the higher stage.

This is the way things develop. If you simply say that there has been progress, people won't believe you.

CCAS: We hope to get an accurate picture of China, and Pa$S this on to the American people. We feel that this has not been done in the past, and that the Arne rican people have a distorted picture of the Chinese people.

Chou En-lai Although the contribu-

tion which you make may be small at the beginning, its influence will gradually grow. And that is the way all new things develop. Who was going to put forward some philosophical problems to these two comrades here?* CCAS: I'm interested in the movement to study philosophy that has arisen among the Chinese masses since the cultural revolution. I believe it has great significance, not only for China, but also for the American movement.

Could I ask either Comrade Chang or Comrade Yao how they particularly study philosophy and how they apply it in their daily work?

Yao: I agree with your idea and your question. We study some philosophical works of Chairman Mao Tse-tung and also some of the works of Marx and Lenin . Our aim is to come to know the world and to transform the world.

And in transforming the world there are two aspects; that is, to transform society, and also to transform one's own ideas, one's ideology.

For instance, Chairman Mao Tsetung put forward a thesis of continuing the revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat, and this is in itself a very important philosophical problem that is to say, in a socialist society there still exist classes, class contradictions, and class struggle. And personally, it has taken me a gradual process to come to understand this question.

All this in the final analysis is a question of one's world outlook, a question of philosophy. And this is what we call " to study with problems in mind". And in my practice in the revolution the problems that I have come up against most are ideological ones. My study in this field has not been as good as the advanced elements of the workers, peasants and People's liberation Army. I should continue to learn from them . To study philosophy one must study the present situation, history, theory, and make the correct analysis, draw out the correct conclusions, and be able to find the laws guiding the development.

CCAS: I have a non-philosophical question What is there that has changed the relationship between the Chinese and American people after 22 years of separation? And what are the biggest problems we still have in developing the friendship between the Chinese and American people?

Chou En-lai: The foremost thing is that the Chinese and American people wish to exchange visits with each other and this strong desire has broken through the barriers. Isn't one of your points that you believe that the older generation of Asian scholars in America has gotten mixed up w ith the government, or has become silent?

CCAS: That's right.

Chou En-lai: F irst, I agree with your aims. But secondly, I must say some words of sympathy for them. They happened to be oppressed in the 50's, during the McCarthy period, and this was a great harm for them. I recall what I said, at the Bandung Confer-

ence in 1955. It was that peoples of China and the United States wished to have friendly contact with each other. It cannot be said that there was no response to my words. There were a few progressive correspondents who wished to come to China, but theSe· cretary of State at the time, John Foster Dulles, denied them that right.

I believe that these facts could be found in the files of the State Depart· ment, and I don't think that they should be classified documents. (laughter) But now we have passed through the sixties and entered the seventies.

And it's your generation, your era, and you have broken through the barriers. And so with one sentence of Chairman Mao's we invited the United States table tennis team to visit China.

And so they came! The barriers were broken through. For this we must thank the new forces of your era. Isn't that so? And these new and friendly contacts are bound to continue. When you go back you will introduce even more American friends to us. Also some black friends. Of course if you would be able to introduce some minorities of the United States to us, we would be very thankful.

Let them all come to China to have a look. Of course, we will also return the visits. Your CCAS, the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars (this he said in English) has invited us, and since you are so kind, I think that our young Chinese friends should afso return the visit I believe you will also welcome not only men, but also eomen (lau!tlter). It would be a good thing to make it equal in numbers.

Even in our socialist country, a country of the dictatorship of the proletariat, male chauvinism comes up now and then. Of course subconsciously.

Chang: Today, seated here among the Chinese comrades, the number of men and women are not equal yet.

Chou En-Jai: See, he's criticizing me.

Yet I have tried my utmost to pay at· tention to the fact. When I invited the comrades from Tsinghue University, I invited one man and one woman ...

CCAS: How do you view internal events in the United States and their relationship to the new contact between China and the United States?

Chou En-lai: Different states still exist in the world, and if there is no normalization of the relations between the two states, then it will be impos· sible for contact between the two peoples to develop unhindered. The governments of the two countries bear the main responsibility in this. It will take process and time. Isn't that so?

One of you said that though the re~ volutionary movement in United States is developing, it cannot be said that it would be able to transform the entire system at the present date. It will take time to transform society. In recent years, Chairman Mao himself has paid attention to the American situation.

He has asked us all to note the fact that it can be said that the United States is now on the eve of a great storm. But the question of how this storm shall be developed is yours, not ours. We can only tell you about something of our hopes.

