October 1995

Rewarding EXCELLENCE

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SP~O"Ob"1995 I grew up in Waukegan (Little Fort), a small industrial city on the western shore of Lake Michigan (Clearing), midway between the much larger cities of Chicago (Onionplace) and Milwaukee (Goodland), in the Midwestern state ofIllinois (Tribe of Superior Men). I particularly identify with that last name.

These are all variations of American Indian terms which, as Gregory McNamee reminds us this month, are the oldest place-names in the United States. McNamee provides a fascinating account of how the names that dot the American landscape "record forgotten episodes, commemorate passing moments and great events alike, and chronicle the movement of peoples and generations over hundreds, even thousands, of years."

I am sure the place-names ofIndia do the same thing. I have had the good fortune of experiencing passing moments and great events at many of them over the past five years~from Agra to Calcutta, Shimla to Dharamshala, Bombay to Bangalore, Varanasi to Manali, Madras to Mathura, Jodhpur to Udaipur, Gwalior to Pushkar, Leh to Lucknow~to name but a few.

There are so many other places in India I want to see, but, unfortunately, my time here has run out. I depart in a few days for my next assignment, in Washington (I don't need to tell you from where that name comes).

The names I will miss most in India belong to the splendid members of the SPAN family: Copycheckers Snigdha and Venkat; artists Gopi and Suhas; DTP designer Hemant; production assistant Sanjay; newcomers Arun and Prakash; editorial assistants Rashmi and Ashok; Amrita, Swaraj, Jackie, Kanti, Rocky, and Aruna among the dearly departed (to other pursuits) and, most importantly, that holy trinity of creative tenaciousness, Nand, Krish, and Avinash, who together represent more than 100 years of SPAN service.

A tribe of superior men and women, if ever there was one.

They will be joined this month by a name they, and many longtime SPAN readers, know well. Stephen Espie is replacing me as editor. Steve edited this magazine in the mid-1970s, returned to Delhi in the early 1980s as deputy director of the U.S. Information Service in India, then went on to other assignments before deciding in 1990 to retire from the foreign service and to take up the life of a man ofleisure in India. But when it was suggested that he might like to return to the labor of his true love, SPAN, he quickly decided to put leisure aside for a while.

I feel sad at leaving, butam comforted by the thought that SPAN is in good hands and that India is a place one can return to. Namaste. ~G.E.O.

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A Store for All Readers

byMaureenLiebl

Art of Editing

Robert Gottlieb-The Interviews by Larissa MacF arquhar

14

Talking Books

15 16

TalkingAboutBooks

byKathleenCox byRenukaSingh

Writing and Typing-Is

There a Difference?

byJohn Kenneth Galbraith

18

So Red

20

All Days Are Not Equal

22 29

Kissing Off Corporate

34

The Threat of Chemical and Biological Weapons byRobertWright

38 40

Focus On ...

42

Sacred and Healing Spaces

45

America's Front Porch

APoembyJohnHollander

Names on the Land

by Marjorie Kelly

America

byKennethLabich

byGregoryMcNamee

On the Lighter Side bySandraMaxwell

by Sue Bridwell Beckham

Frontcover: Dylan Hagen, all of19 months old, selects a book in the children's section of Tattered Cover bookstore in Denver, Colorado.

Publisher, E. Ashley Wills; Editor, Guy E. Olson Managing Editor, Krishan Gabrani; Associate Editors, Arun Bhanot, Prakash Chandra; Copy Editors, A. Venkata Narayana, Snigdha Goswami; Editorial Assistants, Rashmi Goel, Ashok Kumar; Photo Editor, Avinash Pasricha; Art Director, Nand Katyal;. Contributing Designers, Gopi Gajwani, Suhas Nimbalkar; Staff Designer, Hemant Bhatnagar; Production Assistant, Sanjay Pokhriyal; Circulation Manage/; D.P. Sharma; Photographic Services, USIS Photographic Services Unit; Research Services, USIS Documentation Services, American Center Library, New Delhi.

Photographs: Front cover-Barry Staver. l-R.K. Sharma. 8-13,21, 32-33-illustrations by Suhas Nimbalkar. 14-illustration

by Hemant Bhatnagar. J 5, 17-Avinash Pasricha.18-Kosti Ruohomaa. 22-23-Richard Lee. 27 bottom-Mark Richards; topTodd Buchanan. 29-illustration

by Gopi Gajwani. 39 top-R.K. Sharma. 39 center, 43 top left-Avinash Pasricha. 42-44-courtesy Karen Lukas. 45-illustration by Hemant Bhatnagar. 46 top left-David Valenzuela; top right-Robert Mohl; bottomMaguire/Reeder Ltd. 47-courtesy Florida Department of Commerce.

Published by the United States Inrormation 110001 (phone: 3316841), on behalrorthe

Service, American Center, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi American Embassy, New Delhi. Prin/eda/Thomson

Limited, Faridabad, Haryana. The opinions expressed in this magazine do not necessarily policies orthe U.S. Government. the Editor. For permission (Rs. 110 rorstudents):

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A Store for All Readers The Tattered Cover in Denver, Colorado, is much more than a bookstore. It is a "house of ideas," in the words of its owner, where "people ... feel at home, really welcome, and comfortable."

Above: A view of the bookstore's first floor. Right: Karen Ellis reads to a group of enthralled-except for two-listeners; the Tattered Cover holds special story sessions for children on Tuesdays and Saturdays.

Below: A regular at the bookstore, Lea Anne Owens is engrossed in reading by the lamp; the store is open until 11:00 p.m. jar night owls. Center: Employee Tom Rowan (brown shirt) reads to kids and parents. Bottom: Swiss national Manuel/a Grosset browses through a Swiss newspaper to catch up on eventsji-om home; the store subscribes to several joreignnewspapers and periodicals.

was t an unusual strategy for relocating a business. The Tattered Cover bookstore in Denver, Colorado, had outgrown its old quarters and was moving to a larger space nearby. The staff, with some hesitation, put up notices in the store, asking for volunteers to help with the move.

"The results were pretty surprising," recalls Matt Miller, a manager who has been with the store since the late 1970s, speaking in the soft, understated manner that seems to characterize all Tattered Cover staff.

The results, in fact, were amazing. More than 300 customers volunteered to help--so many that some had to be turned down. On the day of the move, they arrived in droveson foot, by bicycle, in jeeps, and pickup trucks. Some stationed themselves along the mechanical conveyor belts that ferried volumes from the old shop t9 the new.

Others, inside the new quarters, formed human conveyor belts, moving books upstairs, around comers, and onto shelves.

The store provided lunch, T-shirts commemorating "The Moving Experience," and a day that all look back on with affectionate nostalgia.

It was testimony to the special relationship Tattered Cover regulars have with their favorite bookstore. "I love it here," says a woman sitting on the floor in the children's section. "My husband loves it here. My teenage son loves it here. My seven-year-old loves it here. It's like our second home." A young man browsing through the New York Times in the ground floor coffee bar voices similar sentiments. ''I'm between jobs right now," he confides, "and nobody seems to mind if I just settle down here for the whole day."

Joyce Meskis, a former mathematician, is the owner and moving spirit of this unique institution.

"I just wanted to have a bookstore where people would feel at home, really welcome, and comfortable," she says simply, explaining her philosophy. "This is, after all, a house of ideas."

When Joyce, as customers and staff all call her, bought the original Tattered Cover in 1974, it was a small, struggling books hop occupying about 100 square meters. Within five years, she had turned the business around and expanded to a bi-level building with 1,850 square meters. In 1986, the shop

I

was again moved, with the help of the customers, to its present location. Sitting on a prime comer in the lively and fashionable Cherry Creek area, the store has 3,700 square meters of book space sprawling over four levels, offering customers a stock of about 250,000 titles and an inventory base of half-a-million books. Recently, a small, sophisticated restaurant was added to the top floor of the building, a coffee bar tucked into a comer of the ground floor, and a second store opened in the booming "LoDo" (lower downtown) area of Denver.

It is books, of course, that are the Tattered Cover's main attraction, and it would be hard to find a rival for the variety, quality, selection, and sheer size of the store's inventory. In addition to comprehensive collections of contemporary fiction and nonfiction, there are specialty collections in more than 60 categories-in areas as diverse as poetry, travel, architecture, home repair, spiritual growth, business, history, biography, and new science fiction. The floor plan of the shop shows 21 separate subsections of the children's book category alone. And, in addition to the books, Elementary schoolchildren from Denver (and around the world. if the winnerfrom DusseldOlf Germany. is any indication) design bookmarks/or the Tattered Covel:

the inventory includes a large selection of foreign and domestic magazines, newspapers, and periodicals.

The inventory, however, is only the beginning of the Tattered Cover experience.

From the start, Joyce Meskis instilled in all her employees the belief that this bookshop was part ofa community, and that service to customers and to the community was paramount. The services that the Tattered Cover routinely provides, free of charge, leave other bookstore proprietors shaking their heads in wonder. They include special orders for any book, gift-wrapping, mailord~r shipments, a gift registry, and out-ofprint searches. In addition, staff stationed at the many computer terminals sprinkled throughout the store will spend any amount of time-any amount of time-cheerfully tracking down the most obscure and vague references. Meanwhile, other employees sitting in a small cubicle in the staff offices upstairs attend to the hundreds of queries that come in each day by phone.

The Tattered Cover also tries to respond to special needs, by stocking braille books' for the visually impaired, providing wheelchair access to both stores, and offering special services for the hearing-impaired. Moreover, the main store is open until 11:00 p.m. most nights, catering to the night-owl population.

On any given day, something special is bound to be happening at the Tattered Cover.

A recent week was typical. On Monday, therapist Jose Stevens came in to speak and to autograph copies of his acclaimed Transforming Your Dragons. On Tuesday, well-known physicist and radio personality Michio Kaku was there to talk and sign copies of the bestseller Hyperspace.

On Wednesday, as part of the ongoing "Chalkboard Colloquium" senes for educators, Joy Hakim presented the new History of us.. the innovative ten-volume series that uses stories to present American history to children. The same evening, David Brower, the first director of the environmental protection organization, the Sierra Club, came to meet customers and sign copies of his Let the Mountains Talk.

Let the Rivers Run. The guest on Thursday was John Dunning with his newest murderand-mayhem book, set in the rarefied realms of the book-collecting world,

The Bookman s Wake. On Friday, Dana Stabenow came in to sign copies of her newest mystery, set in the Alaskan wilderness, Play with Fire. On Sunday afternoon, the week wound up with a children's concert. And on Tuesday and Saturday, as always, children flocked in for the popular morning story hours.

These days, the concept of the "superbookstore" is sweeping America. National chains like Barnes & Noble and Borders are flooding shopping malls across the country with mega-bookshops, often with coffee bars attached. The chains seem to have hit on a winning formula by packaging an ambience that is a vague mixture of Englishgentleman's library and fin-de-siecle European coffee house. The obvious popularity of these new bookshops is one of the most reassuring signs in contemporary America in that the pleasures of oldfashioned reading are surviving the television-video arcade-computer game onslaught. The International Herald Tribune recently reported that book sales were up ten percent in America this year in contrast to a three percent rise in retail sales overall.

In places like Lakeland, Florida, it is now possible to enjoy cafe au fait and a croissant in a jewel of a Barnes & Noble, surrounded by dark green carpeting, wood paneling, beautifully designed shelving and cafe furniture, and, of course, books. Still, there is a welcoming, homelike ambience about the Tattered Cover that the new superbookstores haven't been able to capture.

Here, in the ground floor coffee bar, there are about a dozen tables. They have not been carefully designed to look old; they are old.

Moreover, they don't match-in fact, they look like they were collected from various grandmothers' attics. THroughout the bookstore, there are overstuffed armchairs, comfy sofas, reading lamps-all equally mixed-and-matched, all a bit worn from the thousands of readers who have curled up in them for leisurely browsing.

Dottie Ambler, stepmother of John Ambler, who was until recently a deputy representative at the Ford Foundation in New Delhi, has been a staff member of the Tattered Cover since 1977. Asked how the store differs from the super-bookstore chains, she smiles and says gently, "I don't think they can really compete with us. They may be large, but still

they can't carry th-: types of things we do-titles from small presses, textbooks, books that carry small discounts, all the things that are not very profitable, but that we stock because our readers want them. And they can never match the type of relationship we have with our customers. Why, in the early days, people used to ski into the store during snowstorms! And so many of us have been here almost from the beginning. The entire staff here is a very close family. Joyce makes sure of that."

Lorraine Bonebrake, the store's newest employee, concurs. "We spend our first day of training with Joyce," she explains. "She talks about the philosophy of the store, which basically is that we should bend over backward, do everything we possibly can to put a book and a person together. It's a lot of fun-this is a very personal, very special place." With very special people, one might add. Bonebrake herself is a Yale-trained art historian, and hopes to eventually "graduate" to the art books department.

On the ground floor, by the elevators, there is a rack of newly arrived books, each with a handwritten review and recommendation by a staff member who has read it. The young man currently between jobs has moved from the coffee bar to a sofa near the large main staircase, where he is comfortably immersed in a book. Bon~brake is happily manning a cash register at the main desk. Chris Essex, another new employee who previously worked at a newsstand in Lafayette, Indiana, interrupts an interview to dash after a customer who has just left after an unsuccessful hunt for an obscure magazine.

"Be right back," he calls. "I just remembered where she might find it. Hope I can catch her."

Upstairs, an elderly woman is explaining that she doesn't know the name of the book, "but it's about birds. Oh, yes, and it has a very pretty cover." The young staff member at the desk cheerfully turns to his computer, telling her, "Don't worry, ma'am, we'll find it."

Downstairs, dozens of brilliantly colored bookmarks designed by the store's youngest customers have been printed up and are available for the taking. "Books Are Out of This Galaxy," proclaims the 1994 winning entry for 3rd and 4th graders, by Nicholas Moses. "Books-Making Friends Around the World," reads the entry by Jenny Warner,

1994 winner among 7th and 8th graders.

A few months ago Joyce Meskis was honored by American PEN, in an award normally restricted to authors and editors, for the Tattered Cover's commitment to preserving freedom of speech. She received $25,000 and an abstract sculpture, and was cited for her activism against censorship.

Among other things, she had refused to take Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses off the shelf despite anonymous telephone demands to withdraw it, and she had led a successful fight against Colorado legislation that would have permitted each of the state's municipalities to establish obscenity ordinances.

"We must stand up to the challenges that come at us from all directions," Meskis told writers and publishers at the PEN awards

banquet in New York.

Elizabeth Blasi, a Denver kindergarten student, doesn't know anything about PEN, or the principles offree speech. Nevertheless, Joyce Meskis and her house of ideas have already had an impact on her. Proudly displayed along with the works of the older bookmark award winners is Elizabeth's own creation, wavering letters scrawled across a big heart-I Love You, Books. This, perhaps even more than the PEN award, summarizes the remarkable achievements of this most remarkable store.

D About the Author: Maureen Liebl is a New Delhi-based columnist/or Currents, the Sunday magazine o/Newsday published in New York, and contributes to various other international and Indian publications.

Carol Genrich with her chi/den-Danae, ten; Ashley, jive; and Nathan, three.

Says a mother: "I love it here. My husband loves it here. My teenage son loves it here. My seven-year-old loves it here. It:~ like our second home. "

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Left: Steve Rademacher and Annie Thompson glimpse through travel books on New Zealand in preparation for a trip to that countl)'.

Center: John Dunning gives a talk on, and autographs copies of his newest murder-and-mayhem book, The Bookman's Wake.

Bottom: The store s coffee bar is afavorite with clients. Jean Olivia-Rasbach (in multicolored dress) dips cooked chicken in a sauce from her recipe book, as well as signs copies of the book.

ROBERT GOTTLIEB

The Art of Editing Robert Gottlieb is a man of eclectic tastes, and it is difficult to make generalizations about the authors he has worked with or the hundreds of books he has edited.

In his years at Simon & Schuster, where he became editor in chief, and as publisher and editor in chief of Knopf, he edited some of the most influential books of the past 50 years.

Gottlieb was born in New York City in 1931 and grew up in Manhattan. He read "Henry James, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Proust-the great moralists of the novel," he says. He graduatedfrom Columbia in 1952, the year his first son was born. (He has since had two more children with his second wife, actress Maria Tucci.) He spent two years studying at Cambridge and then in 1955 gotajobatSimon & Schuster as editorial assistant to Jack Goodman, the editor in chief In 1957, Jack Goodman unexpectedly died, and at about the same time, Simon & Schuster was sold back by the Marshall Field estate to two of its original owners, Max Schuster and Leon Shimkin. Within a few years Gottlieb became managing editor, and a few years after that, editor in chief Then, in 1968, he left Simon & Schuster to be-

come editor in chief and publisher of Knopf In 1987, at the invitation of its new ownel; s.f. Newhouse, Gottlieb left Knopf to take over the New Yorker. In 1992, Gottlieb agreed to retire ji-om the New Yorker to make way for former Vanity Fair editor Tina Brown.

Then 61, Gottlieb decided he didn't want to begin running something else, and offered his services to Sonny Mehta, who had taken over Knopf when Gottlieb left. Since then, Gottlieb has been workinggratisfor Knopf My interviews with Gottlieb took place in the living room of his Manhattan townhouse. The interviewees in this piece were suggested

by Gottlieb himself Their comments and Gottlieb s responses were combined afterward-there was no direct conversation. Joseph Heller, Doris Lessing, John Ie Carre, Cynthia O::ick, Michael Crichton, Chaim Potok, Toni Morrison, Robert Caro, and Mordecai Richlerareall authors Gottlieb has edited. Charles McGrath worked with Gottlieb at the New Yorker, where McGrath is deputy editOl: Lynn Nesbit is a literary agent who has worked with Gottlieb on a number of books.

JOSEPH HELLER: When I finally completed my second novel, Something Happened, the New York Times interviewed me about having finished the book, and I talked to them about Bob's value to me as an editor. The day the interview ran, Bob called me and said he didn 'tthink itwas agood idea to talk about editing and the contributions of editors, since the ,,--, public likes to think everything in the book

a wholesome thing. The editor's relationship to a book should be an invisible one. The last thing anyone reading Jane Eyre would want to kJ1ow, for example, is that I had convinced Charlotte Bronte that the first

comes right from the author. That's true, and so from that time on, I haven't.

I !

ROBERT GOTTLIEB: Of course, if anybody says nice things about me in print it's pleasant. But the fact is, this glorification of editors, of which I have been an extreme example, is not

Mrs. Rochester should go up in flames. The most famous case of editorial intervention in English literature has always bothered me-you know, that Dickens's friend Bulwer-Lytton advised him to change the end of Great Expectations: I don't want to know that' As a critic, of course, as a literary historian, I'm interested, but as a reader, I find it very disconcerting. Nobody should know what I told Joe Heller and how grateful he is, ifhe is. It's unkind to the reader andjustout of place.

