Volume 1 - Issue 5

Volume one, number five I December 10, 1967

Should this man be President of the United States tomorrow morning at nine?

21 The New Journal! December 10, 1967

Letters

institution of this new law for a year in an effort to bide time, or a new system of random selection will be established. Arlt discounted the possibility that there would be deferments for special disciplines of study, for "that is the law Johnson has in front of him, and if he wanted it, he would just sign it."

How the change in the draft laws will affect the Yale Graduate School, Miller isn't sure, for there are a number of contingent problems that must be confronted, the most serious being money.

Comment: Draft ... Money, Candidate, Dramats, Games, Seeger, Recordings, Dow

... Money

3

The memoirs of George Kennan

by Gaddis Smith

6

Norman Mailer: existentialist sheriff

by Jonathan Aaron

8

Eugene O'Neill at a crossroad

by Dr. Albert Rothenberg

12

15

Kingman Brewster in television's department of clarification

by Daniel Y erg in

Draft ...

In a press conference that will be held this week, President Johnson is expected to announce a new policy on graduate school deferments, according to Gustau Arlt, president of the Council of Graduate Schools( COS). Arlt interprets the press conference as "an extremely hopeful sign" that the new draft law scheduled to go into effect will be altered.

Under the Military Selective Service Act of 1967, which has not yet been enacted, there are no deferments for graduate students except in disciplines that the National Security Council rules in the national interest. Because the new law requires the abolition of graduate school deferments and that oldest eligible males be drafted first, the Yale Graduate School could lose up to 40% of its students next year.

A resolution passed by the CGS December 2 urges the President to alter the planned draft system and to come to an early decision, so that both graduate students and schools can plan for next year. Integral in all the lobbying of graduate schools is John Perry Miller, dean of the Yale Graduate School and president of the Association of Graduate Schools (AGS), a group of 41 prestige schools that works within the COS. "Miller sat in my suite in the Statler Hilton until 2 a.m. and helped me write the resolutions," said Arlt.

The CGS's main recommendation for changing the draft argues for three basic changes. The first is that no discipline be designated as more critical than any other, since "all fields of higher education are of equally critical importance to the continued welfare and balanced development of the nation." Second, it argues that the draft should be based on some form of random selection, and third that men be drafted at a point of natural transition in their education or careers.

The recommendation makes no plea for general deferment of graduate students because "the national security transcends the interest of any individual or group."

Miller, as president of the AGS, formulated and drafted much in these suggestions.

Miller is confident the pending draft laws will be modified, and feels that the military is as anxious as he for the changes, since it would be forced to draft men considerably older than desired.

"College graduates are too old," says Miller. ''They're past their prime. Now the military wants some old ones, but a good fighting officer is past his prime at 21."

No one is sure bow the law will be changed. Both Arlt and Miller predict that either the President will suspend the

With Congress cutting back the number of Federal fellowships by one third, the Yale Graduate School faces what could develop into a serious financial crisis.

Ironically, the scope of the financial problem hinges on the type of draft system that is initiated.

If most of the first and second year graduate students are drafted, as they would be under the pending law, the crisis would be averted, according to John Hoskins, director of grant and contract administration. The 15,000 Federal fellowships to graduate education that exist this year have been slashed to 10,000 for next, and graduate schools face a tight financial pinch unless there is a drastic reduction in enrollment.

"In the long run," said Dean Miller, "the financial problem is quite serious if no changes in federal funding are made and if a considerable portion of the student body is not drafted." Because of the cushioning effect of a Ford Foundation grant, there will be no significant financial problems at Yale next year. However, in years after, the problem becomes acute.

Other schools, more dependent on Federal funds than Yale, are already faced with financial chaos. The University of Illinois is laying off faculty at midyear.

Miller disagreed with Hoskins' claim that wartime spending is responsible for Federal cutbacks. "It is not just an economy move," said Miller. "There is an anti-education spirit in Congress. This will have more than a temporary effect."

-Jonathan Lear

been devoted to the cause of peace. This is what I must do."