To normalize relations we must contact those who are in authority in your country. Your president has said that he wishes to move toward friendship and that he hopes to visit ·China.

Naturally we can invite him, in order to seek the normalization of relations between the two countries, and also to discuss questions concerning both sides. But what are the obstructions to the improvement of the relations between China and the United States?

CCAS: Taiwan ... lndochina...

Chou En-lai: You have mentioned the ri!tlt problems. I would like to reaf· firm our stand on Taiwan.

First, if state relations are to beestablished between the United States and China, then it must be recognized that the government of the People's Republic of China is the sole legitimate government representing the Chinese people.

Second, Taiwan is a province of China and it is an inalienable part of China's territory. After the second World War Taiwan was restored to China. The liberation of Taiwan by the Chinese people is an internal affair of China which brooks no foreign intervention.

Third, the theory that the status of Taiwan is yet unsettled is absurd. In 1894, Japan defeated China in war and took Taiwan. During the Second World War, however, in the Cairo Declaration and later in the Potsdam Proclamation, it was affirmed that Taiwan should should be returned to China. Then in 1945, when Japan surrendered, the Chinese government accepted the return of Taiwan.

Fourth, we oppose any advocation of a two-China policy, or any similar policy. And if such a situation continues in the United Nations, we will not go there.

Fifth, we are resolutely opposed to the so-called "Taiwan independence movement." Because the people in Taiwan are Chinese. Taiwan was originally a province of China. And a thousand years ago it had already become a part of China. The dialect spoken in Taiwan is the same dialect spoken in the area around Amoy in Fukier Province. Of course there are minority nationalities like the Kaoshan nationality in Taiwan, the minority that lives on the high hills. There are also various national minorities on the mainland and we pursue a policy of national equality. Besides, the "Taiwan independence movement" is not a native movement in itself. It is a movement which has behind it special manipulation by foreign forces. One of their leaders is P'eng Ming-min who was originally a student at Harvard, then returned to Taiwan to become a professor, and now is back in the United States. There is some element of this movement in Japan. They are supported by the Japanese government.

Sixth, the United States·should withdraw all of its present military strength and military installations from Taiwan and the Taiwan Straits. The defense treaty which was agreed to by the United States and Chiang Kai-shek in 1954 (about the so-called "defense of Taiwan and Panghu") is illegal, and the Olinese people do not recognize that treaty.

This is our stand. It has not changed since the beginning of the Ambassadorial Talks between China and the United States that began on the first of August. 1955. And it shall not change.

·~

You mentioned very correctly that we are also concerned with the Indochina issue. This question also concerns China and the United States. You have said that one of your aims is opposition to the aggressive policies of the United States in Indochina and Asia. Isn't that so?

CCAS: Yes. Chou En-lai: The aggressive policies of the United States - at first in Vietnam - later expanded to the whole of Indochina. China has not gone to Vietnam or Indochina to commit aggression. We are assisting the people there to fi~t against aggression.

The question goes back to 1954.

At that time during the Geneva Conference we reached an agreement. At that time we Chinese and our Vietnamese friends, lacked experience in international subjects. The representatives of the United States did not sign the documents but only made a statement that they would not dis· .turb the agreement. But the reality was not so.

How could it be that a country which would not sign an agreement would truly agree not to disturb it.

Therefore, immediately following the Geneva Agreements, the Manila Con· terence was held at which SEATO was formed and a line of demarcation was drawn. Of course, SEATO has now gone bankrupt. But after the Geneva Agreement the election was not held and the U.S. assisted Ngo Dinh Diem to overthrow Bao Dai. The U.S. got control of South Vietnam that way.

All those who participated in the Geneva Conference will admit that if there had been an election in Vietnam as stipulated by the Geneva Agreements, President Ho Chi Minh would have been elected. Through the war of resistance against the French aggression he had won great esteem, not only among the Vietnamese peo· pie but also among the people of all Indochina. But that did not come about and the facts are the United States committed aggression first in Vietnam.

Now this question lies before the people of the United States, the people of Indochina and us, and the only way to solve this problem is that we show our complete support for the 7 point proposaf put forth by Mme Nguven Thi Binh on the first of July on behalf of the Provisional Revolu· tionary Govt. of the South Vietnam Republic and the Vietnamese people, and the Chinese government and the Chinese people completely support this proposition. We know that broad masses of the people of the United States are also opposed to the aggressive war in Vietnam which has now expanded into the whole of Indochina.