HELLER: Some of Bob's suggestions for Catch-22 involved a lot of work. There was a chapter that came on page 200 or 300 of the manuscript-I believe it was the one with Colonel Cathcart; it was either that or the Major Major chapter-and he said he liked this chapter, and it was a shame we didn't get to it earlier. I agreed with him, and I cut about 50 or 60 pages from theopeningjustto get there more quickly.

GOTTLIEB: Joe Heller and I have always been on exactly tl1e same wa ve length edi toriall y, and the most extraordi nary proo f 0 fthis came up when we were working on Something Happened. It's a deeply disturbing book about a very conflicted man-a man who is consumed with anxiety and all kinds of serious moral problems-and his name was Bill Slocum.

Well, we went through the whole book, and divided it up into chapters and all the rest of it, and atthe end oftheprocess I said,Joe, this is goingto sound crazy to you but this guy is not a Bill. He said, Oh really, what do you think he is? I said, He's a Bob. And Joe looked at me and said, He was

couldn't find a more perfect pair of opposites in the editorial process. Le Carre is unbelievably sensitive to editorial suggestion because his ear is so good and because his imagination is so fertile-he'll take the slightest hint and come back with 30 extraordinary new pages. Deighton, on the other hand-who is totally willing, couldn't be more eager for suggestions-is one ofthose writers for whom, once a sentence is down on paper, it takes on a reality that no amount of goodwill or effort can change.

So you can say to him, Len, this is a terrific story but there is a serious problem. He'll say, What is it? What is it? And you say, Well, on page 37

a Bob, and I changed his name to Bill because I thought you would be of-

this character is killed, but on page 118 he appears at a party. Oh my God,

fended if! made him a Bob. I said, Oh no, I don't think he's anything like me, it'sjust that this character is a Bob. So we changed it back. It was absolutely amazing. How did it happen? I don't know. I suppose ourconvo-

Len says, this is terrible, but I'll fix it, don 'tworry. Then you getthe manuscript back, and you turn to page 37, and he'll have changed it to, He

luted, neurotic, New York Jewish minds work the same way.

DORIS LESSING: What makes Bob a great editor, probably the best of his time, is that he has read everything, is soaked in the best that has been said and thought and brings this weight rience into use when hejudges of his authors. You may think kind of background should be

of expethe work that this taken for

granted. Well, once upon a time one could assume that an editor in a serious publishing house had read, could make comparisons. But these days this is not what you find in publishing houses.

GOTTLIEB: A lot of things one doesn't usually think about can affect the reading experience. The way you structure the book, for examplewhether you divide it into chapters or let it run uninterrupted, whether you give the chapters titles .... Years ago I edited a wonderful novel that later became a successful movie, Lilith, by 1.R. Salamanca. It was a pow-

wasalmostkilled.

LE CARRE: A Pelfect Spy is the novel of mine which is closest to my heart. It is also my most autobiographical novel, and it skates along the edge ofa great deal of childhood pain and stuff. It's always a queasy business when a writer starts moaning about his childhood, so the only way I could redeem the situation was by making the son much less pleasant in many ways. Bob pointed out the places where he felt that the fiction became so autobiographical that it became embarrassing-where he felt that I had really spilled into private experience and had thrown away the mask. He was terribly good at that. What we left on the cutting room floor still makes me blush.

CYNTHIA OZICK: Bob became my editor when David Segal, who had been my editor and heart's friend at Knopf, died at the age of 42 of a heart attack just before Christmas, 1970. On that same day, or within a week, Bob and Maria's little daughter Elizabeth was born. Bob called me from the hospital right after her birth and said, Don't worry, you're not abandoned, your editor is gone, but I am here, and I will be your editor and publish you. Don't feel that you're deserted or lost. It was one of the most astounding

acts of generosity

I've encoun-

erful and affecting book, and the character who dominated it, who sparked it, was the character named Lilith, but she didn't turn up at all in

tered in my life. It occurred in the middle ofbirth, death, bewilderment, grief. Now, very often when

the first 60 or 80 pages. I don't remember what the original title was, but I suggested to Jack that he change it to Lilith, because that way through all the opening pages of the book when Lilith hadn't yet appeared, the reader would be expecting her. So just by changing the title one created a tension that wouldn't have been there otherwise.

I am writing, I have on my right shoulder, my shoulder at what approval-I have to

JOHN LE CARRE:

Bob will tell me how he understands

a story, and

where he feels slightly disappointed, perhaps; where the satisfactions remains very are not what he expected, or something of that kind-it loose. He will say to me, I'm going to draw a wavy line down these page.s; for me, they're too lyrical, too self-conscious, too over-the-top.

And I will say, Okay, for the moment I disagree because I'm in love with every word I've written, but I'll rake it over and lick my wounds, and we'll see what happens. Occasionally I'll say I disagree, in which case we will leave the matter in suspense until I recognize that he is right. In no case have I ever regretted taking Bob's advice. In all the large things, he's always been right.

GOTTLIEB: For a while I was editing the two best writers of quality who were writing spy novels, John Ie Carre and Len Deighton, and you

something like a bird sitting a watchful bird looking over I am doing. I want that bird 's get it. It is a very critical bird,

who is in a way a burden, but also grants me permissi6n. This bird is the mind of Bob Gottlieb. It is to him I present what I am working on when I am finished, and it is him I want to satisfy and more than satisfy: Grati fy.

GOTTLIEB: The first thing writers want-and this sounds so basic, but you'd be surprised how un-basic it is in the publishing world-is a quick response. Once they've finished a new manuscript and put it in the mail, they exist in a state of suspended emotional and psychic animation until they hear from their editor, and it's cruelty to animals to keep them waiting. I'm lucky, because I happen to bea very quick reader, so I canalmost always read a new manuscript overnight. Besides, when I receive a manuscript from a writer I've been working with I'm consumed by curiosity to know what he or she has written. But easy or not, one's first job is a swi ft and honest response-tempered, of course, by tact.

This glorification of editors, of which I have been an extreme example, is not a wholesome -Robert Gonlieb thing. The editor's relationship to a book should be an invisible one.

It took me some time, when I was a very young man, to grasp writer-even a mature, experienced one-could have made an tional transference to me. But of course it makes sense: The editor or withholds approval, and even to a certain extent controls the

that a emogives purse

read Chaim Potok's The Chosen, to use an extreme example, I recognized that the book had come to an end, and that Chaim had written 300 more pages. The material that was the motor ofthe book had worked itself out, and he had gone on to write the sequel. So I called up Chaim's agent and

strings. It's a relationship fraught with difficulty, because it can lead to infantilizing and then to resentment. Somehow, to be helpful, an editor

plain to him it's only on the condition that he drop the last 300 pages that I

has to embody authority yet not become possessive or controlling.

want to publish it: If he wants to leave it as it is, it's a different book.

MICHAEL CRICHTON: Bob became my editor just after he had moved to Knopf from Simon & Schuster in 1968. Lynn Nesbit was my agent. She recommended Bob partly because she thought I'd like him and partly because he was an overnight person.

When I sent Bob a draft of The Andromeda Strain-the first book I did for himin 1968 he said he would publish it if I would agree to completely rewrite it. I gulped and said okay. He gave me his feelings about what had to happen on the phone, in about 20 minutes. He was very quick. Anyway, I rewrote it completely. He called me up and said, Well, this is good, now you only have to rewrite haIJofit. Again, he told me what needed to happen-forthe book to begin in what was then the middle, and fill in the material from the beginning sometime later on.

Finally we had the manuscript in some kind of shape. I was just completely exhausted. He said to me, Dear boy, you've got this ending backward. (He's married to an actress, and he has a very theatrical manner. He calls me "dear boy," like an English actor might do.) I don't remember exactly the way it was, but I had it so that one of the characters was supposed to turn on a nuclear device, and there was suspense about whether ornotthatwould happen. Bob said, No, no, the switch has to turnitseIJon automatically, and the character has to turn it off. He was absolutely right. That was the first time I understood that when there is something wrong in writing, the chance are that there is either too much of it, too little of it, or that it is in someway backY<'ard.

said, I love the book and would like to talk to him about it, but please ex-

Chaim immediately TONI

MORRISON:

saw the point, so there was no problem.

Endings I always know, because

that's always

whatthe book is about. The problem is getting there. I used to have these really awful beginnings-never

they were starts-and

really beginnings,

Bob always caught them. He would say, This is not a beginning, the book is not grounded yet. I originally began Sula, for example, with what is now chapter two. Bob told me he felt the first words of the manuscript"National Suicide Day"-were

not the beginning of the book. So I spent a

summer trying to write a beginning.

OZICK: I will tell you two stories, one about somebody else and one about myself. The somebody else is a close friend, also edited by Bob, who when writing a novel tends to find herselfwriting episodes or short stories. He said to her, Maybe that's just how you write a novel: You have to write short stories, and then you putthem together and that's the novel.

I, on the other hand, have begun novels and then abandoned

them and

they have become short stories. You have to think you're doing a novel, and then it turns out to be a short story.

MORRISON:

Writing my first two books, The Bluest Eye and Sula,

I had the anxiety ofa new writer who needs to make sure every sentence is exactly the right one. Sometimes jeweled quality-a after I finished

that produces

tightness, which I particularly Sula and was working

a kind of precious, wanted in Sula. Then

on the third book, Song of

Solomon, Bob said to me, You can loosen, open up. Your writing doesn't have to be so contained, ircan be wider. I'm not sure these were his exact words, but I know that the consequence

of the remarks was that I did

relax and begin to open up to possibilities.

GOTTLIEB:

I remember

the discussion

with Toni as she was begin-

I think in the process of working on it Bob taught me a tremendous amount about editing. I never again sent him a manuscript in such a mess. Even now, when Bob first calls me back about a manuscript, I panic. But I'll tell you, I think every writer should have tattooed back-

ning Song of Salam on, because although we always did some marginal

ward on his forehead, like AMBULANCEon ambulances, EvelJ1body needs an editor.

only other real help I gave to her was non-editorial:

the words:

cosmetic work on her manuscripts, discrimination

obviously

a writerofher

powers and

doesn't need a lot of help with her prose. I think I served

Toni best by encouraging

her-helping

to free her to be herself. The

stop editing and to write full-time, something

I encouraged

her to

I knew she wanted to do.

As I remember it, I reassured her about her finances-but

what I was re-

GOTTLIEB: It's often the case that the most strained moments in books are the very beginning and the very end-the getting in and the getting out. The ending especially: It's awkward, as if the writer doesn't know

ally saying was, You're not an editor who does some writing, you're a writer-acknowledge it; there's nothing to be scared of. We always un-

when the book is over and nervously says it all again. Sometimes the most useful thing you can tell a writer is, Here's where the book ends-in these

the same age.

next two-and-a-half

ROBERT

pages you're just clearing your throat. When I first

derstood each other-two

CARO:

editors, two lovers of reading,

When I first handed in the manuscript

and exactly

of The Power

Broker it was over a million words. With the technology of that time there was a limited number of words you could fit between two covers and have what they call a manageable trade book~something like 700,000 words, around 1,300 pages. Bob didn't want to do the thing in volumes. He told me, [ can get people interested in Robert Moses once, but not twice. So we had to cut 300,000 words. That's like cutting a 500-page book out ofa book. It's not easy. I would come into Knopfin the morning, day after day, and Bob was running the company, but he would shut the door of his office and we would work on the manuscript all day. I remember there was a point near the end when we thought we were done, but it turned out someone had miscounted. Bob called the next week and said, Bob, I have some bad news. We have to cut 50,000 more words. It was a terrible thing.

most of all, with no author to work with, I was out there alone~with the responsibility

all

of presenting not only John's words, but his life. But it

was also the most gratifying job I've ever done, and one of the very few times in my working life when I've felt J' d actually achieved something.

What I find most useful are the moments

MORRISON:

disturbed by something in a book. He is a marvelous ders completely

to a text, so when he finds something

suasive, or ifsomething

leaves him disoriented,

when Bob is

reader, and surreninvalid or unper-

I know it is important

for me to go back to it. I pay a very rigorous attention especially to that level of comfort a reader needs in order to accept the kind of gestures of fantasy [ include. I know and he knows]

need to create a sense of

absolute stability in order to be able to transport the reader into a realm that is not "realistic."

You have to surrender to a book. If you do, when some-

GOTTLIEB:

thing in it seems to be going askew, you are wounded. The more you have surrendered to a book, the more jarring its errors appear. I read a manuscript very quickly, the moment I get it. I usually won't use a pencil the first time through because

['m just reading

for impressions.

When I

GOTTLIEB: It took a year. The Power Broker was Caro's first book, and he had worked on it for eight years in isolation,just him and his wife.

It was agony for him to cut it. It was painful for me, too, because I loved

reach the end, I'll call the writer and say, I think it's very fine (or whatever), but I think there are problems here and here. At that point I don't

the material.

know why I think that~Ijust

I could have read twice as much, but I couldn't print twice

scriptagain,

as much.

moreslowly,

ative reactions CARO: In order to get enough money to finish The Power Broker] had signed a two-book contract with Knopf. After The Power Broker [ was supposed to do a biography of Fiorello LaGuardia. But I realized after I had signed the contract that [didn't really want to do it. [had seen Robert Moses's life as a way to study how power works in the cities, and I wanted to study the same thing on a national level through the life of Lyndon Johnson, since I thought he understood power better than any other American President. I also wanted to do it in more than one volume, because there were things cut out of The Power Broker that I thought should not have been cut.

I expected a big fight over this, because back then nobody was doing multi-volume biographies except academics. So [ went in to see Bob about it. Before I had said anything, he said to me, Bob, I've been thinking about you and what you ought to do. ] know you've been planning to do the LaGuardia book, but I think what you should really do is a biography of Lyndon Johnson. And he said, I think you should do it in several volumes. It was really quite startling.

GOTTLIEB:

That's something an editor can do~come

up with an idea

for a book. I've done this with happy results a few times. Potok's Wanderings, for instance, was originally my idea. I thought, I am a Jew who knows nothing about Jewishness:] grew up in an atheist household; I never attended anything. ] thought that Chaim could write a very popular and useful book that might instruct someone like me. The most important instance was when I convinced John Cheever to let me put together his collected stories. He kept saying, Why do you wa¡nt to do this? These stories have all appeared in collections already. Eventually, after his death, I was asked by his family to edit his journals, for both the New Yorker and Knopf. It was the hardest job I've ever done~it

involved

wrestling

125,000 words out of several million. The material was very dark, and

think it. Then [go back and read the manuand I find and mark the places where I had neg-

to try to figure out what's

through I think about solutions~maybe

wrong.

The second

this needs expanding,

there's too much of this so it's blurring that.

Editing requires you to be always open, always responding.

time

maybe It is very

important, for example, not to allow yoursel fto want the writer to write a certain kind of book. Sometimes books is Something

Happened.

that's hard. My favorite

of Heller's

When we are working on a manuscript,

Joe is always telling me (rightly) that [ want him to write Something Happenedagain,

and that he could only write it once. Inevitably you will

like some ofa writer's books better than others. But when you're working on a manuscript,

that can't matter. You have to be inside that book

anddo your best to make it as good as itcan be. And if you can't approach it in that spirit, you shouldn't be working on it.

CHARLES

McG RATH: Bob has an uncanny knack for putting his fin-

ger on that one sentence, or that one paragraph, that somewhere in the back of your mind you knew wasn't quite right but was close enough so that you decided to worry about it later. Then you forgot about it, or you convinced yourself that it was okay, because it was too much trouble to change. He always goes right to those places.

GOTTLIEB:

Editing is simply the application

of the common sense of

any good reader. That's why, to be an editor, you have to be a reader. It's the number one qualification.

Because you could have all the editorial

tools, but if you're not a responsive reader you won't sense where the problems lie. I am a reader. My life is reading. In fact, I was about 40 years old when I had an amazing

revelation

(this is going to sound

dumb): It suddenly came to me that not every person in the world assumed, without thinking about it, that reading was the most important thing in Iife. I hadn't known that. I hadn't even known that I had thought it, it was so basic to me.

What makes Bob a great editor, probably the best of his time, is that he has read everything, is soaked in the best.. .and brings this weight of experience into use when he judges the work of his authors.

-Doris Lessing Oddly enough, I find that reading non-editorially is a very different experience for me. When I'm reading for pleasure I don't tend to think as an editor, even with books I've edited .... Very rarely have I had the impulse to make changes in a book I'm just reading for pleasure or instruction. It's only bad translations to madness and make me reach for a pencil.

McGRATH:

that drive me

Bob is the best-read person I've ever met. I used to have a

somewhat inflated notion of how well-read I was, but Bob makes me look like someone who'sjust got his first library card.

MORRISON: I can never tell Bob-in fact I've only recently begun to tell anybody-what I am doing critically in a book. Iff think I am recasting language in a certain way, or manipulating history so that it becomes flesh-whatever I think is radical and interventionist and different about my work in terms of American literature in general-the lit-crit stuff-I never get into that with Bob. He isn't interested in it, and it wouldn't be useful for us to talk about it, because enfin a book has to work as a book for someone who just isn't going to pick up on all these clever things you think you're doing. Sometimes Bob will say he thinks I'm editorializing, and I can 'tremember a time when he hasn't been right about that. He sees those places where, particularly earlier on, you didn't know how to dramatize something, so you editorialized it. I always know what I will not alter under any circumstances. Sometimes I just say no, and Bob won't pursue it, because he knows that if! say no it means something quite different from "I don't want to." It's in the areas in which you did the best you could, but you weren't entirely pleased, or you weren't quite sure, that you need the third eye.

GOTTLIEB: For some writers a solution provided by an editor is of no use. When I worked with Margaret Atwood at the New Yorker, for instance, whether there was a plot problem or a punctuation

problem, ifthe

solution came from her it worked wonderfully. But if! offered one myself, it never took. Now another writer might say, It's no good your telling me this is the wrong word if you don't give me the right word.

Of course, I have also spent a great deal of my life working with writers who are simply bad. I have fixed more sentences than most people have read in their lives .... There are books that are never going to come fully to life, either because the idea was wrong, or it was the wrong idea for that writer, or the writer is just not good. Then the reviewers say, What this book needed was a good editor. But those are usually the books that have had the most editing.

LE CARRE: Bob knows how much to tell to me. I think that is really one of his crucial young editors I hear of who are practically you. Bob is like a good movie director with get the best out of you.

me and how much virtues. There are trying to write the an actor: He's just

to leave so many book for trying to

CRICHTON: Bob always says he is an editor, not a writer. He has a way of not competing with you, which is very reassuring. If you hear

criticism from Bob you neverthink, as you sometimes do with otherpeopie, Well, he's just jealous because he wants to be me. And that helps in terms of hearing things from him that you might not want to hear.

GOTTLIEB: Your job as an editor is to figure out what the book needs, but the writer has to provide it. You can't be the one who says, Send him to Hong Kong at this point, let him have a love affair with a cocker spaniel. Rather, you say, This book needs something at this point: It needs opening up, it needs a direction, it needs excitement. When people say to me, Oh you're so creative, I try to explain that I'm not creative. I simply have certain other qualities that are necessary for my kind of work. It has liberated me, being happy being what I am. There are editors who will always feel guilty that they aren't writers. I can write perfectly well-anybody who's educated can write perfectly well. But I dislike writing: It's very, very hard, and I just don't like the activity. Whereas reading is like breathing.

MORRISON: I think we erroneously give pride of place to the act of writing rather than the act of reading. People think youjust read because you can understand the language, but a certain kind of reading is a very high-level intellectual process. I have such reverence for that kind of sensitive reading-it is not just absorbing things and identifying what's wrong but a much deeper thing that I can see would be perfectly satisfying. Anyway, this separation is fairly recent: Not long ago the great readers were the great writers, the great critics were the great novelists, the great poets were the great translators. People didn't make these big distinctions about which one was more thrilling than the other.

I never wrote a line until after I became an editor, and only then because I wanted to read something that I couldn't find. That was the first book I wrote.

MORDECAI

RICHLER:

I cannot tolerate editors who go in for lineby-line criticism, or who cross out words and substitute words of their own, or who will cross out two pages and write overthem, cut. Bob has never been so officious.

GOTTLIEB:

Many people have this

vulgar idea that writers and editors are at each others' throats, that they are antagonistic. That is craziness. No editor should work with a book he doesn't like, because his job as an editor is to make something better of what it is. If you try to turn a book into something it isn't, you're doomed to disaster.

An editor has to be selfless, and yet has also to be strong-minded.

If you don't know what you think, or if you 're

nervous about expressing your opinions, what good is that to a writer? I remember one book ofJohn Cheever's I was working on, I felt there was a minor problem with the ending. At first I thought, who am I to be telling John Cheever to change the end of his novel? And then I thought, Well, I'm the editor he chose, and I can't, out of cowardice, withhold what I think. I'm not forcing him to do anything. I'm saying, This is what I think is wrong, and it's up to him to decide whether to take my advice or not. As it happened,

he immediately

got the point and found a solution.

in publishing in the 1950s, the way business was done, the way you met people, was at lunches. So when I had been at Simon & Schuster a year they said, You should have an expense account. I said, That's very nice but I don't know anybody to take out to lunch. So they said, Well, we'd better give you an agent. The agent they gave me was a young man named Georges Borchardt. They gave me Georges because I read French, and at

books to be loved and want themselves to be loved, but I don't want that. I don't want my hand

CRICHTON: From time to time ours was an irritable relationship. Sometimes in later years I would send Bob drafts that were not cleaned up enough, and he would be a little short about the fact that he was being shown something that was not ready. He would never address it directly. He would never say, Why are you sending me this, you haven't worked on it enough. There would just be this feeling.

'\- the time Georges was handling only French books. So Georges and I had many, many lunches on my expense account, and we're close friends to this day. But after a while, of course, I met more people until I got to the point where having lunch with them all the time seemed to be yielding diminishing returns-you're out for two hours, two-and-a-halfhours, you overeat, you've wasted all that time, it's disgusting. So when I went to Knopf! said, This is it, I won't do lunch anymore.

Bob is very skillful at motivation. He really knows how to make you work. He would call me up and say, Dear boy! I have read your manuscript; and here is what you have to do. And he was not above saying, I don't know if you can do it this way, I don't know if you're up to itwhich of course would drive me into a fury of effort. It was very effective. And it was only years later that I thought, You know, I think he probably said that on purpose.

GOTTLIEB: I certainly on purpose.

well, he said. Not a lot of laughter. So I arrived in New York, and there was Bob, a rare sight in a suit, and we went to a restaurant he had found out about. He ate extremely frugally, and drank nothing, and watched me with venomous eyes as I made my way through the menu.

GOTTLIEB: Yes, boys must have their fun! The thing is, when I was a kid

MORRISON: Some authors really want their

held, I don 'twantto be stroked, I don'twantto be patronized, I don't want any of those things. And I never got any ofthat from Bob. As a result, our editing sessions are vital, they are hard, and they are tremendous fun.

of those lousy tuna sandwiches lying on my tummy in his room. Bob called me that evening and said, I think we have a deal; and is that true about lunch? And I said, Yup, Bob, that's the break point in the deal. Very

didn't say anything like that to Michael I do what I think I have to do and respond to people as I

respond to them. I intensely dislike manipulating people,just as I resent being manipulated.

As an editor I have to be tactful, of course (which I wasn't very good at when I was young). But goodwill has to be natural. You can't fake it. It just doesn't work that way.

LE CARRE: Negotiations were always tight with Bob. He was celebrated for not believing in huge advances, and it didn't matter that three other houses were offering literally twice what he was offering. He felt that for half the money, you got the best. Most publishers, when you arrive in New York with your (as you hope) best-selling manuscript, send flowers to your suite, arrange for a limo, maybe, at the airport, and then let you go and put on the nosebag at some great restaurant. The whole idea is to make you feel great. With Bobyoudid best to arrive injeans and sn~akers, and then you lay on your tummy side by side with him on the floor of his office and sandwiches were brought up.

After I finished one book, I think it wasA Peifect Spy, my agent called me and said, Okay, we've got X-zillion yen and whatnot, and I said,And lunch. My agent said, What? I said, And lunch. When I get to New York I want to be taken, by Bob, to a decent restaurant for once and not eat one

CARO: Bob and I would have big fights over colons and semicolons.

Semicolons

are not quite as forceful as colons. And dashes are very im-

portant to me-I establish my rhythm with them. We could spend a long time fighting over an adjective. We had such fights that sometimes he would bring in another editor as a buffer. When Bob is editing something he's very careful that the rhythm stays the same, which is very hard to do. I had huge fights with William Shawn when he excerpted The Power Broker for the New Yorker. One time my editor there, William Whitworth, who's now at the Atlantic, put Shawn on the line, and Shawn said, But we've hardly changed it at all, we haven't changed any of the words. I said, But you ran three paragraphs together-paragraphs to me, they're part of my rhythm. You're combining sentences,

matter making

periods into semicolons, semicolons into commas-that is changing my writing. Those fights were not nice fights; they were bitter, angry fights.

Now there's never anything like that with Bob.

McGRATH: There's always a tension between a writer's idiosyncratic wayofpresentinghimselfand the house style, but magazines need house style.)fyou don't have some kind of consistent way of doing things, it looks as if you've lost your mind.

GOTTLIEB: This is in fact the great difference between being a book editor and being a magazine editor, as I discovered in my years at the New Yorke!: In book publishing, the editor and the author have the same goal: To make the book as good as itcan be, and to sell as many copies as possible.

In a magazine, it's a different matter. Of course a magazine editor wants the writing to be as good as possible, but he wants it to be as good as possible for the magazine, while the writer wants to preserve his piece's integrity. At a magazine, the writer can always withdraw his piece, but basically the editor is in charge. In book publishing, editors are the servants ofthe writers, and if we don't serve writers well, they leave us.

Another difference is that a book publishing house is much less (Continued on page 31)

M

any Americans, at least 25 percent of the population in 1994, have discovered a new way to "read" books. They read them through their ears, not their eyes-because their books are recorded on tape. Some analysts consider this phenomenon to be a high-tech version of the oral tradition that has existed for centuries, a tradition that has remained a part of nearly everyone's life. Who doesn't cherish that childhood memory when mom, dad, or a grandparent read aloud a bedtime story that lulled the tired soul to sleep? Or those days when the entire family gathered around the radio to listen to such adventure stories as Superman orthe Lone Ranger?

Taped books are also proof that necessity is the mother of invention. Recorded books fill a late 20th-century need. Many Americans simply lack the free time they once had for reading. For them, aural and oral are a perfect match. They slip a cassette of John Grisham's latest mystery into the car's tape deck, push the play button, and the spoken word provides riveting relief from their daily commute to the office or the factory. Or they clip a Sony Walkman to their waistband and hear Kirk Douglas read his own autobiography, The Ragman s Son, a diversion that makes minutes fly as they jog or work out on a treadmill. The ubiquitous portable tape recorder and taped book havtt transformed daily or weekly chores from walking the dog to mowing the lawn into a "found" opportunity to catch up on one's reading.

While some literary buffs, among them many writers, insist that cozying up with a real book-one with pages between two covers-is an irreplaceable pastime, tape advocates counter that the talking book captures the joy that comes from the spoken word.

The recorded book lets a reader hear an author recite his or her own work or hear an actor give a delivery that adds a new dimension to the characters, the action, the atmosphere, the suspense, the pathos, or the humor.

Whatever the assessment of this trend, business is booming.

The typical cost of a taped book, which is usually recorded on two cassettes, is about $17. Time magazine reported that retail sales in 1993 were $1,200 million, a 40 percent increase over 1992. The recorded book business is so successful that the rights to record a book are often auctioned, and bestsellers get premium bids. Tom Clancy's Debt a/Honor netted a cool million dollars. Movie stars, offered handsome fees and a chance to enhance their career, are

getting into the book-recording act.

Whoopi Goldberg, Michael York, Jamie Lee Curtis, Sharon Stone, Ben Kingsley, Glenda Jackson, and Brad Pitt have all become modern-day storytellers.

Audio books are sold in bookstores and record stores, where shelf and display space is hotly contested (more proof that this new trend means profit). New "audio only" bookstores are also springing up around the United States. Libraries circulate taped books, and, of course, many publishing houses have established their own audio divisions to get their piece of this burgeoning economic pie. Some taped-book companies are niche-oriented. For example, Second Renaissance Books limits its releases to works by Ayn Rand.

Taped books aren't just restricted to fiction or poetry.

Nonfiction adapts especially well to this medium since most audio books are typically sold in abridged three to four hour-long versions. When you consider that it's rare for anyone to polish offa book with his or her eyes in that length of time, it becomes obvious many passages land on the cutting room floor. This fact doesn't sit well with some authors who agonize over every phrase and consider audio cuts an encroachment on their creativity. Many insist that great authors, such as Tolstoy or Dickens, would turn in their graves at the thought of their classics being cut down to fit the audio-book formula. But other genres can be condensed. Some maintain that nonfiction, especially the "how to" and "self-help" category, are enhanced by the pruning. The listener gets the best of a long-winded tome and the author gets a new source of revenue.

While the literary merits of recorded books will probably be debated forever, the purists who read with their eyes can at least take comfort in one statistic: Book sales-hardcover and paperback-have not suffered since the arrival of the tape. The audio book could even have the same effect on the reader as the movie on a moviegoer: Once you've seen the story and now heard it, you want to read the book to find out what you missed or determine which version deserves to be the bestseller. Was it the one on film, audiocassette, or the one on real paper?

0 About the Author: Kathleen Cox. South Asia editor/or the travel book FODORS, recently completed herfirst novel. Once she gets it published, she says, she'll consider hm'ing the book recorded.

Talking About Books Despite the computer-age seductions of television and video, book discussion groups are proliferating.

They help to satisfy, says the author, a yearning for real dialogue and communication.

A

bout five years ago I was invited "to defend" my book, The Womb of Mind (1990), before a women's discussion group in New Delhi comprised mostly of Americans. I had vaguely heard about American book clubs before from some Indian writer friends, but I had no idea what to expect. When I arrived for the session at the home ofa diplomat I encountered ten women armed with notes, reviews, and copies of the book. Were they going to shred it to pieces, and me in the process? To my utter relief, they were very supportive and we had a stimulating, even stirring, discussion about the status of urban Indian women, the subject of my study.

A year later, I was invited back for a discussion of Elisabeth Bumiller's book, May You Be a Mother of a Hundred Sons. I had been one of Elisabeth '5 sources and helped her arrange and conduct interviews. The club had divided into two groups-a morning one composed of housewives and freelancers that met at a diplomat's home, and an evening one for women with office jobs that met at the American Embassy School.

Tea, coffee, and snacks were offered at both to fuel the literary discussions.

The morning group was sympathetic toward El isabeth 's understanding and portrayal of women 's existential reality. The evening group, however, could not accept the fact that in just three years, someone-especially an outsider-could do justice to a subject painted on such a vast canvas, given the complex cultural, regional, religious, and linguistic di-

Members of the club pictured here inciudeJrom left, JoAnn Krecke, Janet Gilligan, the author, Mary Kay Bed. ..with, Georgia Whittaker, and Amy Goodman. versity in India. I probably reacted a bit defensively about my friend's work, but I was gratified when the evening group seemed to agree that Elisabeth had set an example and standards for other American women writers residing in India to emulate and live up to.

That fateful evening I got inducted into the book club as a regular member and have been attending the monthly meetings with an almost religious devotion ever since. About three years back the morning and evening groups were merged into one, and the venue and membership has changed several times over.

For American newcomers, the club is something of a cultural shock absorber, enabling them to gain perspective on, and occasionally blow off steam about, what is for them a new and different land.

The current Indian contingent in-

cludes an architect and an English professor in addition to myself. We three do not necessarily flock together when discussions demand or result in a polarization of views.

In India one is quite familiarwith study groups in colleges and universities. I attended two such groups during my student days at Jawaharlal ehru University.

Beyond that, women seldom get together just to talk about books. In Delhi I am aware of only two such groups, plus a club called Bibliophile, run by a woman, that sells books at a small discount.

Book clubs that focus on discussion are generally associated with European salons of a century ago, but they have been a staple of the American literary scene for decades and, in fact, have been proliferating in recent years, according to what Clara Germani writes in a Christian Science Monitor article.

Germani quotes Elizabeth Long, a sociologist from Rice University in Houston, Texas, who estimates that there are tens of thousands of book clubs across the United States. Not only are such

groups diverse, they have a rich history. Germani reports that the Reading Club, a group of 30 women who meet every Monday in San Antonio, Texas, celebrated its I OOthanniversary in 1992. Sandra Brown, a cofounder of the newsletter Reading Women, tells Germani that many recent book-discussion groups evolved out of 1970s encounter groups and the 1980s fitness obsession. These "egocentric" movements have now swung toward a "need to reach out," she asserts, adding that "Book groups have become the intellectual stimulation of the 1990s, using fiction to provide the structure for your own self-awareness."

In India, "silence," a highly evolved state of consciousness in which language cannot improve upon one's experience, has been a civilizational goal. Implicit in this is gaining knowledge directly, and not from second-hand sources such as books. Yet, I recognize a yearning in the human heart for real dialogue and communication.

Novelists serve an important function in this regard, for they instruct

and delight without assuming the role of pedagogue or preacher, thus allowing us to make our own insights into our lives.

Emerson aptly observed that we surround ourselves, according to our freedom and ability, with things that provide true images of ourselves, be they ships or books or canon or places of worship.

Enveloping oneself in linguistic forms, artistic images, and modern or mythical symbols should not prevent one from pursuing the ultimate goal of self-awareness. I recall how Susan Sontag's The Volcano Lover, a historical novel with a glimpse of postmodernist self-awareness, generated intense debate in our group about the dichotomies of love and wealth, possession and renunciation, that were depicted in the story.

The flow of modernity has been reducing beliefs to mere ideas, creating losses in meaning, values, and identity. The group experience helps to sustain an individual through the magic of collective energy and intellectual bonding.

While group members are indeed looking for hope and encouragement, they unwittingly reveal their weaknesses and conflicts. A book discussion becomes an honest interaction that occasionally discloses privacies through the inadvertencies of conversation.

Our group has shown a strong preference for contemporary novelists~their rhythms, paces, and silences. Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy, Amy Tan's The Kitchen God's Wife, Jacquelin Singh's Seasons, Geeta Mehta's A River Sutra, Amit Choudhuri's Afternoon Raag, Rohinton Mistry's Such a Long Journey, Bapsi Sidhwa's lceCandy Man, Milan Kundera's Immortality, Gurcharan Das's A FineFamily, Harriet Doerr's Stones for Ibbara, Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines, and Sontag's The Volcano Lover are some of the titles that have stayed with me. We had

lively discussions about their styles, themes, plots, characterizations, dialogues, or narratives. Not all the novels are uplifting or imbued with deep meaning, but they serve as weather vanes of private or public opinions and sensibilities.

Reactions to A Suitable Boy, for instance, were interesting. I was at Oxford when the book was launched in England. Seth's novel fascinated first-generation Indians there, whereas the Indians in our New Delhi group found little revealing in it. Several of the Americans who plowed through to the end raved about it, while others simply wondered, "Why did he make it so long?"

Issues of moral conscience, death, karma, fate, family decisionmaking, individualism, interpersonal relationships, sexuality, race, and caste have figured often in our discussions. For example, Doerr's Stones for Ibbara (see SPAN, August 1994) crystallized the differences in our attitudes toward death. The Americans thought of death as a taboo subject, discussion of which was uncomfortable for them, while Indians considered talking about death to be an everyday experience, as ordinary as changing a garment or stepping into another room.

The unstructured setting of our discussions provides scope forraising questions and watching minds filled with ideas that well up from the deep springs of mixed and muddled cross-cultural experiences.

Sometimes hazy, ambiguous, and contradictory ideas pour forth, but for better or for worse, they form the real stuff of women's streams of thought.

0 About the Author: Renuka Singh, a sociologist and senior fellow at the Centre for the Study of Social Systems, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, is writing a book about urban Indian women's family relationships and their experiences with spirituality.

riting T

he

first lesson

has to do with the all-important

of inspiration. mornings

intimate

terms

All writers

they are touched

with poetry

enced those moments

by the wand;

and cosmic

myself.

truth.

Their lesson

a total illusion.

And the danger

wait for them.

Such is the horror

issue

know that on some golden they are on

I have experi-

is simple;

in the illusion

they are

is that you will

of having

to face the type-

writer that you will spend all your time waiting.

I am persuaded

that,

hangovers

apart,

most

writers,

like

most other artisans,

are about as good one day as the next. The is the result of euphoria,

seeming

difference

nation.

This means

writer

every morning

that one had better

alcohol,

or imagi-

go to his or her type-

and stay there regardless

of the result.

It will be much the same.

All professions Writers

have their own way of justifying

often do nothing

because

laziness.

they are waiting

for inspira-

tion. In my own case there are days when the result that no fewer than five revisions I'm greatly

inspired,

are required.

only four are needed

said, I put in that note of spontaneity

is so bad

However,

before,

when

as I've often

even my meanest

which

critics concede.

The question

of revision

is closely

tion. There may be inspired

writers

allied with that of in spirafor whom

just right. But anyone who is not certifiably assume

that the first draft is a very primitive

is simple: avowed, anything

Writing

is difficult

is a very tedious process, to avoid.

need to combine less demanding

composition in this regard;

Nothing

of confidence Again

there

in himself.

concerns

by the

can be better.

Nothing

is so

the writer a sense the product.

a brilliant

writer

at

who could work only with

a bottle of Scotch.

for him in the years

will do

Each later one is

so impairs

I remember

War II when Scotch was difficult

as Voltaire

flayed

alcohol.

for giving

And nothing

his hat on and after consuming crises

are deeply

with thought.