We are a neighbor of the Indochinese countries. We assisted them, supported them, in their war of resist~nce against France. And in the same spirit support them in their war of resistance against US aggression for na· tional salvation. This is known to the world. No matter whether"in the United States or abroad, we believe the greatest cry is for the United States to withdraw its troops from Vietnam and the whole of Indochina. We be· lieve that at the present day among the American people the most out· standing issue is not only for the United States to withdraw its troops from Vietnam but also from the whole of Indochina not only troops but all military forces and all military instal· lations.

It mi~t be said that this demand is even stronger than the demand to restore relations between the Chinese and American people. The people of the United States do not wish to sacrifice the lives of their people in a dirty war.

We believe that the question to be solved first should be the question of Indochina, and by_doing so we would be satisfying not only the interests of the Indochinese people but also of the people of the United States.

And besides these 2 issues I think there are other issues worth your at· tention. I should like to remind you that in Korea up to the present day there is only a ceasefire. Only an armistice agreement was passed. After that there was a meeting in Geneva, the same Geneva Conference, in 1954.

The first stage of that conference was devoted to Korea. It was completely without results. On the final day there was no result whatsoever with regard to the Korean question.

Then what was the use of our coming?

We said that at least we should set a date for another meeting. The foreign ministers of certain countries agreed to this, Mr. Spaak of Belgium for instance. The chairman of the meeting was Mr. Eden. He wavered a bit and he tended to agree w ith us. But there was an authoritative representative seated at the conference who waved his hand in opposition. The Korea question was by-passed. You probably know who the representative was: the deputy of Mr. John Foster Dulles, Mr. Smith. He didn't say anything, he couldn't find any words. He just waved his hand. And so now at the 38th parallel in Korea there is a military armistice commission that meets every week. There's only a ceasefire, there's no other treaty whatsoever. According to international law the state of war has not yet ended.

There are still American troops in South Korea. The Chinese Peoples' volunteers withdrew from Korea in 1958. The American troops in South Korea are there under the banner of the United Nations. Yet many countries of the United Nations have withdrawn their troops. It is almost the same case between China and Japan.

The state of war has not been called off yet. We still have not concluded a peace treaty And in relation with that there is the whole question of Japan.

10/The New Journal/October 10, 1971

...like trying

It is a fact that Japanese militarism is being revived because the Japanese economy is developing.in a lop-sided way. They depend on foreign coun· tries for natural resources and for mar· kets too. After the war they were not burdened by paying reparations and for quite some time they spent very little on armaments. How was the Japanese economy developed? There is one characteristic of the develop· ment of their economy. that is, they made a fortune on wars fought by others, the war of aggression against Korea and the war of aggression against Vietnam.

For instance, the United States estimates that within the past ten years, it has spent 120 billion American dollars on the Indochina war. Out of this Japan made quite a lot of money from the military repairs, transportation, and communication costs. In all these fields I think Japan made quite a lot of money.

Twenty·five years after the second World War, Japan, a defeated power, has become the number two economic power in the Western countries. Presi· dent Nixon praises Japan as his biggest partner. He made that statement on the 6th of July, in Kansas City. He also describes Japan as a competitor. Nixon praised Japan in these terms: that the output of steel in Japan last year approached 100 million tons. Japan either this year or next may catch up with the United States' 110 million

tons annually in steel output. What will issue from this lopsided develop· ment of Japan? She needs to carry out an economic expansion abroad. Other· wise, she cannot maintain her economy.

And so, being in a capitalist system, followinQ this economic expansion, there is inevitably. bound to come with it military expansion. Japan's fourth defense plan is from 1972 to 1976, and it plans to spend more than six· teen billion American dollars. In the first three defense plans from theSe· cond World War to 1971 Japan spent a total of only a bit over 1 0 billion.

According to the present economic capacity of Japan, she does not require 5 years to carry out this 4th plan. As we see it, they may be able to fulfill it in only 2 or 2Y:z years. It's all further proof, that the appetite, the ambitions are becoming greater.

So there does exist this danger. And also, what is more, the peoples of the Pacific and first of all the peoples of the Far East are no longer the peoples of the 30's or the 40's. The Japanese people are aware of the fact that if Japanese -militarism is revived, it will not benefit Japan.

Chou En·lai: National membership of CCAS are college graduates in the United States?

CCAS There are some· who are study· ing in college.

Chou En·lai: Then in our country, you would be considered high intellec· tuals, and you· have a heavy responsi· bility. And it is our responsibility to link the truth, the general truth, with actual practice. And that must be im· plemented through you. Some of you friends have said that foreign experience cannot be mechanically brought over to your country.