Fortune for whom I was responsible major

thing. The reason

Thinking,

hence the writing

is so important

are exceptions;

had better

which men or women

So all first drafts

The next of my injunctions pleasant.

work.

the first draft is

a Milton

immediately

to find.

There were after

World

Is

and

There a

Difference?

I also tell my students of a point strongly pressed, if my

source, does not please others. Where humor is concerned,

memory serves, by George Bernard Shaw. He once said that as he

there are no standards. Only a very foolish man will use a form

grew older, he became less and less interested in theory, more and

of language

more interested in information. The temptation in writing isjust

is the nature of humor.

the reverse. Nothing is so hard to come by as a new and interesting fact. Nothing is so easy on the feet as a generalization.

that is wholly uncertain

in its effect. And that

There are other reasons for avoiding humor. In [American] so-

I now

ciety the solemn person inspires far more trust than the one who

pick up magazines and leaf through them looking for articles that

laughs. The politician allows himself one joke at the beginning of

are rich with facts; I don't much care what they are. Evocative

his speech. A ritual. Then he changes his expression and affects

and deeply percipienttheory

an aspect of morbid solemnity signaling that, after all, he is a

I avoid. It leaves me cold unless I am

the author of it myself. My advice to all young writers would be to

totally serious man. Nothing so undermines a point as its associa-

stick to research and reporting with only a minimum of interpre-

tion with a wisecrack: The very word is pejorative.

tation. And even more, this would be my advice to all older writ-

Finally, I come to a matter of much personal interest, one that is

ers, particularly to columnists. As one's feet give out, one seeks

intensely self-serving.

to have the mind take their place.

writer who is dealing with presumptively

It concerns the peculiar pitfalls for the difficult or technical

I also

matters. Economics is an example, and within the field of eco-

urge my class to recognize the grave risks in resorting to humor.

nomics the subject of money, with the history of which I have

It does greatly lighten one's task. Humor is an intensely per-

been much concerned, is an especially good case. Any specialist

sonal, largely internal thing. What pleases some, including the

who ventures to write on money with a view to making himself

Reluctantly,

but from a long and terrible experience,

intelligible works under a grave moral hazard. He will be accused of oversimplification.

The charge will be made by his fellow pro-

fessionals, however obtuse or incompetent,

and it will have a

sympathetic hearing from the layman. That is because no layman expects

really to understand

about money,

inflation,

Alan

Greenspan [chairman of Federal Reserve], or the International Monetary Fund. If he does he suspects that he is being fooled.

Only someone who is decently confusing can be respected.

Complexity and obscurity have great professional value; they are th~ academic equivalents of apprenticeship rules in the building trades. They exclude the outsiders, keep down the competition, preserve the image of a privileged or priestly class. The man who makes things clear is a scab. He is criticized less for his clarity than for his treachery.

You might say that all this constitutes a meager yield for a lifetime of writing. Or perhaps, as someone once said of Jack Kerouac 's prose, not writing but typing.

0

John Kenneth Galbraith, who was American envoy to India from 1961-63, is professor emeritus of economics at Harvard University.

Among the numerous books he has written are The Affluent Society (1958), The New Industrial State (1967), and A Journey through Economic Time (1994).

So Red

John Hollander, born in New York in 1929, has been professor of English at Yale University since 1977.

He has published more than 20 volumes of poetry, for which he has won several awards, and written or edited numerous other books on literature and criticism.

Critic Daniel Hoffman writes: "Hollander s work results from the fusion of a curious, wide-ranging intelligence-equally familiar of traditions in literature, philosophy, and myth, and of speculative psychology and sciencewith the skills of a virtuoso versemaker. " Reprinted by permission. Š 1994 John Hollander.

Originally

in The New Yorke!:

PHOTOGRAPH BY KOSTl RUOHOMAA

Blossoms in the late October light, of such a saturated red:

moments-in this case October days-it takes to make itself intense in,

what can flower now?

Only the now awakened dark and dull maroon-

to put forth something of light that had either been waiting all along

like the unburnished metal of copper beeches shadowing itself-

to reveal itself or, more likely, escaping its dying body

of midsummer and spring burning the Japanese maple's dying leaves

of leaf, hits the road with a visual halloo as of a bright scarf

has fired the bursting into astonished color of the very self

or a letting of arterial blood in a high ceremony-

of lateness, lastness which itself can never last longer than the few

annual, but so loud this year-of impatience and acknowledgment

•

•

Inoas rea

IS •

Ice

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All Days Are Not Equal Time is more than a forward movement of orderly and unchanging cadencehours, days, months, years. It unfolds in unpredictable ways that do not always conform to our clockwork worldview, says the author.

I've been noticing lately how inept most of us are at judging time. A project expected to take a half day takes two full days. The meeting scheduled for two hours needs three. I mean, really: Ifmy colleagues and I were as bad at estimating space as we are at estimating time, we would be crashing into the furniture and dropping coffee cups off our desks.

When it comes to time, we always seem to err on the side of optimism: Like infants reaching for the moon, we imagine something is within our grasp when in reality it is far beyond reach. And we go crashing about as a result. "I'll write these three letters this morning," I tell myself. Crash. I get one done. "I'll have those two articles edited by the end of the day," a fellow editor tells me. Crash. It takes him into next week. Yet each day we go on making our plans (promises, predictions) with little awareness of how inaccurate they so often prove to be. We seem to believe each day anew that this time we'll get it all done, this time we'll make the hours conform to our wishes. Our faith in our ability to control the future might be touching ifit weren't so absurd.

And lately I've begun asking myself: What on Earth is going on here? Since so many of us make the same errors so routinely, I've begun to think there's something at work beyond our own personal mistakes-something deeper, or more basic. I suspect it has something to do with the way we conceptualize time.

In a curious way, our awkwardness at "moving" through time makes sense, if we think of ourselves as new to the dimension of time, as infants are new to Reprinted from the Urne Readel; January/February 1994.

Copyright Š by Lens Publishing Co., Inc. Reprinted with permission from Business Ethics magazine, 52 South Tenth Street, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55403.

spatial reality. For it's only since Einstein that we have come to speak of time as a fourth dimension added to the three dimensions of space. And the four-dimensional reality, as breakthroughs in the new physics and other fields of science show, is vastly different from our old view of the world, in ways that we have barely begun to assimilate.

When we think of time, most of us function unconsciously in the linear way of thinking that has dominated Western thought since the time ofIsaac Newton and Rene Descartes: Imagining time to be a forward movement of orderly and unchanging cadencehours, days, months, years-laid out like a grid upon our lives.

Trusting this to be a valid picture of time, we naturally approach time management as the task of inserting appropriate tasks into appropriate slots. And when our days fail to follow such orderly paths, unfolding instead in chaotic and unpredictable ways, we think ourselves undisciplined.

We blame ourselves, rarely thinking that our worldview might be askew.

But it may be that the discomfort we feel, trying to operate in a linear view of time, isn't a mistake but a clue. Instead of seeing our unpredictable days as aberrations, we might examine them for the information we need to conceptualize time more accurately-much as the unpredictable behavior of subatomic particles led physicists into the new world of quantum reality. Instead offeeling guilty about our personal chaos, we might learn from it, looking to find the larger patterns that science now tells us govern even the unpredictability of chaos.

In examining my own experience of time, I've made a number of observations. The first is that time is not uni-

told us, we had a fixed amount of time, and a fixed amount of work to fit into that slot, so taking a break would subtract from the time available.

Time is a matter of mathematics, right? But it didn't work that way, Exhausted

and stiff, we decided

to take a walk

along a nearby creek-and though we came back feeling slightly naughty, we also felt refreshed and clear. Much to our astonishment, we flew through the rest of the editing in an hour. The moral of the story, you might say, is that when you're traveling the terrain of time, the shortest distance between two points may be a detour.

All this is not to say, of course,

that linear time is

no longer a useful concept-only that it is a less than c0l11plete description of how we experience time.

rl"

' ,

form, as the old clockwork worldview tells us, but instead unfolds in its own way-unpredictable in a daily sense, but ordered in some larger way. Time has its own topography, with all sorts of different terrain that is not marked on the temporal maps of our calendars and schedule books. I've come to recognize, for example, that there are days that carry me forward like a stream downhill: On these days every call I make connects, all my conversations are wonderful, and projects I've been working on cl ick together effortlessly.

I try to get a lot done these days, because I know that what I start is likely to be finished successfully.

Such days, you might say, are like valleys in which time flows smoothly.

But there are also rocky and mountainous days-the days when I can't get anyone on the phone, bad news comes in the mail, and deals that were 99 percent done evaporate before my eyes. I consciously avoid making important calls or decisions on these days, and when I leave the office I drive with special caution-because I know these are times I'm more likely to have an accident or get a ticket [for violating traffic rules].

Why time operates like this I don't know, but I've seen it often enough in my own life and the lives of others to recognize it. Yet our

CI

didn't

Physicist Fred Alan Wolf, in The Eagle:, Quest, refers to linear time as "chronos"-the clock time that rules the world of thinking. But he points also to another kind of time, which he tenns "mythos"-the seamless sense of events flowing together into the larger story of our lives, which we experience through our intuitive feel ings.

We might think of myth os as the pattern in which chronos is imbedded. And when we misjudge time, it may not be that we're misjudging chronos allow enough time for that task"), but that we're some-

how misreading the human mythos. For while chronos has to do with hours on a clock face, mythos has to do with relationshipsto each other, to our bodies, to the world.

Through observations like these, we might see time not asa linear path moving toward the future, but as the unfolding motion of a whole system. We might conceptualize time as the medium in which we can see the motion of the larger whole-the movement that demonstrates to us, over and over again, that nothing really is separate from anything else. This might serve as a reminder that beneath the urgency of our machinelike days, filled with to-do lists and rigid schedules with which we '"manage" time, there is something else at work-a rhythm, a movement carrying along, and we move with it. whether we realize it or not.

us

As difficult as it is for us Westerners to accept, managing our time may not be possible in any total sense. Just as in any day there is both dark and light, in time there must be both order and disorder.

Perhaps our real task is to find a balance between acceptance and control: To learn to read the topography of time and accept what it holds in store-even unwelcome chaos-but

culture is ill-equipped to see such patterns in any systematic way.

And this inability to recognize the differences in "identical" slots of time may be, I suspect, one reason our schedules so often fail.

at the same time to find ways within our own will.

A second observation about time struck me one afternoon a few months back, when a fellow editor and I were facing a stack of manuscripts that needed to be edited that day. We had used up more than half our time onjust one article, and we stared glumly at the remaining pile-believing, instinctively, that the best way to get through them was to plow ahead without stopping. After all, as our watches

opening, a door onto a new relationship to time, where only half our task is getting life to do what we want it to do. The other halfis discovering where life itselfwants us to go.

D

Perhaps

About

the chaos

the Author:

the larger order to exercise

so many of us feel isn't

.I!{//joric

rel({[cd TOpics/or Business

a problem

but an

Kclly wriTcs 011bllSillcss and lI/allagclI/enT-

Ethics II/aga::illc.

Kissing Corporate

America Why are some of America's biggest companies finding it difficult to hire the best and the brightest business-school graduates?

Daniel Grossman squirmed on the horns ofa career dilemma. The small toy company he worked for had been taken over by industry titan Mattei, and he had been offered a great job at the new parent. A flashy future loomed-an international VP berth, lots of bucks and perks and travel. On the downside, he would spend his professional life forcing endless variations of Barbie Doll and Friends on the world's unsuspecting youth-Geisha Barbie? Eurotrash Ken? That didn't sit well with Grossman. At 37, he is still an idealistic sort, a kind of New Age Geppetto with politically exquisite notions about toys: "They should encourage kids to explore the world around them and add to their self-esteem."

Also weighing in his deliberation: Between getting a BA in Russian studies from Yale and an MBA from Stanford, Grossman had labored deep in the bureaucracy of the U.S. State Department.

The thought of joining another large organization held little appeal.

In the end he spurned MatteI and, in 1993, started his own company, named Wild Planet Toys. With a handful of colleagues, he now occupies space in a renovated coffee warehouse near downtown San Francisco, and his company will likely bring in several million dollars in revenue this year. "If your aspiration is to be a bureaucratic infighter, you may be well suited for a large organization," he says.

"But you've got to swallow more than I care to. On some level, you can't be who you really are during the workday."

Those words would provoke a chorus of mega-dittos wherever young business types gather these days. It is no secret that many FORTUNE 500 companies have lost their luster as places to work. In a recent study of career preferences in America conducted by Opinion Research Corporation, just one percent of the 1,000 adult respondents said they would freely choose to be corporate managers. Careers that carry a high degree of independence, such as medicine or the law, were far more popular.

Among business-school students, ever greater numbers of today's superstars, whose parents and older siblings were content to work their way up slowly in large companies, now want big responsibility-or is it independence?-and even bigger rewards up front, and they are willing to take commensurate risks. Says Ross Webber, chairman ofthe management department at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania: "There's been a change in the myths that talented people in this new generation guide their lives by, and an entrepreneurial, rather than corporate, connection is a strong part of that mythology."

The changing attitudes of top U.S. business-school graduates are particularly revealing. These are people who have choices, who usually boast several years of solid experience and receive multiple job offers in all but the very worst of economic climates. In the past many aspired to corporate power, to hold the reins at some giant company. But now more and more of them, especially those at or near the top of their classes, want to carve out a niche of their own rather than slip into one supplied by a corporation. As recently as 1990, a quarter of new MBAs of Columbia University joined large manufacturers; last year just 13 percent did so. At Stanford nearly 70 percent of the business school's class of 1989 joined big companies, defined as those with more than 1,000 employees. In 1994 only about half did so.

Even those numbers understate the trend. Many of the big outfits that today's hot young talents join right after graduation are management consulting firms or investment banks. About half the students at top schools now choose one or the other, up from a thirdjust a few years ago. But mostly they are becoming consultants or investment bankers with an eye toward pursuing entrepreneurial careers later on. They figure they will make big money for a few years and then find a small company to buy or an opportunity ripe for a startup. The variety ofbusiness situations they encounter while consulting or banking will make the search that much easier-but no way will they endure the constant travel orthe crazy hours for more than a few years. The annual turnoveramongjuniorassociates at large consulting firms runs about 25 percent. According to a recent study, fewer than half of University of Chicago MBAs who became consultants in 1988 were still consulting in 1994.

At Chicago, long a training ground for corporate financial wizards, the zeitgeist has shifted remarkably. In 1994 autumn 350 out of 600 second-year students tried to get into a new course on entrepreneurial financing; only about 130 could be accommodated. When recruiters from large corporations show up, embarrassed placement officials sometimes can't find enough candidates to fill up a day's worth of interviews. Similar situations have cropped up at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management in Evanston, Illinois. A big company will fly in four or five executives for a rah-rah recruiting slide show, only to be met by fewerthan a dozen skeptical students. At Harvard some manufacturing companies have stopped coming because even though students showed up at their road shows, they spurned subsequent offers.

Kellogg operates one program in conjunction with the engineering school that is designed specifically to turn out future leaders for large manufacturing companies. Last year 43 percent of the pro-

gram's graduates chose to join consulting firms instead. Otlicials at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management experienced comparable results with a similar program until they upped the ante at admission interviews. "We now lay out in advance that the moral imperative is that they go into manufacturing," says program official Donald Rosenfield. Nonetheless, last year about 12percent of the program's graduates chose consulting.

Does the trend represent a threat to the future competitiveness of large American companies? Yes, but after having helped bring on the new attitudes by the way they have changed over the past decade-downsizing, restructuring-so are they now continuing to change and adapt in ways that may limit the damage. The downsized, no-more-fat companies of the new economy are prepared to hire top talent as needed, bringing in management consultants to iron out operational kinks or shore up marketing plans, and investment bankers when it's time to cut a deal.

Outsourcing and strategic alliances with smaller, specialized firms fill in much of the rest of the picture.

Still, there are corporate positions that need to be filled and intellectual capital that has to be built-got to preserve those core competencies-and here and there the talent pool may be getting shallow. According to the Society for Information Management based in Chicago, Illinois, a slew of top information-service specialists have defected from company ranks, many attracted by rich start-up opportunities. While human-resources types are understandably loath to admit they can't get the good people their organizations need, recruiters from big American companies such as AT&Tsay they sometimes have trouble finding talented folks to fill specific roles, like rolling out new products or marketing to ethnic segments. "There are definitely skill voids," says AT&T human resources manager Susanne Schrott.

In an ever more competitive world, any decline in talent levels could prove dangerous. Says Albert Bellino, who haunts the best business schools in search of fledgling investment bankers for Bankers Trust in New York: "Thewaywe look at it, the organization that gets the best people is gonna win-it's that simple." Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, director of the Center for Leadership and Career Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, points to United Parcel Service, which five years ago began a massive effort to go global and now operates successfully in dozens of countries. Says he":"You can't pull offa major strategic shift like that, one that is sometimes necessary for your survival as a company, unless you can call on the very best people from within your ranks."

Michael Driver, a professor of management at the University of Southern California who has been tracking the career choices of top business graduates for decades, thinks that more and more big companies are courting disaster by losing out in the race for the best and brightest. Says Driver: "More energized, motivated people are going elsewhere, and these organizations are not going to make it unless they stop the flow. You hate to use the overworked term 'dinosaur,' but it does apply."

Each person has his own reasons for choosing a particular career path, of course, but a number offactors have combined to drive potentialleaders away from corporate life. Simple economics plays a

role. The big investment banks and management consultant firnls in narrow, repetitive tasks that offered hardly any challenge. Suzanne Hooper, a second-year Kellogg student, recalls her days as a senior the United States offer top grads a first-year package of salary and bonuses of well over $1 aO,OOO-about $30,000 more than old-line auditor with Arthur Andersen as a series of tightly focused functions that gave her little chance to stretch. "You'd go into some place and FORTUNE500 companies are likely to offer. If a firnl really wants spend all your time worrying about one small aspect of the operasome top-school hotshot, it will line up a well-paid summer interntion," she says. "If you didn't know what the company did, you ship after the person's first year, then offer to pay second-year tuwouldn't know what the company did." ition in exchange for a commitment. For a young professional In contrast, says 1990 Stanford MBA Melanie Dulbecco, smaller facing a $60,000 tab for an MBA, such inducements can be powerful motivation. companies let fledgling talents test their wings over a variety ofterBut money is clearly not even close to everything fortoday's superrain. Upon graduation, she took a job as chief operating officer of stars. The 1993 class at the Harvard Business School ranked salary R. Torre & Co .. a small San Francisco company that produces seventh among the reasons for the career Italian-style syrups to add flavor to coffee and other foods. At first, she says, her role choices they made. Leading the list: Job at the 30-person company included ancontent and level of responsibility. swering phones and emptying wastebasCompany culture and the caliber of colThe best bureaucrats, not the best leagues were close behind. Says Maury kets. Now her days are filled with an performers, are more likely to get ahead. energizing variety of business tasks-fiHanigan, a New York consultant who advises major corporations on how to attract nancial analysis, working with production It's too easy to get pigeonholed or the best talent: "These arc people who are managers, doing site selection for a new stuck in a dead-end job with no way out. warehouse, setting up a customer-service scared to death of being bored." o It takes too long to get enough According to Driver, big corporations hotline, inspiring the sales troops. Says responsibility, authority, and rewards. have been culturally out of sync with top Dulbecco: "] get to use everything] have learned-not just some small piece of it." young professionals since the social unThere's not enough flexibility about rest of the 1960s. At that time, he says, Young hotshots also grouse that they did where and when you work. nearly all large companies were based not get the recognition they deserved. The Top managers say they want risk on a linear-career concept; success was rewards went to the best politicians, not takers, but they don't. seen as steady progression up a ladder of necessarily the most able executives. They defined steps. But the most talented excontend that innovation often was discourecutives had begun to think in different aged in favor of learning how to fit in. tenns about their careers; many had adopted what Driver calls a Christine Reiter, a 1994 Harvard MBA, worked in a financial-man"spiral" career philosophy. They wanted to spend seven to ten years agement training program at GE Capital for three years before gradmastering one field and then move on to another, always building on uate school, and she felt little pull to return. She is now an associate with Coopers & Lybrand Consulting. "I felt] was always being put old skills while mastering new ones. Then, ironically, just when into predictable situations at GE," she says. "People were not enmany big companies had begun to flatten pyramids and create cultures more hospitable to spiral careers, on came the yuppies of the couraged to be creative. They really want you to wear the same hat and same coat as everybody else."

1980s. Many of them yearned for the old linear days of ladderBarbara Doran, who graduated from Harvard Business School in climbing straight upward, only to be met instead by downsizing and 1984 after knocking around in the New York publishing world, says reengineering.

Today students frequently arrive at business school already she felt continually hemmed in at large organizations by the expectations of her bosses. "It's often not enough to be good," she says. turned offby the new Darwinism at large corporations. Memories of "You've always got to live up to other people's standards"-howbloodletting are a stone in their shoes. Robert Berg, 33, a 1993 ever idiosyncratic they may be.

Wharton graduate now at Coopers & Lybrand Consulting in Boston, Massachusetts, recalls with some pain his days at Xerox prior to Doran sold institutional equities for First Boston and Lehman graduate school: "I thought there was a good dynamic among the Brothers for a few years after Harvard, picking up the contacts and expertise to found her own money management firm. Since setting people there. But when the time came to close the division I was up shop in June 1994, she has been handling about $4 million for II working with, management left us with the feeling that they were going to take care of us. They didn't. Basically, they lied to us" Says limited partners and has posted an 18 percent gain, mostly by tradEmory University'S Jeffrey Sonnenfeld: "When a big company says ing in the stocks of small and medium-size companies. Doran parnobody has employment security, we don't pay very well, and we ticularlyrelishes the fact that as her own boss, she has the flexibility to stand for continuity, not innovation-where 's the payoff?" work out of her Park Avenue office or the Manhattan apartment she shares with hercat, Cecil.

Anothercommon complaint among top business-school students with a brief corporate fling in their background: The failure of their Internal bickering and bureaucratic thickets at big companies fonner employers to give them-or let them earn-serious responalso turn offa lot of top talent. Deborah Fienberg, now a second-year sibility. Some star students say they often found themselves doing student at Kellogg, worked her way up to product manager after

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I want to be in a situation where your growth is limited only by your own talent, your own energyand that usually means an entrepreneurial situation.

-Tim

McDonald, 3i, president, Interactive Management institute

I have no interest in a blue-suit, traditional corporate life. I have much more progressive views about what a job should be.

-Melanie

Dulbecco, 33, chief operating office/; R. Torre & Co.

several years at Colgate-Palmolive. She led a major product-relaunch task force and oversaw a $160 million promotion budget.

Still, she felt she was constantly inhibited by superiors who secondguessed her every move, and by a reporting system that stifled individual initiative. "You just can't move on things fast enough," she says. "And like it or not, you have to spend a lot of time perfecting ways to work the system."

Impatience is a signal trait of the more talented members of the upcoming professional generation. They have little interest in being at the top of a giant company, and none in inching their way there.

"My father worked for Motorola for 41 years, but I'm not going to make that kind of long-term commitment," says second-year Kellogg student Brad Jones. He is leaning toward investment banking, for a while anyway, because "you are given as much responsibility as you can handle right away." Says John Martin, president of Kellogg's class of 1995: "We don't really have a lot of corporate role models here. I don't know anyone who wants to be like Jack Welch or Jack Smith."

The top people in this business generation are also often unwilling to subjugate their personal lives to corporate demands. Even if they or their families haven't been wounded by corporate layoffs or right-sizings, they don't propose to surrender themselves to some entity unlikely to honor the sacrifice. "They interview you," says AT&T recruiter Susanne Schrott. "They want to know whether or not your company will fit in with their lifestyle."

This often means refusing to consider the sort of concessions that

To succeed in a large organization, you've got to put on a mask and tuck part of your true self away. I'm not willing to do that.

-Daniel

Grossman, 37, president, Wild Planet Toys

were once routine at large companies-logging long hours in obMinnesota-based 3M loses some top talent because of its frigid winter weather. But the company has consistently snared between scurity, accepting a transfer to some far-flung outpost. Big manufacturers with plants far away from the bright lights are especially 70 percent and 80 percent of the young stars it attempts to recruit by hampered in their recruiting. Says John Flato, corporate director of emphasizing the diverse array of businesses it supports and the varied technologies it pursues. Again, the point is to demonstrate that university relations at AlliedSignal: "They're afraid they are going to get lost, and mainstream manufacturing usually doesn't take here is a place where a person can obtain salable skills, where place in New York or San Francisco. It takes place in Elyria, Ohio, or knowledge is king. Says Martin Hanson, manager of staffing and college relations at 3M: "If we can get people to understand that we some town in Tennessee." encourage intellectual exploration, we generally have a good Smart young businesswomen are adamant in demanding workplace flexibility-and many of them despair of finding it at large chance of bringing them aboard." companies. Says Kristin Snowden, a second-year University of High-tech companies continue to hold something of an edge here, largely because they appear to honor brainpower more than corpoChicago student who worked for several years as a Price rate gamesmanship. Still, the top Waterhouse auditor: "There is a way talents will hold back if the role people are supposed to behave at work at large companies, and it's they are offered seems limited to based on a male model that is hunsome arcane area of business. ''They want growth, variety, chaldreds of years old. Women cry more lenge," says Steve Brashear, who often than men, for example; we recruits MBAs for Hewlettfind that it is an effective way to rePackard. "Most important: They lieve stress. But you are never, ever supposed to cry on the job if you don'twantto get pigeonholed." work at a large company."

Eventually, argues Wharton's All this is not to say that every big management department chaircompany has become a pariah on man Ross Webber, the career penthe campuses of elite schools. dulum may swing at least partway Bankers Trust recruiter Albert back toward larger companies. He Bellino says he feels quite confident notes that more and more leaders going head-to-head for top talent of big corporations are bubbling against any large company-"exup from the operations side, rather "Just think. in nineyears we would have cept Microsoft. They have somehow than from finance or marketing as been here ten years. " managed to offer some of the same in the past. The trend, he thinks, things we do, particularly ownerwill provide better opportunities ship of ideas and fast rewards." for the sort of folks who pursue Indeed, many of the young Americans who disparage life at most MBAs at the top schools. Says Webber: "I believe that some of these big companies tend to exempt Microsoft and a handful of other younger people who have veered off into investment banking or emerging high-tech giants. Tim McDonald, a top 1994 Kellogg consulting, orwho have this dream of starting a small business, will graduate, has been totally focused on entrepreneurship since graduasimply become frustrated. They will want to lead, to manage, to get tion. He is involved in a bunch of start-up projects, including a into a situation where there's real action." scheme to develop interactive educational and training services for Perhaps, but Michael Driver has spotted another trend that sugbusinesses. But he still harbors admiration for Microsoft because, gests an altogether different result. Overthe past couple of years, he J he says, "they love to hire people who have tried to start a business says, an increasing number of students at top business schools say and failed-they recognize the lessons that have been learned." they want a career that involves a high level of social responsibility.

The signs of growing campus altruism are increasingly apparent.

There are signs that other big companies are beginning to get their minds around the upcoming generation's new mood. In a recent 35The most active organization at the University of Chicago Business minute speech in Chicago, IBM Chairman Lou Gerstner used the School is the Giving Something Back Ciub, which is engaged in word "entrepreneurial" 11 times to describe his vision of his comeverything from tutoring poor students to collecting toys for tots. A pany's future. tableful of Kellogg students foresees an ideal future that combines Today's best young executives neither expect nor want a lifelong running a successful small business hal f the year and doing good career at a single company. Employers do well to recognize that, and works, like teaching in a school for the blind, the rest of the time. to emphasize the value to the individual of the work experience they Driver says most big companies haven't a clue about how to offer. Says Andrea Miles, manager of employee selection and relate to such notions.

0 staffing at Coming, Inc.: "It has become more and more important to let people know that you are offering them a chance to develop skills About the Author: Kenneth Labich is on the board of editors at that are marketable anywhere."

Fortune magazine.

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VI=a=

by GREGORY

"Language," the philosopher and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, "is fossil poetry." In the same spirit, place-names are fossil history, moments of the past frozen in time.

The names that dot the map of the United States-at last count they numbered more than three million-reveal much about the nation's development. They record forgotten episodes, commemorate passing moments and great events alike, and chronicle the movement of peoples and generations over hundreds, even thousands, of years.

The oldest place-names are, of course, Native American in origin-as foreign visitors note when puzzling out pronunciations, trying to make linguistic sense out of words like Mattapoiset, Passamaquody, and Tukanikavits. No mainland state lacks such names, which long precede the Europeans' arrival. In the East, we have Schenectady, New York, an Algonquian name meaning "forested hill," and Okeefenokee, Florida, "shaking water" in Muskogean, so called

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McNAMEE

for the hundreds of quicksand pools that dot the huge lake's swampy shore. In the Midwest and the Great Plains states, the names of great tribes, most meaning "the people," resound: Ogallala, Cheyenne, Dakota, Shoshone, Sioux, Nebraska, Iowa, and Arkansas. The West has its share, too, from Tucumcari, New Mexico, a Comanche word for "place of ambush," to Walla Walla, Washington, a Nez Perce name meaning "swift small river."

Fi ve hundred years ago, when Europeans arrived in the Americas to stay, they brought familiar things with them-plows, guns, seeds, and customs. They brought their languages, their religions, their literatures. And they brought names to remind them of the lands they had lrft behind, anchoring themselves in their pasts in the face of an unknown world.

Over a period of 300 years, the Spanish planted names from St. Augustine, Florida, westward to San Francisco, California, giving us pleasant-sounding points on the map like Punto Lobos (wolves' point), California; Palacios (palaces), Texas; and La Junta (the junction), Colorado. The state where I live carries hundreds of Spanish place-names, but scholars still dispute the origins of the word Arizona. According to some, it combines the Spanish words arida

and zona "arid zone"; others attribute the name to the 0'odham words ali and shonak, "the place of the little spring"; and still others trace the name to the Basque arizonac, a term that cropped up in an old mining claim and that is thought to mean "place of the oaks." The historian Herbert Bancroft even suggested, quite seriously, that the shape of the territory ceded to the United States under the Gadsden Purchase of 1853 resembled the profile of a large-nosed woman, narizona in Spanish, whence the name. In any event, the word appears in Spanish documents after the l750s as the Real de Arizona, and it stuck.

The French, who explored the waterways of what are now the central and northern United States, left their legacy in places like Detroit, "river's mouth"; Boise, "woodland"; Pierre, "stone"; Baton Rouge, "red stick"; St. Croix, "holy cross"; Anse Grise, "gray cover"; and Grandglaise, "big salt lick." The great explorers from the French era are commemorated in such place-names as La Salle, Illinois; Marquette, Michigan; and Duluth, Minnesota. And the French language survives in many other atlas entries where, unfortunately, it cannot be immediately recognized. Ozarks, for example, comes from mangling the French aux Arks, "at the place

of the Arkansas Indians"; Zumbro, Minnesota, is a mispronunciation of aux embarras, "at the place of the river obstacles," referring to the small rapids at the headwaters of the Mississippi River. And the Colorado cowboy who takes his herd over the Picket Wire River is crossing what French trappers named Purgatoire, "purgatory," where souls are tested.

Many other European nationalities left their mark on the American map. Germans are remembered by places such as Cleveland, Ohio; Brunswick, Georgia; Manheim, Pennsylvania; Bingen, Washington; Elmendorf, Texas; Osnabrock, North Dakota; Holstein, Iowa; Rhinelander, Wisconsin; and Frankfort, Kentucky. There were many more German names on the map, but hundreds of them were renamed for patriotic purposes during World War I. The Dutch who settled the Hudson and Connecticut River valleys are remembered

by New York place-names such as Kinderhook (cape of the children) and Gramercy, misspelling of Krummarisjee (crooked bog). Norwegians are represented

by Norden, South Dakota; Hovland and Viking, Minnesota; and Ruthven, Iowa; Danes in Solvang, California; Dannebrog, Nebraska; and Borger, Texas; and Czechs in Poth, Texas; and Prague, Oklahoma Hungary makes an appearance in Buda, Texas, and even tiny Luxembourg takes a bow with the Wisconsin town of that name.

Strangely, however, other great immigrant groups brought little of home to the names of their new land. The Italians, for instance, are poorly represented, apart from a few names like Naples, Florida. So, too, are the Greeks, Lebanese, and Armenians who came by the hundreds of thousands at the turn of the century. The thousands of Portuguese who served as the backbone of the New England fishing industry are virtually absent from the American atlas, as are the Poles, Ukrainians, and Russians who settled in both western Pennsylvania and the northern Great Plains states in the late 19th century.

Naturally, the American landscape abounds in names taken straight from the map of England, from Boston, Massachusetts, to Dover, Delaware, and Norfolk, Virginia. Most of these names

have a long pedigree that stretches far back in time. The Pennsylvania town Chester, for example, is named for the eastern Cheshire cathedral town, which in turn is derived from the Latin castrum, "fort."

Wye, Maryland, recalls the Welsh river Wye, an ancient Cymric word for water.

Glasgow, Kentucky, and Aberdeen, Kansas, honor ancient Celtic fortified towns of Scotland. And Springfield, one of the most common of American placenames, comes not from a particular place but a ubiquitous geographical fact in well-watered England-a field with a bubbling spring.

The close of the American Revolution (1775-83) ushered in a new era of naming.

Resentful of the hardships they had endured under the English crown, American patriots turned once more to American Indian names, where they existed. Where they did not, newly settled places were named for heroes of the struggle-whence Washington; Jefferson, Missouri; Marion, South Carolina; Pulaski, Tennessee; Fort Wayne, Indiana; and Lafayette, Louisiana.

Alternately, newly founded places were given names from classical history and literature, harking back to the ancient Greek and Roman republics from which the Founding Fathers had taken so many lessons. Few such names existed before the war, the notable exception being Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, named after the great Greco-Egyptian metropolis.

Afterward, however, the eastern and midwestern United States began to swim in names like Athens (New York, Ohio, Maine, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Georgia), Troy (Alabama, New York, Ohio, and Michigan), and Utica (New York, Ohio, and Kansas).

Less common names like Hannibal, Missouri; Cairo, Illinois; Marcellus, New York; Cincinnati, Ohio; Egypt, West Virginia; and Memphis, Tennessee, suggest that their namers knew their ancient history.

This period of classical naming lasted well into the 19th century, when it gave way to both descriptive naming (Black Rock, Short Creek) and place-names taken from newspaper headlines, such as Waterloo, Iowa, commemorating Napoleon's last stand, and Ghent, Ohio, honoring the treaty that ended the War of 1812. At the same

time, other places honored Scripture, bearing biblical names like Shiloh, Tennessee; Bethany, Delaware; Nazareth and Bethlehem, Pennsylvania; Bethesda, Maryland; Tophet, West Virginia; Goshen, Connecticut; and Abilene, Texas.

Still other names were taken from whimsy. Bug Hollow, Kentucky, is so named for the fleas that infest the area in the warm months, and, as you might expect, it does not attract many visitors. Fools Lake, Minnesota, commemorates two hapless hunters who got lost in the woods and nearly died of exposure; their camp, complete with food and firewood, lay only a few meters away. And Matrimony Creek, which runs from Virginia into North Carolina, was so named by an inveterate bachelor who considered the stream to be "noisy, impetuous, and clamorous."

With westward expansion came a new naming style, marking historical moments that might otherwise never be known to us.

Bean Soup Lake, Nebraska, commemorates a long winter in the 1870s when a group of luckless cowhands had to endure months on end of this unhappy diet. "I ain't never gonna eat a bean again," one of them grumbled when spring came, and it is said that he kept his word.

The vaqueros had it better than the five trappers memorialized in Cannibal Plateau, Colorado, who, at about the same time, were killed and eaten by a companion.

Central Michigan residents had it better still; Ann Arbor is named after two women, both named Ann, who grew lush gardens of grapes, apples, persimmons, and other fruits in friendly competition in what is now the center ofa famous college town.

Other western names bear witness to historical events large and small. We have Bloody Basin, Arizona, the site of a fierce battle between sheep herders and cattle ranchers, and Cripple Creek, Oregon, where an unlucky farmer nearly cut off his foot felling a spruce. Mad River, California, bears witness to a fit of rage on the part of one Josiah Gregg, who would later write the classic history book, Commerce of the Prairies. These are far more pleasant than the many western place-names that intimate mortality: Deadman Creek, South Dakota; Death Valley, California; Hangm-

an Creek, Washington; Murder Creek, Oregon; Skull Valley, Arizona; and Dead Man's Mountain, Texas, all speak to the dangerous rigors of subduing the frontier.

bound up with the personality is a collection

of its editor in chief. A good house

of highly individual

all of whom contribute

editors with very individual

other hand, is in a sense an emanation impulses

then thought to be beneficial to health.

Fruitland, Utah, was similarly named to draw

intention of a sentence crystal clear. He can become

Mountains and the Sierra Nevada abound in apt names such as Green Valley, Arizona; Arcadia, Wyoming; Silverpeak, Nevada; and Bliss, Idaho. ff truth-in-advertising laws applied to the naming of places, their coiners would be in big trouble.

and views and, to use a disgusting

on the

of its chief editor-of

Some other western names promised better fortunes. Ozona, Texas, was meant to lure settlers with the promise of abundant natural gas,

homesteaders with the promise of rich produce, its developer having scrapped the original and much more accurate name Rabbit Gulch; the latter commemorated a vast local cottontail population that would, the first settlers learned, quickly strip every last seedling from the ground. The dry deserts between the Rocky

tastes,

different things to the list. A magazine,

his

word, vision.