We cannot impose on you, nor can you just mechanically copy from us.

You can see the American youth is gradually raising their political consciousness. According to our experience, it is always intellectuals who start out, because it is easier for them to accept revolutionary theory. and revolutionary experience from books.

But for the movement to succeed, you must go among the workers, because in the United States the working class is the great majority of the people, and the peasantry is quite small. You must go into them deeply. Yes, one must go through some arduous pro-

cess.

CCAS: I would like to say a word about the process which Premier Chou has talked about, because in the United States, in our struggle there has been a peculiar process of gaining information and gaining knowledge. This is the question of knowledge. One of · the main contradictions of our process of gaining information about the problems that we deal with is that we were only first awakened by the vio· lent struggl.e in Vietnam and our learning process then began to go back· wards. As we investigated the origins of the conflict in Vietnam we were taken further and further back. We were embarrassed the other evening when we were talking with our Korean friends that still we do not have a clear understanding of the Korean situation, so we keep on going backwards in our understanding. We think that our knowledge of the development of American imperialist policy is still imperfect in many ways.

Chou En-lai: You have addressed your· selves to various problems throughout the world. Your American friends should have a broad perspective because as you know the United States after World War II has extended itself everywhere in the world, even to the moon. (Laughter) As Chairrnan Mao said, they look into other people's affairs everywhere. And as a result, they merely put nooses about their own necks. There is a saying in China,

to catch ten fleas with ten fingers.

that that is like trying to catch ten fleas with ten fingers. When you are trying to catch one flea, another one jumps out. And the result is that all of them escape. And at the most, you can only catch one flea by freeing one of your hands and letting go five f leas instead.

That is the predicament that President Nixon is now facing. But it would be more fair to say that it is not only of his own making but also something he couldn't even have dreamt of in those days. And the opposite of that is that people like you are rising up and tak ing action.

At the conclusion of the Second World War the United States imperialists appeared to be almighty . The world is changing. But the American people should not feel any discouragemel't There is great hope for the American people.

Although we are a social ist country, we must be vigilant against ourselves. Chairman Mao constantly teaches us that we must at all times be on the alert against committing the mistake of big power chauvinism both at home and abroad. Because in the world there is another country which is learning from you and sending its hand out everywhere and competing with you. Economic competition is bound to bring with it military competition. Economic development combined w ith military expansion is bound to occupy various places throughout the world.

In our revolution, many of our comrades sacrificed their lives. Chairman Mao often says that we are those left over from the Revolutionary Wars.

You have the spirit of pioneers. Al most 200 years now, isn' t that so?

Chairman Mao often likes to talk about when George Washington rose up to oppose the British Colonial rule with only a population of three m i llion. At that time Britain had probably a population of around ten times the population of the United States.

But you had the pioneering spirit, fearing no difficulties, and the British Colonial army was beaten by you everywhere. And the Americans at that time precisely carried out guerrilla warfare, firing from this corner and that corner. And you started your struggle in 1775. And on your 200th

anniversary you will come again. At that time you may only see two of us.

At that time we will congratulate you.

Five years is not a long time.

If one puts in efforts and struggles hard, great results will take place. For instance when the Chinese Communist Party was founded in 19i1, there were only 12 deputies to the First Party Congress, and the total number of Communist Party members at that time did not exceed 70. But only about three years later in 1924, it had changed tremendously. By 1926 our forces were already above fifty thousand. Such tremendous changes took place within a period of only five years, but your era is totally different from the era of those days. While w e can make the comparison, history w ill not re-enact itself. We al w ays say that times are advancing, and time w ill not turn back.

CCAS: I would like to make some closing remarks. First I w ant to extend our thanks, to Premier Chou, and comrades Chang and Yau from the central Committee. We firmly believe again that the real heroes of the anti-imperialist struggle in Asia are in fact the Asian people- the Indochinese people, the Korean people, and the Chinese people.

P. Chou: But if you make efforts, you will become world heroes.

CCAS: I would like to present some symbols to our Chinese friends here, similar to what we have presented as gifts everywhere. There are two symbols. One is a photograph of our group.

The other is a button . On both of these symbols is written, "Long live the friendship of the Chinese and American peoples." (applause) And on both of these can be found a peace symbol.

Chou: That is our final aim. e

One Man's Mead

Dewey Faulkner Dewey Faulkner teaches Beowulf and other things at Yale. He dabbles from time to time in translating Beowulf into 'its only historically justifiable form ,' heroic couplets.

And if the Babe is born a Boy He's given to a Woman Old, Who nails him down upon a rock, Catches his shrieks in cups of gold.