Bob is concerned above all with making the meaning and

McGRATH:

quite ingenious,

almost paranoid, thinking of ways that a reader might possibly misconstrue something.

He is a Tartar, too, about participial a relative clause-a

clauses.

He will often take

"that" clause or a "which" clause-and

make it into

a participial phrase or a gerund phrase. And he has a great nose for cant and pretension and highfalutin crap of any sort. He goes at it like a terrier.

It's as ifhe can smell it.

GOTTLIEB:

I have idiosyncrasies

in punctuation,

like everybody else.

Because one ofthe formative writers of my life was Henry James, it's all too easy for me to pepper a text with dashes. Many people don't like dashes. With Le Carre, I'm always putting commas in, and he's always taking them out, but we know that about each other. He'll say, Look, if you absolutely need this one, have it. And I'll say, Well, I would have liked it,

Whimsy figures again in the American atlas, reflecting an ever-evolving popular culture.

but I guess I can live without it. We accommodate

Jenny Lind, Arkansas, honors "the Swedish nightingale," a singer who, to the delight of her backwoods fans, stopped by the place on an American tour in 1850. Similarly, the cantankerous Judge Roy Bean, known as "the law west of the Pecos" and a law unto himself,

wasn't going to have my way, or that it wasn't my job to impose my views.

named his headquarters of Langtry, Texas, after the stage actress Lily Langtry, on whom he had a great crush.

Where there is whimsy there is chance, and not all American names are deliberate.

Nome, Alaska, that faraway town by the Bering Sea, was originally a notation on a British admiralty chart that read? name. When the chart was converted to a printed map, the draftsman rendered this as "Cape Name," which the engraver read as "Nome."

Captain John Smith, an early English explorer, jotted down what he understood an Algonquian river name to be as "Potomac," a name no subsequent Algonquian could decipher; scholars are still trying to puz-

each other. When I was a

young firebrand it never occurred to me that I might be wrong, or that I I could get into 20-minute

shouting matches over semicolons,

because

every semicolon was a matter of life or death. As you grow older you realize that there are bad lines inKing Learand it has survived.

There was a certain type of writing

McGRATH:

about a lot. We called overblown

it "cry of the loon"

we used to laugh

writing-that

kind of

nature prose. Bob has a deadly instinct for when that stuff

has gone ripe. He has a fine ear for English as it's spoken, and a lot of his work as an editor is taking stilted, artificial language the direction of the vernacular.

and pushing it in

How words sound on a page (if that's not

an oxymoron)

is what Bob listens for.

GOTTLIEB:

There are certain locutions I become obsessed with. I hate

the overuse of the word continued: He continued to eat his soup, instead of he went on eating his soup. That is something

I must have changed

10,000 times in five years at the New Yorker. Impoverished

vocabulary

disturbs me. I used to joke with my colleagues about VE.-verb

enrich-

ment. I hate it when a writer uses the word "walk" 30times in two pages, for example. At the New Yorker changing things like that was difficult because the editors there had been trained that an editor does not improve writing, he makes it correct. I was a book editor, though, and my job has

zle out what Smith could have heard. Canyon de Chelly, Arizona, represents a Spanish misren-

always been to help writers make books better.

dering of the Navajo word tsegi, "big rock." (To complicate matters, modern Americans pronounce it "Shay.")

another sensibility or another vocabulary on top of what's there, but Bob

McGRATH:

Anyone can take a piece and tart it up, and in so doing layer

doesn't do that. He has a great ability to get inside a piece and instinctively understand

About the Author: Gregory McNamee writes frequently on travel and natural history. He has recently completed a literary anthology on the environments of Arizona.

the terms and the vocabulary

changes in those terms and that vocabulary.

of the writer, and make

This is one of the hallmarks

of great editing: When it is done right, you don 'tnotice it.

GOTTLIEB:

I happen to be a kind of word whore. I will read anything

Bob has an uncanny knack for putting his finger on that one sentence ...one paragraph, that somewhere in the back of your mind you knew wasn't quite right but was -Charles McGrath close enough so that you decided to worry about it later. from Racine to a nurse romance, ifit's a good nurse romance. Many people just aren't like that. Some of my closest friends cannot read anything that isn't substantial-they don't see the point. I don't, however, like a certain kind of very rich, ornate, literary writing. I feel as ifJ'm being choked, as ifgravel is being poured down my throat. Books like Under

the Volcano, for instance, are not for me.

Bob once used an adjective about one of my booksBeloved-that I'd never, ever, ever heard him use before, about my book or anybody else's. He said "great." It's funny, because everybody says "great" about anything. What's the weather like? It's great. How do you feel? Great. But I know that when Bob said it, in that context, he meant something was wonderfully

else. He might say wonderful, done, but he never said great.

when

MORRISON: Bob and I used to joke about our egos being so huge that they didn't exist-which is a way of saying that neither he nor I felt we were in competition with anybody. That's not a very nice thing to say

words

to remember

that a large ego can be generous and enabling, because of its lack of envy.

There was a way in which our confidence was wide-spirited.

LYNN NESBIT:

People always say Bob has such an enormous ego, but I

say that Bob takes this enormous

ego and lends it to the writer, thereby

reinforcing the writer's ego. Bob is very generous with his ego.

GOTTLIEB:

CARO: In all the hours of working on The Power Broker Bob neversaid one nice thing to me-never a single complimentary word, either about the book as a whole or about a single portion of the book. That was also true of my second book, The Path to Power. But then he got soft. When we finished the last page of the last book we worked on, Means of Ascent, he held up the manuscript for a moment and said, slowly, as ifhe didn't want to say it, "not bad." Those are the only two complimentary he has eversaid to me, to this day.

to have that in an editor

is a valuable thing indeed.

about myself or him; but at the same time, it's important

MORRISON:

that. He didn't mean something

stantly living in a world of panic and uncertainty,

When you're dealing with nonprofessional

writers, you

simply to have to give them a tremendous amount of encouragement convince them that they can write at all. Lauren Bacall is a perfect example. I knew she could write her own book, and I knew that she would never be satisfied ifshe had a ghostwriter, but she didn't know how to do it, so finally we set up a system. She would come into the office every day and write in longhand on yellow pads, and every night little elves would type up what she had written during the day. She kept saying, Is it all right? and I would say, Yes, yes, it's fine. You write it, I'll edit it. And it

was fine. Of course, it needed standard editorial work, but it was her LESSING: Bob has been advising me and editing my work for 30 or more years. It is hard to remember details now. I have just been reading my diary for 1978, where it records that I spent some days making alterations he suggested. I remember cutting quite a bit out of The Sirian

Experiments. I cut a bit out of The Four-Gated City at his suggestion, which perhaps was a mistake. Bob has made mistakes. But, nearly always, he is right. I don't think Bob would be surprised to hear that [ would describe him as an authoritarian personality. Why should he? I've told him so. We are good enough friends for us both to put up with this kind of mutual criticism.

GOTTLIEB: Well, I describe her as authoritarian. So there you are. But this is actually more complicated than that, because my neurotic vision of myself is of a fly on the wall. I see mysel f as an observer, as someone who could not possibly affect any other human being, not even my children. Now, I'm an acute observer and an analyzed person, so I know perfectly well from the evidence of my eyes and ears that I have a strong personality and have no problem running large organizations, and I know that I've had a considerable effect on many people. I know I have a great deal of personal authority. But there's a disparity between what I know and what I feel. I've never quite understood

why people

But then, r.ve never

do what

taken myself

I say. very

seriously.

CHAIM POTOK: There is a certainty, an ease, an assuredness that comes from Bob, and when you're a writer and you're con-

book, it came right out of her. Betty Bacall is a bright Jewish girl from New York-she wasn't going to write a bad book.

I did Liv Ullmann's book too. She had already written it in Norwegian and had it translated, and she wanted someone to edit it in English. The first time I met her it was winter, and she came into the office wearing a big furcoat.l took her coat, we had a long talk, and after about45 minutes I said, Come on, I'll walk you around the office and introduce

you to

some of the people you'll be working with. She said all right, and she stood up and started putting on her coat. I said, Why are you putting on your coat, it's boiling in these offices, and she said, I'm putting on my coat because I'm so fat I don't want anyone to see me. Now, I'm married to an actress, and this triggered something in me, and I completely forgot that I hadjustmether45 minutes ago.! said, Wait a minute. Numberone, it's very hot in here. Number two, you do not look fat, you look great.

And number three, you're not putting on your coat. This is just what I would have said to my wife, Maria. And she said, Oh, fine, and took off her coat. Because she's an actress-she needed the director to tell her she looked great and she needed reassurance. Yet she had written a very fine book on her own.

CRICHTON: Absolutely

There is absolutely no question that I see Bob paternally. no question. There is a lot of jealousy

involved in your rela-

tionship with your editor. You don't want to walk into the office and see another writer chatting with Bob-you'd want to kill them. So you learn to schedule your appointments so you can see Daddy all by yourself. I remember at one point I wanted a larger advance and Bob didn't want to give it to me. He asked Lynn Nesbit, my agent, Why does Michael want

such a big advance? And she said, Well, Bob, I think he wants to buy a house. Bob said, Well what does he need such a big house for, and she said, Bob, he's married now and has a child. There was a way in which, as with a parent, I was always this young kid to him, and it never really changed.

So maybe there was some counter-transference too.

we never realize our dreams; but Bob did realize his dreams, and it ended with the New Yorker. And at 61 he decided that what he really liked doing was what he had done at the beginning of his publishing life, which was editing.

LE CARRE: Young writers taken on by

editing is almost maternal

publishing houses these days seem to be treated with a great deal more sanity than used to be the case. American publishing went through a phase: Just as American acting was haunted by the Brando exam~;/

deliver something nurturing and corrective, and the benefit and the pleasure is in seeing the nurturing and the corrective show without your fingerprints.

If it has your fingerprints on it, it's no good. It's

pie, so American by the Fitzgerald

great difficulty

explaining

like knowing you've don't need you.

publishing was haunted example. For decades it

was regarded as almost mandatory that a writer be drunk half the day, that he have an appallingly untidy sex life, be manicdepressive, need a doctor....I have the impression

MORRISON: I was an editor myself for a long while, and I have what was so gratifying

about it. I suppose

at times: You see yourself

been successful

as being able to

with your children

when they

GOTTLIEB: What is it that impels this act of editing? I know that in my case it's not merely about words. Whatever counter,

that publishers

don't

I want it to be good-whether

Ilook at, whatever

it's what you're

wearing,

I enor

how the restaurant has laid the table, or what's going on on stage, or what the President said last night, or how two people are talking to each

do all that wet-nursing in the way thatthey used to. You're much more on your own, and that may not be a bad thing. I don't think writers need all that sympathy. They need to be told when their books are bad. The excessively sycophantic phase of American publishing has been forced off the stream because it's simply not cost-effective anymore.

other at a bus stop. I don't want to interfere with it or control it, exactly-I want it to work, I want it to be happy, I want it to come out right. If! hadn't gone into publishing, I might have been a psychoana-

LESSING: There have been two pressures that have eroded excellence

This is going to sound ungrateful, but I've had more recognition than anybody should have for doing a job that isn't running the United

in publishing. One is its increasing commercialization, the other is politics. We now have a generation of people whose literary education has consisted not of being soaked in excellence, but of judging novels and

lyst; I might have been, I think, a rabbi, if!'d been at all religious.

My

impulse to make things good, and to make good things better, is almost ungovernable. I suppose it's lucky I found a wholesome outlet for it.

Nations, and I used to ask myself, Why have I done so well? I really didn't understand it. I used to feel I was a fraud because [ had had so much suc-

stories by their theme or by the color or political stance of their authors.

Now it is common to meet editors who will talk about a second-rate book as ifit were the best. My guess is that they probably started offwith high

cess and done so little to deserve it. And then I realized, you don't have to

standards-that is, if they weren't political-but sures slowly brought them low.

getic, sensible, and full of goodwill. Those shouldn't be rare qualities, and they don't deserve a lot of credit, because you're either born with them oryou're not. It's luck. And that's why you can be as good an editor your first day on the job as on your last; you're not developing some unique and profound gift.

the commercial

pres-

McGRATH: These days most people at the heads of magazines and publishing houses don't do the nitpicky stuff that Bob does. They don't have time. Perhaps they hope the little stuff will get done by someone else, or perhaps they secretly believe that even ifit isn 'tdone they can get away with it. There has been a great change in the notion of what editing means. Increasingly, editing means going to lunch. It means editing with a credit card, not with a pencil.

NESBIT: There's so much concern for the bottom line these days. Of course, it's notthat 25 years ago everyone was publishing such wonderful literary things and didn't care about finances; but now that the publishing houses have become larger, and books sell many more copies than they used to, writers want bigger advances, the pressures are greater. I think that's one of the reasons that, when Bob left Knopf, he was glad to be out.

be a genius to be an editor. You don't have to have a great inspirational talent to be a publisher. Youjust have to be capable, hardworking, ener-

But publishing has changed in many ways, and one of them is that these days many editors don't edit. There are editors now who basically make deals; they have assistant editors or associate editors who do the actual editing for them. When I was growing up in the business, editors, even if they were heads of publishing houses, what they brought in, or they had someone who worked could help them. Now it's much more splintered, and publishing has become far more complicated and fierce

tended to edit with them who the business of and febri Ie.

On the other hand, one has to remember that the time I look back on as the golden age was seen by people like Alfred Knopf as the age of the slobs, as opposed

to prewar publishing,

which was the true golden

LE CARRE: You have to give a little thought,

age. At a certain point you have to face the fact that you've

what Bob's doing at the where the guy was captain back as a humble member out any executive powers

an old fart-that

in human terms, to moment. It's an extraordinary situation, of the ship all those years, and now goes of the crew, working as a line editor, withat all. Bob had three ambitions in his life.

They involved the New York City Ballet, Knopf, and the New Yorker.

And he achieved them all. There's a Jewish prayer which says, May

you can't

tell whether

changed for the worse or whether aren't in touch anymore.

About the Interviewer: the Paris Review.

you've

the zeitgeist

turned into has actually

simply fallen behind and 0

Larissa MacFarquhar

is an advisory editor for

The

Threat

of International efforts to control weapons of mass destruction have been inadequate.

The renewed Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty is weak, the Chemical Weapons Convention still awaits ratification, and biological weapons, which pose the scariest threat of all, are essentially devoid of international control. nce you have assimilated the idea that an apocalyptic new-age cult with offices on three continents had stockpiled tons of nerve-gas ingredients and was trying to cultivate the bacterial toxin that causes botulism, the rest of the story is pretty good news. The cult, Aum Supreme Truth in Japan, employed its nerve gas on only one of the continents, rather than aim for synchronized gassings of the Tokyo, New York, and Moscow subways. Only a small fraction of its chemical stock was used, and that was prepared shoddily; the gas seems to have been a degraded version of sarin, and the "delivery systems" that emitted it were barely worthy of that name. Rather than thousands dead on three continents, we got 11 dead in Japan. A happy ending.

On the other hand, a worldwide display of well-run chemical and biological terrorism would have had its virtues. From mid-April through mid-May, on the eve of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty's expiration at age 25, representatives of more than 170 nations met in New York to renew the treaty. Conceivably, this gala event could inspire a broader and much-needed dialogue on the state of the world's efforts to control weapons of mass destruction, including chemical and biological arms. Then again, conceivably it couldn't. So far, attempts to take a truly fresh look at this issue have tended to encounter a certain dull inertia within policymaking circles. This is the sort of condition for which 10,000 globally televised deaths on three continents might have beenjust the cure.

One salient feature ofthe world's approach to weapons of mass destruction is perverseness.

The Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty-the NPT -is a much weaker document than the recently negotiated Chemical Weapons Convention, which now awaits American ratification; yet, nuclear weapons are much more devastating than chemical ones. Meanwhile, biological weapons are essentially devoid of international control, yet they are the scariest of the three. They may not be the most potent-not for now, at least-but they have the greatest combination of potency and plausibility. Ifsomeone asks you to guess which technology will be the first to kill 100,000 Americans in a terrorist incident, you should not hesitate; bet on biotechnology. And not futuristic, genetically engineered, genocidal viruses, though these may be along eventually. Plain old first-generation biological weapons-the same vintage as the ones Aum Supreme Truth was trying to make-are the

O

Reprinted with permission from The Nell' Republic. May 1,1995, pp. 21-27.

Copyright Š 1995, The New Republic, Inc.

great unheralded threat to national security in the late 1990s.

All told, the planet's current policy on weapons of mass destruction can be summarized as follows: The more terrible and threatening the weapon, the less we do about it. There has never been a more opportune time to rethink these priorities.

To its credit, the Clinton Administration worked doggedly on behalf of NPT renewal. Officials traveled the globe, reminding world leaders that they are more secure with the treaty than without it, and promising the more ambivalent ones God-knows-what in exchange for their support. The treaty was extended at the New York conference.

Extension is certainly better than non-extension. Still, since its inception back in the 1960s, the treaty's structural weakness has gotten sufficiently glaring that one wishes those weren't the only two options.

The idea behind the treaty was that the nuclear haves-Britain, China, France, Russia, the United States-would buy off the have-nots, The have-nots would pledge not to acquire nuclear weapons, and the haves would help them get and maintain nuclear energy for peaceful use. That was the carrot. Once the have-nots had signed on, they would be subjected (along with the rest of us) to the stick: International inspection of nuclear reactors, with the understanding that misuse of the technology would lead to its cutoff.

Administering both carrot and stick is the International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA. One oddity ofthis arrangement is that the IAEA's job is to relentlessly complicate its own life. As it helps spread "peaceful" nuclear materials around the globe, opportunities for illicit use multiply, and so does the need for stringent policing. Thus, the world must get better and better at two things-detecting cheaters, and punishing them with sufficient force to deter others. Recent events show the world to have failed in both regards At the outset of the Persian Gulf War, Iraq was an NPT member in technically good standing. After the war, the world discovered what a m,eaningle~s fact that can be. Indeed, as if to drive home the IAEA's impotence, a separate agency, under United Nations auspices, went into Iraq, documented the nuclear weapons program, and dismantled it.

It's true that the existence of this program didn't come as a bolt from the blue, There had long been grave suspicions, but President George Bush's aversion to regional Iranian hegemony had given him a certain tolerance for Iraqi excesses, Still, few suspected the scope of Saddam Hussein's nuclear program, or the subtlety of its concealment.

Hussein proved that the IAEA's inspection regime-confined to declared nuclear sites-is inadequate.

The first application of this lesson was in North Korea. After inspection ofa declared site revealed nuclear materials to be missing, the IAEA, for the first time ever, asked to look at an undeclared site.