So begins John Gardner's Grendel.

This isn' t an obscure passage of AngloSaxon poetry that has gained a lot in translatio n; it is a stanza from Blake's 'Mental Traveller' that contains an image of life in our fallen world - here viewed as an image of Beowulf's Grendel and his mother. With this epigraph the author gives fair warning of the allusive, consciously 'literary': quality of the book to come. If you skip the epigraph, you'll find the book to be as gutsy as is necessary - for sales as well. Esquire is reprinting parts of it ; critics uniformly are in squealing ecstasies over it. At this stage the only thing to do is read it.

You' ll probably like it. (Even people who don' t especially like modern novels and who do especially like Beowulfhave liked it.)

My particular quarrel is with those reviewers, who tend to be fuzzy ('philosophical,' 'profound') where the author is clear; more misrepresentation of the medieval. The lecturing pedant in me rises. And so, believing that a good word for Grendel is a good word for Beowulf(and that a good word for Beowulf is good for business), I present the following nifty brief guide to Grendel. ( Feor ut.)

To begin with , the plot is mainly a continued allusion to Beowulf - at least. to that part of it in which Grendel is the leading monster villain. Almost everyone has read a translation of the poem at some time (I hope) the original Old English being reserved for the dedicated - and by not rewriting the story , Gardner does not disturb us (especially me). King Hrothgar of Denmark builds his kingdom and his mead hall, Heorot or Hart ; our old friends Wealtheow, Unferth , Hrothulf, etc., live t here. Angered by the poet's (Shaper's) songs, Grendel comes in at night and kills and devours the Danish warriors.

Beowulf arrives from southern Sweden with his small band of followers, offers to aid Hrothgar against Grendel, defeats the jealous Unferth in a verbal combat, and finally defeats Grendel physically by catching him by surprise, hand-wrestling with him, and tearing off his arm . Gardner is a good medievalist : he doesn't alter his 'matter.'

But he does embroider it a bit.

First , Grendel does all the talking. (He only chuckles a little in the poem. But he is vaguely human, descended from Cain just as all the humans proper are descended from Abel's brother Seth; so Gardner is well within his rights.)

Then , Grendel tells about numerous incidents that didn't get into t he 'official' poem, the most important being his visit to the dragon (whom Beowulf is to fight after he kills Grendel

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83rd Year-Established 1888 and Grendel's moth er). Finally , Gardner makes Grendel a sensitive, suffering, self-conscious being, capable of expressing himself playfully, poetically: Portnoy in the sixth century, or Frankenstein's Creature in a previous incarnation. Here I join the reviewers. O bviously this playful poetic!' business was fun for the author. Fun, fun , fun. Author, author, author. But where did the narra.t ing character go?

What do you read, my lord? ('Grendel, has it occurred to you my dear that you are crazy?' I Gardner, has it occurred to you my dear that you are too d amn clever?) It could be argued that much Old English poetry is no less consciously poetic than much of this novel, that Gardner is simply imitating his 'auctoritee' (a good medieval trait). Nonetheless ...

The book centers on Grendel's' immediate problems (and he has plenty of them) with all the o ther characters. They arise from a central complex of causes; Grendel is the eternal adolescent, alienated, s·u ffering, longing. He states h is 'philosophy' in chapter two: :tunderstood that this world was nothing: a mechanical chaos of casual, brute enmity on which we stupidly - • impose our hopes and fears. I understood that, finally and absolutely, I alone exist. All the rest, I saw. is merely what pushes me, or what I push against, blindly -as blindly as a ll that is not myself pushes back. I create the whole universe, blink by blink. -An ugly god pitifully dying in a tree!

He spends most of the rest of the novel informing us how and why he has developed this view. which he never chan('.!S but merely elaborates parts of: Thus, just before he dies, Grendel blames his defeat on h is accidentally having slipped o n blood when he attempted to kick Beowulf away: "It was an accident," I bellow back .

I will cling to what is true. " Blind, mindless, mechanical. Mere logic of chance."

And his dying words to the 'evil, incredibly stupid' animals who stand around watching him die are, typically "Poor Grendel's had an accident.. ..

So may you all. "

Gardner redeems this potentially leaden viewpoint by Grendel's mercurial shifts in tone. Whenever he becomes too serious, Grendel always deflates himself, in a manner reminiscent of By ron. (Another game -. Byron wrote Cain an d identified with the hero: Grendel , being of the race of Cain, is often Don Juanishly Byronic.).As Byron says, ' if a writer should be quite consistent./How could he possibly show things existent?' ,Inconsistent Grendel is very much concerned with things existent, and

he is very much afraid of su ccumbing to wo rds that presume to change the real world but that operate only in the speaker's or listener's imaginatio_n: I couldn't go on, too conscious a ll at once of my whimpering, my eternal posturing, always t ransforming the world with words - changing nothing.