The North Korean refusal confirmed everyone's worst suspicions, and thus revealed a second NPT deficiency: Once the world knows that a country is not cooperating, there are no provisions for assured and effective punishment. In theory the IAEA could appeal to the

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

UN Security Council for economic sanctions-or, indeed, for the authorization of air strikes against the suspect facility. But often this channel will be blocked by a Big Five (Britain, China, France, Russia, and the United States) veto-possibly China's in the case of North Korea, perhaps Russia's in some future case involving Iran. otwithstanding these flaws, the NPT has been pretty effective. Nobody called John Kennedy a hysteric when in 1963 he predicted that within a dozen years 15 to 20 nations would have the bomb. Yet now, 32 years later, the best guess is that eight nations have a functioning bomb-the Big Five within the NPT and, outside of it, Israel, Pakistan, and India. (In addition, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan were born with the bomb, and say they will give it up.) A primary reason for this glacial pace is that the NPT eased fears, in large chunks of the world, about the imminent nuclearization of neighbors.

Still, the Middle East and South Asia have gotten arms-race fever since 1963, and North Korea may yet start a race in the Pacific. So it would be nice to make the NPT more seductive and effective: To raise both the benefits of signing and the costs of reneging. And, though no one talked about using the recent conference to amend the NPT (this would supposedly open up various cans of worms), there is talk of reaching that goal in other ways. For example, the IAEA can interpret its sometimes-ambiguous mandate broadly-as it did in claiming the right to inspect undeclared sites in North Korea-and hope everyone goes along, thus setting a precedent. Or the agency can approach member nations collectively about a generic rewrite of their individual "safeguard agreements"-the documents, technically separate from the NPT, that grant the IAEA's power to inspect.

In any event, the NPT extension happened early enough in New York for the conference at least to open a dialogue about the grave flaws of the current regime, particularly concerning nuclear disarmament and destroying nuclear arms.

A good rough model for refoml exists in the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWe), which now awaits Senate ratification after more than a decade of negotiatiun involving three administrations.

The CWC has both kinds of teeth that the NPT lacks-a tough inspection regime and real punishment for violation. In the arms-control field, says Barry Kellman, a law professor at DePaul University in Chicago, Illinois, it is a "wholly unprecedented document of international law." Were it already in effect, Aum Supreme Truth's attempt to make chemical weapons would have been a lot harder.

Under the chemical convention, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (or OPCW, the CWe's version of the IAEA) would be routinely informed about the commercial transfer of substances used to make chemical weapons-and substances used to make substances that are in turn used to make chemical weapons. That covers dozens and dozens of substances. It also covers a lot of sellers and buyers, because those substances tend to have legitimate uses as well. Thiodiglycol is used to make both mustard gas and ballpoint-pen ink. Dimethylamine makes for good nerve gas and detergent. In an impressive balancing act, CWC negotiators

N

by ROBERT

WRIGHT

managed to craft a system that (a) monitors the sale and transport of these chemicals and entails periodic inspections; and (b) has the unambiguous support ofthe Chemical Manufacturers Association.

Unlike the NPT, the CWC goes well beyond this inspection of "declared" sites-factories that avowedly employ the suspect chemicals-and provides explicitly for the inspection of undeclared sites. And here things can happen pretty fast. If the United States requests a "challenge inspection" of, say, a suspicious-looking warehouse in [a signatory country; that state] must let inspectors into its country within 12 hours of being notified. After another 12 hours, it must have escorted the inspectors to the perimeter of the warehouse. (Eliminating every trace of chemical weapons manufacture within 24 hours is considered quite unlikely.) At this point there can be up to 96 hours of negotiations about which parts of the warehouse are subject to inspection. But any vehicles leaving the area in the meanwhile can be searched.

A country could conceivably keep this standoff going longer by arguing that a search warrant at the national level is required.

Indeed, it might even be telling the truth (though for chemical factories, already subject to government regulation, this excuse would not wash). And, what's more, such a warrant might wind up being truly unobtainable-if, for example, the requested search were of your indoor tennis court and the OPCW could provide no evidence of illegal activity there. Still, if such appeals to national sovereignty had an overpoweringly phony air, the country could be deemed in noncompliance with the treaty by a vote of OPCW member-states.

Nations so deemed would truly be put in the doghouse. There is a whole slew of substances relevant to chemical warfare that treaty violators could no longer buy from OPCW members, a group that would include roughly the whole industrialized world. And the cutoff of these substances could harm factories that make things ranging from pesticides to plastics to ceramics to pharmaceuticals.

Here, the CWC breaks momentously new ground, though less by design than by technological happenstance. Because of the flexibility of chemical technology, the treaty's punishment by denial of "military" chemicals amounts to broad and immediately painful sanctions against the civilian economy. And these sanctions are a good reason not just to stay in compliance, but to sign the treaty in the first place. If you don 'tjoin the OPCW, its members-just about everybody-won't sell you these chemicals in the first place.

That's a carrot; and that's a stick.

Still, the CWC, given the complexity it confronts, would have a good chance of success. It would make the manufacture of chemical weapons an endeavor with a significant risk of unmasking, and unmasking would bring painful penalties-penalties that no Security Council member would have the chance to veto.

The irony in this disparity between the NPT and the CWC is that nuclear weapons are much more devastating than chemical

weapons. Whereas converting a single nuclear bomb into 500,000 deaths is a simple matter of parking a van and setting a timer, converting a single chemical weapon into 500,000 deaths isn't even remotely possible. A thousand deaths is more like it. Racking up large numbers means mounting a well-orchestrated campaign.

This doesn't mean chemical weapons don't warrant the tight treatment they get in the CWe. Forone thing, some ofthem, such as skin-melting and often nonlethal mustard gas, have uniquely horrifying effects. Second, although a single chemical weapon possesses a tiny fraction of a nuclear bomb's lethality, chemical weapons are much easier to get. The recipe for making them is public, a first-rate chemistry major can follow it (ifat some health risk), and the ingredients grow more widely available each decade.

Besides, chemical weapons, though the least massively destructive weapon of mass destruction, are much more potent than conventional explosives. A conventional warhead might kill ten people in a suburban neighborhood where a chemical warhead could kill 100. Still, chemical weapons aren't nearly as pernicious as nuclear weapons. And what most people still don't understand is that in important respects nuclear weapons aren't as pernicious as biological weapons.

In one sense, biological weapons are commonly overestimated.

People tend to assume they work by starting epidemics, when in fact most biological weapons kill by direct exposure, just like chemical weapons. To be sure, contagious weapons exist. Still, in general, contagious weapons have a way of coming back to haunt the aggressor. So, biological weaponry in this century has involved mainly things like anthrax spores, which enter your lungs and hatch bacteria that multiply within your body and finally kill you, but don't infest anyone else in the meanwhile. enetic engineering may eventually make contagious weapons more likely. In principle, for example, one could design a virus that would disproportionately afflict members of a particular ethnic group, thus giving some measure of safety to attackers of other ethnic persuasions. And-more realistically in the near term-genetic engineering makes it easier to match a killer virus with an effective vaccine, so that the aggressor could be immunized. Still, the main effect of modern biotechnology to date-and it has been dramatic-is to make traditional weapons, such as anthrax, much cheaper and easier to produce.

The weapons that can result are phenomenally destructive. An (excellent) Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) report on weapons of mass destruction estimates that a single warhead of anthrax spores landing in Washington, D.e., on a day of moderate wind could kill 30,000 to 100,000 people-a bit more damage than a Hiroshima-sized atomic bomb would do, though nothing like the devastation from a modern nuclear warhead. (And a day of fever, coughing, vomiting, and internal bleeding is an appreciably less desirable way to die than incineration.) In addition, anthrax spores buried in the soil, beyond the reach of sunlight, live on. Gruinard Island, where Britain detonated an experimental anthrax bomb during World War II, is still uninhabitable.

But a warhead is not the most likely form in which biological

G

Though biological weapons are the most horrifying terrorist tool today, they are the furthest from being on the radar screen of any politician who matters.

weapons will first reach [their target]. A ballistic missile, after all, has a return address. And there's another problem with missiledelivered biological weapons. The technological challenge of making an explosive device yield a widespread mist is considerable. Still, if you're not attacking from a distance and can deliver the spores in person, the obstacles to biological attack diminish.

"Figuring out how to do it in a terrorist kind of way is trivial," says one analyst in the U.S. defense establishment. Thus, the fact that no nation has used biological weapons since World War II is no indicator of the likelihood of their future use. Only recently has the technology become so widely available that a wellorganized terrorist group can harness it.

Of all the things that might attract terrorists to biological warfare-the relative cheapness, the inconspicuous production-perhaps the most important is the anonymity. A small, private airplane with 100 kilograms of anthrax spores could fly over Washington on a north-south route, engage in no notably odd behavior and by OTA reckoning-trail an invisible mist that would kill a million people on a day with moderate wind.

Though biological weapons are the most horrifying terrorist tool today, they are also the furthest from being on the radar screen of any politician who matters. The Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) of 1975, which commits the United States, Russia, and other signatories to forgo any biological weapons program, is so toothless as to make the NPT seem like a steel trap. Meanwhile, the most visible result of a series of meetings among BWC signatories about revising the convention is a series of agreements to keep meeting. There is very little talk anywhere about giving the Biological Weapons Convention a rigor reminiscent ofthe chemical convention.

When you ask people to explain this anomaly, they cite the practical problems that make detecting biological weapons harder than detecting chemical weapons. There are so many small, theoretically suspect rooms, at so many medical and biotech facilities. And upon inspection, it's so hard to say for sure whether anything illicit is going on. The perfectly legitimate endeavor of making anthrax vaccine, for example, is an excuse for having anthrax around-one of several potential "masks" for weapons production. What's more, a small, inconspicuous supply of pathogens can, via fermentation, be turned into a weapons-scale supply a mere two weeks after a satisfied international inspector cheerfully waves good-bye.

It's true that these things dramatically complicate enforcement of the treaty. It's also true that they dramatically underscore the need for enforcement. Knowing that in thousands and thousands of buildings on this planet some graduate student or mid-level manager could be breeding enough anthrax spores to decimate the city where I live-well, somehow I don't find that conducive to a laissez-faire attitude. Using the plausibility of biological warfare as reason not to reduce that plausibility is a bit too rich in irony.

A few wild-eyed radicals have gone so far as to suggest new approaches to the problem. One idea is to "internationalize" the production of vaccines; or, at least, to compress each country's vaccine production into fewer facilities, for easier (and assiduous) international monitoring. That would strip all other facilities of one of the masks for weapons production-so that, say, anthrax spores found during a challenge inspection would be hard to explain away.

This reform, of course, assumes that there is such a thing as a challenge inspection for biological weapons, which there isn't.

Adding such inspections to the BWC is about the most ambitious idea now floating around in the Clinton Administration (and it's not floating at the highest levels). The idea here wouldn't be to make the BWC as comprehensive as the CWe. The degree of routinized inspections envisioned in the CWC is probably impractical for biological weapons, given the sheer number of places that would be candidates for inspection. Rather, a revised BWC might simply have signatories provide data about all such sites and be subjected to an occasional challenge inspection-at these sites, or at undeclared sites. This would make the production of biological weapons an endeavor of at least incrementally increased risk. And with weapons of mass destruction, every increment counts. o that end, various other measures-for "transparency," international intelligence pooling, and so on-are also bandied about. The collective result of such measures is called a "web of deterrence" by Graham Pearson of Britain's Ministry of Defence. Pearson reflects the view of the British government that the BWC is in principle "verifiable." The Clinton Administration, in contrast, has yet to amend the official U.S. verdictto the contrary, which it inherited from the Reagan-Bush era of Cold- War-think, with its inordinate fear of intrusive inspections by communist masterminds.

One idea that has surfaced at the BWC's periodic meetings on self-improvement is to piggyback a new, tougher BWC onto the CWe. The CWC's governing body at the Hague could expand to encompass both chemical and biological weapons, metamorphosing from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical and Biological Weapons. Assuming that a new biological convention emulated the chemical convention in providing penalties for noncompliance, the two sets of penalties could be fused. Ifa country not complying with either treaty were cut off from some trade in both chemicals and biotechnology equipment, noncompliance would be extremely unattractive.

For that matter, in theory-and in the long run-the NPT could be thrown in with this mix, so that the illegal development of any weapon of mass destruction complicated one's access to state-of-the-art chemical, biological, and nuclear technology. This would give the NPT much of the force it now lacks, and would create a world in which the responsible use oftechnology is a prerequisite for untrammeled access to it.

There are political reasons why biological weapons have been given little of the attention they deserve. For one thing, ratification of the Chemical Weapons Convention is seen as a prerequisite for a new biological weapons initiative. The CWC took more than a decade of arduous negotiating. If it flops, no one is going to volun-

T

The Chemical Weapons Convention has both kinds of teeth that the NPT lacks: A tough inspection regime and real punishment for violation.

teer to lead the world on another visionary arms-control campaign.

Brad Roberts of the Center for Strategic and International Studies-not exactly a hotbed of woolly minded one-worldism-laid out a pretty concrete version of a lofty vision [for weapons control] in a recent issue of the Washington Quarterly.

Roberts extensively invoked internationalist acronyms-not just CWC, BWC, and NPT, but GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) and NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement). Making some nonobvious connections between trade regimes and nonproliferation regimes, he argued that both must be carefully crafted to attract and enmesh a "new tier" of states recently endowed by technological evolution with the capacity to manufacture potent weapons. With all these acronyms now in a critical phase in one sense or another, 1995 could "prove a genuine turning point"; "basic international institutions will end the year either much strengthened or much weakened"-and if the latter, the prospects for a stable post-Cold War world will sharply diminish.

If President Clinton ever did decide to exert leadership on the issue of weapons of mass destruction, there is little chance that posterity would deem him alarmist. Not only are the threats he would be addressing growing, their growth has deep and enduring roots: Increasing ingenuity in the manufacture of destructive force; increasing access, via information technology, to the data required for this manufacture; wider availabil ity, in an ever-more industrialized world, of the requisite materials; and the increasing ease of their shipment. The underlying force is truly inexorable: The accumulation of scientific knowledge and its application, via technology, to human affairs.

Every once in a while the inevitable results of these trends become apparent-in the discovery that Iraq had an extensive nuclear bomb project and enough chemical weapons to murder a small nation; in the fact that New York's World Trade Center bomJ)ers succeeded in a mission that, given slightly more deft personnel and better financing, could well have involved biological weapons rather than explosives; in the news that a nutty Japanese cult with an international presence was busily amassing a chemical and biological arsenal. So far, none of these object lessons has been driven home at the cost of tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of lives. But as time goes by, the cost of lessons will assuredly rise.

0 About the Author: Robert Wright is a senior editor of the New Republic in Washington, D. C. He has written on science, technology, and philosophy for other magazines and published the book Three Scientists and TheirGods: Looking for Meaning in an Age oflnformation.

A Classic Lensman

Bangalore-based photographer Chakravarthy Rajagopal recently became the first foreigner to win the prestigious Dr. John Doscher Memorial Award of the Photographic Society of America (PSA)

Indian Defence Secretary KA Nambiar and US. Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs Joseph Nye held a series of talks last month in Washington, D.C. The meetings were part of the continuing dialogue on bilateral defense cooperation initiated in January following the signing of the Agreed Minute in New Delhi by Secretary of Defense William J. Perry and Minister of State for Defence M Mallikarjun. The Agreed Minute had envisaged the establishment of a Defense Policy Group and a Joint Technical Group. The two groups held their first meetings during

The annual award is presented to PSA members-Rajagopal has been a member since 1951-for outstanding contributions to classical photography.

The citation reads "In spe-

Nambiar's Washington visit.

A number of security issues were discussedfrom the Persian Gulf to the Pacific Rim as well as peacekeeping operations The two sides expressed satisfaction on the ongoing cooperation in developing India's first light-combat aircraft, but underscored the need to identify additional areas for bilateral cooperation.

Secretary Nambiar also toured the headquarters for the US Atlantic Command in Norfolk, Virginia. He was briefed on UN operations in Haiti and on other defense matters, and given a flying demonstration of the F-15 fighter aircraft

cial recognition of his tireless contribution to the art of photography as a lecturer, teacher, and especially as a superb exhibitor whose work epitomizes the definition of classical photography ..

Ml15iIEA~ EXCHANGES Country music legend Dan Seals (right) made a brief halt in India last month during a twoweek tour of South and Southeast Asia. The tour was arranged by Judy Massa, Voice of America's music director and host of the widely popular Country Music USA program, as a gesture of appreciation to the many listeners who have become fans of country music through her program.

Seals and Massa came to India with a special mission To pay a visit to Clement Andrews, a longtime listener in Mangalore, Karnataka. For Andrews, who thinks Seals is "one of the greatest of the greats," the visit was a dream come true. Since he began listening to Country Music USA ten years ago, Andrews dreamed of visiting Nashville's Grand Ole Opry and mingling with the country music stars But illness has prevented him from realizing it.

Learning about his situation,

Massa decided to "bring a little Nashville to Mangalore" in the person of Texas-born Seals "I feel like a young boy waiting for Christmas-and you are my Santa Claus," Andrews told her Seals's gesture won him new fans even as it warmed the hearts of old faithfuls who flocked to his concerts in Mangalore, Bombay, and New Delhi.

Another musician who made waves last month was Carnatic vocalist OS Arun (right) who toured the United States with fellow musician Behjanki Krishna (mridangam) and Kuchipudi dancer Pasumarthy Vithal for a series of 16 performances arranged by the New Yorkbased Bharatanatyam dancer Indrani Rehman.

During the month-long tour the artists demonstrated India's per-

Saurav Agarwal, a native of New Delhi, is one of the winners of this year's Outstanding Undergraduate Scholarship Award of New York's Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) The award recognizes students for academic excellence, creative work, independent research, and participation in student and civic activities.

Agarwal recently received a degree in electrical engineer-

ing from RIT's College of Engineering. He holds a BSc degree from St. Stephen's College of the University of Delhi In a research project funded by the National Science Foundation, Agarwal and his RIT mentor, Professor Steven McLaughlin, succeeded through audio compression in doubling the capacity of compact discs

forming arts tradition to enthusiastic audiences. Theywere feted at the Ravinia Music Festival in Chicago, performed to a full house at the Asia Society in New York, and visited universities in New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Connecticut.

"Our main audiences were Americans, many of whom were exposed to Asian art forms for the first time," said Arun.

However, the highpoint of the tour for him was a visit to Broadway to watch a production of Guys and Oo/ls "It was a mind-blowing experience," he recalled.

(CDs) without sacrificing the quality of sound. This means that in place of nearly one hour of music per CD as now, one could have more than two hours of music. Agarwal says that before this development can become commercially viable, manufacturers must develop CD players that can decompress data. Audio researchers are confident this will be accomplished in a few years.

Reprinted from The Wall Street Journal -Permission, Cartoon Features Syndicate.

ON

THE LIGHTER SIDE

c.h~Nq "Number Three, take one step forward and say, '[ thought this was the smoking section. '"

The forward surges ahead.

Spectators rise in anticipation.

And then ... the glory of a goal Proud moments in our momentous Record of Construction Even before play began. the Nehru Stadium in Madras had witnessed a record. It was the first international-class stadium which took just 265 days from concept to kick-off L&Is Construction engineers made it possible.

Creating records in India and abroad is customary for L&T s Construction Group - ECC. The Group s 50 year track record includes the tallest industrial structures. the highest viaduct and the most eloquent rendering of marble and concrete - the Baha i temple in New Delhi.

Overseas. the ECC imprint of excellence in visible at the Abu Dhabi airport terminal complex. '''\ two hotels in Uzbekistan. five , bridges in Malaysia ... \l.j Of course. chances are you ({.\Von t see the L&T Construction ~englneer at the landmarks he has helped (0 create. Already he has moved ahead - further down a timeless road.

Sacred and Healing Spaces

New York-based artist Karen Lukas draws upon ancient symbols from around the world to transform ordinary hospital rooms and private homes into spaces that nurture the mind, spirit, and body.

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Karen Lukas (top) surveys her handiwork in rhe redecorated dining room a/the Ambassador's residence. Roosevelt House, in New Delhi. One of her major decoratil'e projects has been the Senior Health Care Center in Hampron Bays, New York.

Shown herefrolll the center are her still-life installations Earth (left, top) and Water (right, top), a glazed and stenciled door (abOl'e), and a detail from the door (top, middle). Her commissions have also included private residences. This room (right) ofa Takoma Park, MQlyland, house has glazed walls (detail at left), stenciled symbols, gold-leafed ceiling, and paintedjilmiture.

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erfiery auburn hair and vibrant blue eyes belie her gentle nature. Karen Lukas is as serene as the pale blueand-white stenciled murals she created on the dining room walls of Roosevelt House, the residence of U.S. Ambassador and Mrs. Frank Wisner. She smiles and speaks softly, but with self-confidence, about her work. One feels that hers is a serenity achieved, in part, by facing adversity and emerging from it with a new sense of purpose.

Lukas is a New York-based painter who combines fine art with decorative art. She describes her work as "the creation and ornamentation of spaces with decorative painting techniques." Her.:canvases are walls, ceilings, floors, fabrics, and furniture; her tools are stencils and glazes made from latex paint.

The colors and symbols she chooses are meant to evoke positive feelings that nurture the mind, spirit, and body, transforming ordinary rooms into what she calls "sacred and healing spaces."

For Lukas, the concept of spaces that can nurture and heal is not an abstract notion. It evolved from personal experience, when two years ago she fell ill and was hospitalized. "I was in bed and in a lot of pain, very sick," she recalls. "I felt the impact of the space. And watching the nurses, who are such wonderful care-givers, I saw that there was no place for them after they'd been there for hours and hours. They get very involved, you know; they need a place to go to heal themselves while they are healing otherpeople."

Before her illness, Lukas had worked for nearly a decade as a decorative painter and built up an impressive clientele. Her involvement in the world of fine art and decorative arts and their fusion began in 1976 when she obtained a bachelor's degree in fine arts from the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston.

She majored in crafts, with a concentration in fibers covering various forms of weaving, textile printing, and dyeing.

During America's Bicentennial celebrations that year, Lukas was involved in the designing and execution of large banners which were exhibited in City Hall, in front of the Boston Public Library, and at various other public places throughout the city.

In 1978 Lukas moved to New York City but returned to Massachusetts a year later to create a series of25 printed banners for the Harvard

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Square Business Association as part of the Christmas decorations for Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

In 1984 Lukas began to concentrate on decorative painting. Among her prized projects was the elaborate stencil and gold leafrestoration of then Vice President George Bush's office in the Old Executive Office Building and the trompe l'oeil stenciling of the ballroom lobby ofthe Ritz Carlton Hotel in Washington, D.C. She also created a nine-meter mural in B. Smith's restaurant and redecorated the VIP dressing rooms of the Radio Music Hall, both in New York, besides engaging in site work for Bloomingdales and Giorgio of Beverly Hills stores in Los Angeles and several private homes across the country.

Her hospital experience, however, set Lukas off in a new creative direction. In conceiving and creating sacred and healing spaces, Lukas imbues rooms with transitional power where color and symbols have therapeutic functions.

"By triggering unconscious psychological processes these elements can evoke positive feelings and fuse experiences into significances; hence sacred spaces that nurture the mind, spirit, and body," she explains.

Since 1993 her projects have included the Senior Health Care Center in Hampton Bays, an AIDS clinic, and a lymphedema massage center, all in the New York City area. She says: "When 1made the decision, two years ago, that I was going to do this kind of work, I thought, how am I going to walk around New York and go into places and say, 'Hi, I'm Karen Lukas and I'm an artist, and I'm doing sacred and healing spaces?' Well, now it's my official letterhead, and the hospitals that I'veworked with use the words 'sacred and healing space.'"

Lukas believes that the concept of sacred spaces is going to become]an integral part of life. "The health-care industry doesn't interact, by and large, with the needs ofthe people that partake ofit~and that means us all. Every single one of us will either spend time in a hospital or knows somebody who's going to.

Harvard did a study a few years back and discovered that millions of dollars are being spent on alternative care. People are looking for something else to facilitate and maintain wellbeing. And I feel that the spaces where healing takes place are vitally important," she states.

Last summer, Lukas took a break from her hospital work when a mutual friend, photographer/anthropologist Stephen Huyler (see SPAN, March 1995), put her in touch with the Wisners. They persuaded her to redecorate the dining room of Roosevelt House, a project paid for by the General Electric company. She arrived in early January and set off to rural India to glean inspiration for the mural she proposed to create. For several weeks she lived and worked among women in eastern Orissa and in Jaisalmer, Rajasthan, and studied their ritual painting, an art form which has been passed on from one generation to another for centuries.

Finally, Lukas chose the silhouetted archways, or mehrabs, ofMoghul architecture as the central motif, with borders of intertwining floral designs and lotus blossoms for the ceiling. The colors selected for the project were shades of blue stenciled on a white background. She credits Mrs. Wisner for the choice of color, adding: "Blue is by far the most popularcolor. People respond to it. So if you want to create a space that a lot of people feel comfortable in, blue is often the way to go.

"In an ideal sense, an ambassador brings one world into another world, and hopefully the two create a new interaction. Through my work, I'm helping create a wonderful arena for that," she explained.

The dining room was inaugurated this past Mayas the Moghul Room and Lukas returned to hospital work in America. Currently she is redecorating the children's treatment rooms at New York's Mt. Sinai Hospital.

On the eve of her departure to the United States, Lukas said: "As an artist, I have a gift from God, and if! believe in that gift, I trust that gift will allow me to create beauty ....I've let the universe know that this is what I'm prepared to do with my life and my work, and it all happens."

0 About the Author: Sandra Maxwell worked in television news and documentary production in Washington, D. C, for 15 years before she moved overseas with her family in 1990. She is nowaji-eelance writer living in New Delhi.

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ong after she had for traditional Southerners permitted her husthe front porch is more band to air-condithan an architectural apby SUE BRIDWELL BECKHAM pendage, more than a tion their old, rambling place for dealing with a Mississippi house, my The American front porch has hot climate and a social mother-in-law insisted always been considered "a neutral zone" soul. For them, it was a that everyone repair to the open to all for congregating, reflecting, ritual space of tradition front porch to "cool off," and regenerating. The author reviews and communion.

Most once the evening dishes its uses and tracks its sources, Southerners would agree were done. In April, when one of which is in India. with this observation from the temperature outdoors Hurston's novel Their was in the low 20s Celsius ~ ~ v '--' Eyes Were Watching God: and fresh, her command I I "When the people sat was welcome; in August, around on the porch and with 32 degrees Celsius passed around the pictures and 90 percent humidity, it of their thoughts for the others to look at seemed to defy logic. Still, she knew the the wonders of modern technology. and see, it was nice. The fact that the Anticipating trends ofthe late 20th century, porch had powers beyond the physical, and thought pictures were always crayon when any family member begged to stay in however, Hurston braved professional censure and announced that she would use her enlargements of life made it even nicer the cooler indoors for some solitary activity to listen to." credentials to record the fol klore of her peosuch as reading or watching television, she They knew that the Southern front porch ple in the American South. Hurston knew was convinced that only a rift with another just where to gather material on the folkwas much of what America waxes nostalgic family member could be behind the desire. about when it eulogizes the Old South. The ways and mores of Southern AfricanAnd she was equally convinced that an hour porch was neither indoors nor outdoors, Americans-she would do it on their or two on the porch would heal the ri ft-the porches. There, she reasoned, where storyneither formal nor entirely casual, neither parties would cool off, too. public nor private, neither black nor white.

An African-American novelist of the telling was a way oflife, where people were most comfortable, where community was It was all of the above. To sit on the porch reHarlem Renaissance (the flowering of the quired appropriate dress and appropriate arts in New York City's inner city from the the rule, she would learn the folklore that activities for various times of day. In the had been passed down for generations. The 1920s through the 1940s), Zora Neale result was a seminal work, Mules and Men, morning, women wore aprons as they set Hurston, was a transplanted Southerner and about their less grueling and more sociable an anthropologist. In the early 1930s, when published in 1934. tasks: Mending clothes, shelling peas, sortThese women of the American SouthHurston finished her degree, the academic ing fruit. Later in the day, aprons temporarmy mother-in-law, a white high school world still believed the only appropriate graduate, member of the working class, ily discarded, they could take a break before subjects for anthropological study were preparing dinner, drink iced tea, apply their Stone Age peoples as yet unexposed to motherofseven, and grandmotherto many, needles to "fancywork," and chat with-or and Hurston, a young and ambitious black This article appeared in the August 1992 issue and is reprinted woman, educated at New York's Columbia about-neighbors.

In the early evening, the with permission rrom The World & t, a publication or The Washington TimesCorporation.

Copyright Š 1992.

University-sensed the same truth: That whole family gathered on the porch to pass

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along family folklore, invent dreams about the future, reminisce about those who had departed this life. And later, after dark, bashful and protected youth in the first flush of intimacy were free to experiment with new relationships, alone yet within earshot and eye range of watchful adults. In between, the porch often belonged to the children, who turned it into steamer decks, forts, playhouses, schoolhouses, and refuges from neighborhood bullies. All of it was done in a zone out ofthe workaday routine, a zone where amiability, leisure, hospital ity, and laughter were the rule.

The porch was a neutral zone where tradition demanded that any passerby be welcomed.

In earlier Southern days, African-Americans were forbidden entrance to white living rooms and whites were equally unwelcome in the parlors of their black acquaintances, but members of the separated races could come together on the porch. Thus, on the porch, the boundary between friend and stranger broke down. People were freed from the constraints and tension of business and their own preoccupations; they could begin to commune and, according to my mother-in-law, to heal.

Thus, class and caste could

be explored in ways that contemporary life makes all but impossible.

Hurston and my mother-in-law knew all that. What they did not know was that the architecture and ritual of the Southern front porch were legacies of the combined cultures that make up America. Most scholars and thinkers consider the front porch to be a uniquely American contribution to vernacular architecture, and yet its origins have been explored only recently. Much of what has been written about the American porch has been nostalgia for a vanished way oflife or practical advice on how to build, furnish, and use the spaces. Still, it now seems certain that the ancestors of various American' cultural groups contributed to the development of outdoor living space on the front of

Porches continue to be ajavorirejeature ojnew homes allover the United States. Left.: A homeowner in Los Angeles. California. refilrbishes hisji"ont porch. Righr: An Aspen.

Colorado, house sporrs a gingerbread-trimmed porch. Below: A spacious porchjiwnes Montpelier; home ojjourrh President and Mrs. James Madison (/809-17), in Orange, Virginia.

Southern American houses.

As recently as the 1970s, books on the American home and American vernacular architecture claimed the porch to be a 19thcentury contribution to dealing with hot climates and seasons. They looked no further than the porches that sprouted on nearly every new American house of the Victorian era. To an extent, those writers were correct.

After Queen Victoria ascended the English throne in 1837, virtually all published American house plans incorporated porches; often, they were elaborate structures dwarfi ng the indoor living space they graced. It was only in the late 19th century that Midwestern, Western, and Eastern farmers, as well as those in the South, began including fulllength porches across the front of humble farmhouses. And it \\'as not

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unti I the early 20th century that householders all over the United States began adding porches to existing dwellings so that they, too, could sit neither outdoors nor in, neither away nor fully at home.

Those writers, however, were ignoring informal antecedents of the formalized Victorian porch. Traditionally, research has looked to the ruling classes as originators and perpetuators of trends. Looking in that direction, researchers found Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, both influential Americans, both Southerners, both architectural innovators, both inordinately fond of ritual structures on the fronts of dwellings, and both responsible for early examples of classic front porches.

Scholars and architects who attributed the proliferation of open porticos to the influence of late-18th-century residences such as Washington's Mount Vernon and Jefferson's Monticello erred by ignoring several hundred years of more functional and less imposing verandas on the modest homes of black and white Southerners, whose common dwellings have not been preserved for posterity. Only in the past decade or two have the keepers of the national memory been interested in the Iifesty les of average Americans.

Unfortunately, by the time the interest developed, most early examples of the housing of American Indians, slaves, and poor white Southern farmers had disappeared.

Historians and archaeologists, however, are clever at using a combination of intelligent speculation and recently developed technology to reconstruct the lifestyles and physical surroundings of vanished peoples.

Like Hurston, they have gathered information passed by word of mouth through the generations. Today, evidence strongly suggests that the development of Southern verandas owed much to the slaves and early free black Americans. Although less documentation has been established, it appears that some debt is owed to the vernacular housing of India and to ritual spaces on the fronts of ceremonial buildings of some Native American tribes.

Architectural historians are quick to MOTher and son share a sllnn)' afternoon on The porch of their Fernandina, Florida, home.

point out the debt Jefferson, Washington, and their contemporaries owed to Greece and Rome. The earliest recorded porticos in Europe were the ritual spaces on ancient Greek temples, which influenced Monticello and Mount Vernon and inspired the Greek Revival and Georgian traditions in U.S. architecture. But reference to early European civilizations does not fully explain the sprouting of porches on the homes of "aristocratic" Americans ofthe late 18th and early 19th centuries. Even the Southern climate does not provide sufficient explanation forthe architectural "innovation." In

her consideration of Mount Vernon in The American House, Mary Mix Foley confesses that "the appearance of this giant colonnade on an otherwise typical Virginia plantation house is one of those small mysteries which have never been solved."

Foley concedes that "trade with the West Indies which Washington ... engaged in could have exposed [him] to the galleried porch," without consjdering that he was exposed to West Indian influence among the slaves on his own plantation and probably, without knowing it, to a Native American tradition of porticos as well.

By the time Christopher Columbus arrived in the New World (1492), the tribes known as the Mississippi Indians-so named because archaeological remains of their cities have been discovered along the Mississippi River-had vanished. No one is sure what happened to these tribes.

Circumstantial evidence, however, suggests that their influence lived after them among other American Indian pE:0ples.

Reconstructions of Mississippian Indian cities indicate that ceremonial buildings were elevated above the residential areas and equipped with porticos affording contact between the ceremonial leaders (probably priests or priestesses) and participants in the rituals. It should be noted that the portico, like Greek and Roman temples and the unassuming Southern front porch, was neither inner sanctum nor fully public; it provided a place for interaction between parties who could not otherwise comfortably interact.

Although the Mississippian Indians were extinct by the time of white contact in this hemisphere, the culture of the West Indian Arawaks was stiil vital when the French brought African slaves to Haiti during the 17th century. Both the European French and the slaves seem to have copied the Arawak dwellings-their bohios-as temporary ways to deal with the climate. These multicultural Haitian dwellings were, according to folklorist John Michael Vlach, very similar in form to the "shotgun houses" that free Haitian blacks built in New Orleans (Louisiana) and Charleston (South Carolina), when they migrated in the early 18th century.

These shotgun houses did not derive exclusively from the Haitian antecedents, however. They seem to have African forerunners as well. Apparently so named because one could stand on the front porch and fire a shot through the front door, the door to the second room, and the back door, these houses bear a striking similarity to the traditional dwellings of the Yoruba tribe in Africa. Though complex, the AfricanAmerican influence on the development of the front porch is virtually indisputable. We have seen that African immigrants-those who came willingly as free people and those brought in bonds-had access to con-

Today, with renewed need for energy efficiency and an acute sense of the loss of community, the front porch is making a comeback.

cepts that may well have been antecedents to American front porches. We have not yet seen that those immigrants were active in the porch's development.

African-American architect Carl Anthony has observed that the Southern plantation was, by necessity, a cooperative effort between African slave and European master, an isolated microcosm wherein interaction and cross-cultural cooperation would have been inescapable.

It is a truism that slaves built their own quarters, but in contrast to the rigid instructions they were required to follow in building the master's mansion, they often were accorded more freedom in the construction of their own homes. Evidence suggests that, in many instances, they built the kinds of dwellings they were comfortable with: Small, one-room cabins with post-supported overhangs for shelter from the sun on the front-front porches. The materials they employed-mud and thatch-were useful to the planter in need of temporary shelter until his grand house could be completed. Every evidence~uggests a rich cultural exchange.

Though it must have been convenient for the occupant of the "Big House" to forget the debt he owed the slave, the grand porticosthat so mysteriously appeared on such mansions as Mount Vernon were the culmination of two centuries of efforts to deal with a physical and social climate inhospitable to black and white alike.

Considering the social development of the porch, we may assume that it stood for the few positive attributes of the slave/owner relationship. Surely the less

grand and more functional pre-Mount Vernon porches were, for white and black alike, the places of respite after a hot day's work, the places where interaction was less strained than in the field or in the house (where field slaves were not welcome), the places where each was able in an unguarded moment to appreciate the humanity of the other. And as Zora Neale Hurston knew, they were places where family members of each race shared memories, news, and stories, those "crayon enlargements" of the pictures in their minds.

Another potential non-European influence on the New World needs to be considered. As early as the 17th century, during their long occupation of India, the English wrote of the bungale, a "low house with galleries or porches all around" that was occu-. pied by Indian natives. The term bungalow became popular only in the l880s; the comfortable American middle-class bungalows, houses with porches across the front, reached their zenith of popularity in the 1920s and 1930s. Nevertheless, it is likely that the concept made its way to North America much earlier, with the English settlers. As a matter offact, in the late 1600s, a type of house very close in form, if not in material, to the Indian bungale made its way from the American South to New England-and in one case at least, it was copied in England.

Americans did invent the front porch, as tradition would have it, but the Americans in question represented several races and cultural traditions. Today, Americans of many cultural backgrounds still revere, use, and even build front porches.

With renewed need for energy efficiency and an acute sense of the loss of community, the front porch is making a comeback. All overthe South, new houses with honest-togoodness front porches are sprouting. They get little use-we're all too busy and the air-conditioning is too seductive. But they testi fy to the Southerner's continued regard for the ritual space that heals, for the community that cherished communion.

0 About the Author: Sue Bridwell Beckham is a professor of American studies at the University of Wisconsin-Stout and has written extensively on SOl/them porches and culture.

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