But he also wants the fictions, the wordish lies, and h e finally accepts men's greatest fiction, the story of Cain and Abel, as the basis for his iden tity. (Like all true adolescents, Grendel is suffering from an 'identity crisis.') Whereas before Grendel had tried to make friends with man occasionally, he now becomes 'the outcast, cursed by the rules of [man's] hideous fable.' He becomes the Destroyer.

Grendel is made aware of this imaginative power in words only after he hears theppoems of the Shaper , the blind o ld poet. (Grendel is always spying on the humans, of course.)

Poetry brings to Grendel his first epiphany, his first awareness of something other than either caves or mead-halls, his first vision of what man can be.

To resolve the confusion this knowledge causes he seeks out the dragon , who turns out to be (for me) the book's most amusing character.

The dragon, like God , sees all time and space; he gives Grendel lectures on Free Will and intercession (parodying Boethius), on the folly of human reason, .on Time and Space. He draws two conclusions: "Things come and go," he said.

"That's the gist of it. In a billion billion billion years, everything will have come and gone several times, in various forms . Even I will be gone. A certain man will absurdly ki ll me. A terrible pity - loss of a remarkable form of life. Conservationists wi ll howl." He chuckled "Meaningless, however."

2 'Know thyself.' that's my dictum.

Know pow much you've got, and beware of strangers!"

Dragons by nature collect precious things and lie o n them and are ex tremely suspicious; thus number two.)

The only advice he gives Grendel is that he should accept his fabled identity: • You improve [men] , my boy !. ..

You make them think and scheme.

You drive them to poetry. science, religion, all that makes them what they are for as long as they last. You are, so to speak , the brute existent by which they learn to define them· selves."

He also gives Grendel an invulnerable hide, which is far more prac tical since

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"I love the Yale Repertor y Theatr e ... if I had the chance to run a repertory company, the Yale Repertory Theatre is precisely the company I would run."

Clive Barnes

The New Yorlc Times * Opens October 14

1 He nrik Ibsen

When We Dead Awaken in a new translation by Michael Feingold directed by Tom Haas Ibsen's rarely performed masterpiece, about an artist's confrontation with the woman ¡he has loved and destroyed.

* Opens October 21

2

Lonnie Carter The Big House directed by Robert Brustein a new farce in the Marx Brothers tradition about prison life.

Opens November 21

3

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yale repertory theatre

Albert Camus

Caligula directed by Alvin Epstein the great existentialist's powerful dr-ama of one man's struggle to complete himself.

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it gives him the means to become Supermonster at will. (After all, boys and girls, this is a romance, more or less.)

To return to the advice, the perceptive reader will see the bald head of Blake speaking through the dragon's mouth. Grendel is a Blakean contrary: 'Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy; Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence.' Man ( especially Hrothgar) is the Prolific; Grendel is the Devouring. It must be so: 'Without Contraries is no progression.' Cain and Abel, Grendel and Hrothgar become opponents linked in necessary conflict. They begin as . equivalents in opposition but may be on!y two halves of one whole: 'Pity poor Hrothgar,/Grendel's foe' and 'Pity poor Grengar,/ Hrothdel's foe' are probably equally true. As Grendel says, 'Balance is everything.'

He has a second epiphany. Hrothgar marries Wealtheow, the sister of a threatening neighbor chief, as a political gesture. She is young, beautiful, sad, and Grendel- in his way - falls in love with her.

I was teased - tortured by the red of her hair and the set of her chin and the white of her shoulders- teased toward disbelief in the dragon's t ruths.

(From this you can probably tell that Gardner's treatment of the virtuous Wealtheow is more in the pure Germanic heroine tradition than is desirable in such a hard-nosed novel, but Grendel does se'e her as a symbol rather than as a person, and it is his story ~fter all.) She is the embodiment of the lie that poetry creates; therefore Grendel decides to kill her. 'I firmly committed myself to killing her slowly, horribly. I would begin by holding her over the fire and cooking the ugly hole between her legs! {Ah, these adolescent hangups.) He can't and doesn' t , of course. He remains spiritually and physically frustrated. The dragon's gold can never be enough for Grendel, who is too imperfect, too human. The dragon is an absolute, the Anti-Poet, making lectures rather than poems; Grendel is merely his prophet, preparing the way.

As such Grendel faces his third and flnal epiphany The Stranger, Beowulf, arrives with his men. By this time Grendel has realized that Hrothulf and others will bring about the destruction of Hrothgar and his kingdom , will destroy the contrary by which Grendel defines himself as 'Ruiner of Meadhalls, Wrecker of Kings.' Fatally for him, he fails to understand that Beowulf has come to clear away the other half of the opposition, Grendel himself.

Beowulf is of a different order from Grendel and Hrothgar. Like the

dragon, his true destined foe , he is an absolute. He also has the dragon's habit of lecturing Grendel: Though you murder the world, turn plains to stone, transmogrify life into I and it, strong search ing roots will crack your cave and rain will cleanse it: the world will burn green, sperm v build again. My promise. Time is the mind. the hand that makes (fingers on harpstrings, hero¡swords, the acts, the eyes of queens.) By this I kill you.

He appears to Grendel in his full apocalyptic identity: 'out of his shoulders come terrible fiery wings.'

All this is too much for the doomed narrator; he decides that Beowulf, V with his cold eyes and his soft voice is insane. A few pages later he is dead.

The poem , of course, goes on from here to Beowulrs fight with Grendel's mother, who has to revenge her son's death (in true Germanic fashion) and finally to his battle with the dragon, in which both fighters die. This last battle in the poem is decidedly less than apocalyptic; when it is ended there is no new heaven and new earth.

The world of the poem ends with a ""'-. ~ funeral pyre for the hero and the threat-of wadfyllo. worn, werodes egesan, hyntho and haeftnyd for his people - a great falling of corpses, terror of armies, humiliation and slavery. Eternity could care less: heo[on rece swealg - heaven swallowed the smoke. It's a long way from Blake's apocalyptic Night the Ninth of The Four Zoas.

In fact , it's so far and Beowulf in the novel is such a strange and unappealing creature that I wonder just how seriousJy Gardner is taking his premises. He has his old priest, Ork (meaning monster, as in Tolkien) say that "Ultimate wisdom ... lies in the perception that the solemnity and grandeur of the universe rise through the slow process of unification in which the diversities of existence are utilized, and nothing, nothing is lost."

In Beowulf, however, the contraries are unified only in death and everything is lost. All that remains are the memorial barrow the Geats build for Beowulfs ashes and the poem itself, a memorial with charred margins to remind us of how nearly we came to losing it, just as we have forgotten the great barrow. Blake into Beowulf won't go, I'm afraid.

The priest raises issues that the book doesn't resolve very satisfactorily; there are more in some of the dragon's speeches. If Gardner wants to play the litsv allusion game. he'd better play it all the way; Grendel's death solves too many problems too easily.

Apart from this (which may be only my unperceptive quibble) the book succeeds rather well. The author's games with styles and allusions are generally intriguing. His realistic

1S/The New Journal/October 10, 1971

writing is convincing and powerful.

His leading character emerges as a mentality both alien and familiar; more important, he emerges as a real being - he emerges from the page.

Gardner is, among other things, a translator of medieval poems.

Beowulf is the most untranslatable of medieval poems (as Gardner's occasional attempts in this book reaffirm), which makes it a translator's greatest challenge . Gardner has met it by producing this novel rather than another dreary , inept translation (Gode sy thane); we have more than enough of those. He gives the reader precious little of the original poem. (This is just as well after all , I must eat.)

What he does give is an arabesque wrought around theppoem, interacting with it, probing beneath it. Consequently, Grendel is not at all an authentic re-vision of Beowulf; rather, it is an act of homage.â&#x20AC;˘ Woodcuts from Beowulf. the Warrior, Ian Serra iller, Oxford University Press, 1954. lllustrated by Severin.

GJ-endel, by John Gardner. Alfred A. ICnopf, 1971

continued from page 2 franchising the dispossessed - all this was cast aside.

The game plan to secure victory was carefully worked out. In the first phase, the reformers built an organization. A registration drive was organized this summer in which carloads of blacks were taken down to the HaJI of Records where they enrolled as Democrats. Hundreds of youths got 45 rpm records for registering as Democrats. The reform machine's boss, Lee Wallace, campaigned for Joe Duffey and and Joe Lieberman, gaining new names for his card ftles and exchanging Hank Parker's endorsement for pledges of future support.

Phase two was to change Parker's image - actually to bring it closer to reality. No longer was he to be the angry black , yearning for the liberation of his people. Instead, his years as a gym teacher (educator, in the literature) as an executive of the telephone company, as the owner of a day care center in Woodbridge, and his Boy Scout activism were stressed.

Parker's media campaign was designed to sell him as an efficient manager for the city of New Haven, one who would

YALE~ STUDENT LI\UNDI\Y

make no bold changes, but who would make the city run more smoothly. He was to be the mayor of all the oeoole. .

Still, his liberal supporters must have flinched when he issued a statement showering praise on Ben Delicto, the city's hack police chief who, in two months this summer, presided over the busting of heads at Yale graduation and¡ at a rock concert at the bowl, where his men arrested youths on the charge of possession of cocaine (it turned out to be quinine).

But after all, the object this time was to win. Nothing else mattered.

Imagine the great reformers' surprise when having sold themselves - that is, having gotten more ttian the 6,000 votes they thought would be sufficient to win - they found that Arthur Barbieri, the town Democratic chairman and a Yale dropout, had changed the rules without telling them and gotten 9,000 votes for Bart Guida.

Nor could moral victory be claimed.

That belonged to Vincent Sirabella, who actually did promise a new kind of leadership, a coalition of working people of all races and a government that was concerned about people. Sirabella spoke up on issues that his op-

ponents would not touch. He spoke out against the fare increase by United IIJuminating and proposed that the city take over the company as a municipal utility. He proposed a graduated state income ta..< to protect the city's working class. But without an organization and without money, SirabeUa lost - and badly.

So Arthur Barbieri will have another go at it. New Haven will be able to test whether he can take a man off the street and make him mayor a second time. The opponent again will be Paul Capra, who hopes the $10,000 he's invested in billboards, and in the speech lessons he's taken to improve his platform appearance will make the necessary difference. In any event, the primary showed that the machine ain't dead yet.

Dan Mcintyre

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The Way of the World

The Moss Hart- George S. Kaufman exuberant comedy favorite, direct from its acclaimed engagement at the Edinburgh Inter· national Festival in Scotland. TERESA WRIGHT is featured as Penny Sycamore, matriarch of one of theatre's most rambunct· ious and lovable families, who "do their own thing" 1930's-style.

Directed by Arvin Brown.

Oct. 22 - Nov. 13

William Congreve's delicious romp is considered the high-water mark of Restoration comedy. The style is dazzling and the wit brilliant in this whirl of gallants, wicked wives, and worldly wooing. Watch for press announcements of Special Guest Artists!

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Tro ika: An Evening of Russian Comedy

The American Premiere of a new play by David Storey, author of last season's New York hit, HOME. A poetic play about the nature of skilled work, the meaning of community in our society, and the effect of its loss, all set in the rowdy jocularity of a crew of tent-ra ising roustabouts.

Nov. 19- Dec. 1 1

The Amer ican premiere of Turgenev's THE COUNTRY WOMAN, plus Chekhov's THE WEDDING and SWAN SONG, in new adaptations by MORRIS CARNOVSKY. Mr. Carnovsky, whose appearance last season in YEGOR BULICHOV is a happy memory for LWT audiences, will direct two of the delightful short plays and appear in the third, to be directed by Arvin Brown.

Mar. 17 - Apr. 8

A Street car Named Desire

The Icern an Cometh

The Pulitzer Prize-winning play by one of the twentieth century's most powerful playwrigh ts, Tennessee Will iams. An emotionally· devastating drama of the conf rontation between the fantasy-rapt Blanche DuBois and her animalistic brother-in-law Stanley Kowalski . A stunning work, considered Will iams' greatest.

Dec. 17 - J an. 15**

After national acclaim for his New York revival of Eugene O'Neill's LONG DAY'S J OURN EY INTO NIG HT with Robert Ryan, Geraldine F itzgerald , a nd Stacy Keach, director Arvin Brown once again works his magic touch with America's greatest play· wright. A c haracter actor's d ream, this masterful O'Neill d rama is filled w ith colorful, touching, down-and-out figures.

Apr. 14 - May 6

T he Contractor

Ham let William Shakespeare's towering classic of festering guilt and bloody vengeance. Noted stage and screen actor STACY KEACH, an LWT alumnus, will return to p lay the title role, making this production one of the major events of the American theatre season. Directed by Arvin Brown.

Jan. 21 - Feb.1 2

A New Play The World Premiere of a hard-hitting new play by William Mor· rison, dealing with the tragic last day in the life of a world · renowned author. Another world premiere coup for Long Wharf Theatre, in the tradit ion of last season's smash SOLITAIR E, DOUB LE SO LITAIRE, soon to open with the LWT company on Broadway!

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