"I guess Harold Stassen is a rather comic phenomenon," said a Political Union member after the candidate's speech. "Students want to see just what kind of man would do what he's doing.

That's why most of these people showed up here tonight."

Added the student politician: "Besides, he is campaigning on the issues, and he's one of the few people who does that when it comes to Vietnam. For all that, he's a damned interesting guy to listen to."

Whenever people asked Stassen about his views, though, the candidate would answer them formally, intoning with his sonorous voice as he would to a camera and microphone. ''This is really the first stage of my campaign," he explained after his speech.

"As I see it, the young men and young women of America are crucial, and that is why I am talking to them first. They appreciate honesty, and their impact will be decisive. Richard Nixon and George Romney spoke at the University of Wisconsin and got mixed receptions.

When I talked there last week, I got a standing ovation."

The candidate continued as he kept signing autographs for students: "I've decided so far to enter the Wisconsin Primary, in April. I'm going out to Utah, and then to New York to speak to more students. I think I shall continue until January 1, when the first stage of my campaign ends and it comes time to speak to larger groups of voters."

Stassen had outlined a plan which involved "quieting down the war," recognizing and negotiating with North Vietnam and Red China, retrenching to enclaves on the South Vietnamese coast until talks begin, and adding Communist nations-including East Germany-to the United Nations.

He was applauded warmly for his speech, and many people wished him good luck. "I appreciate this opportunity very much," he said to his audience. "I ask you to remember that the people who have made the greatest strides in history are the ones who have done what other men said could not be done." ~teven Weisman Yale College

Candidate

Dramats

Just before Ronald Reagan, another Presidential candidate drumming up support for his campaign visited Yale. He was Harold E. Stassen, running for the office for the fifth time since 1948, this time as "the Peace Candidate" in a race which be sees focused today on Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon.

After the former Minnesota governor addressed nearly 100 members of the Political Union, someone rose to ask: "Mr. Stassen, what are you trying to accomplish, aside from creating just another target for Mad Magazine?"

The round-faced Stassen smiled and allowed the embarrassed chuckles in the audience to die down. "That's a good question," he said. Then he went on to use some of the phrases which could be found in his prepared statement to the press: "I am well aware that in pressing for something I feel strongly about-peace in the world-1 must break through a heavy crust of cynicism. I must climb over a high ridge of ridicule. I have long

The Fantasticks, America's longestrunning musical, proved to be Yale's most popular play of the week. Capacity audiences thundered their appreciation and called for the director each night (November 29-December 2). The theme of the play, the delicate world of innocent love being penetrated by the reality of pain and despair, is one which "has been going in and out of style but is guaranteed to raise a smile." Employing the Tinkerbelle-audience-involvement technique, made famous by Peter Pan, narrator-manipulator Ed Gallo lured the audience into remembering "that kind of September when no one wept except the willow."

Director Ricardo Rodriguez heartily stressed the phantasmic nature of the play by suspending pastel gossamers from chandeliers in the dining room theater, by adorning the walls with snowflakes, and by making ingenious use of light-the strobe light in the mock battle scene and continued on page 14

Volume one, number five December 10, 1967 Editors: Gerald Bruck Daniel Yergin Business Manager: Peter Yaeger Executive Editor: Jeffrey Pollock Designer: Ronald Gross Photography Editor: Herman Hong Advertising Manager: Robert Reisner Associate Editor: Paul Malamud Circulation Manager: Jean-Pierre Jordan Classifieds: · William M. Burstein Staff: Wm. Clay Howe, Jonathan Lear, Chris Little, Jonathan Marks, Howard Newman, David Silberstein, Alan Wachtel, and Budd Whitebook THIRD CLASS PERMIT: Third Class~)<» age PAID in New Haven, Conn. The NCI Journal is published by The New JoWlll 3432 Yale Station, New Haven, COli 06520, and is printed by The Carl PurinP Rollins Printing-Office of the Yale Univt sity Press in New Haven. Published ~ weekly during the academic year and dt tributed by qualified controlled circulatill to the Yale Community. For all othtll subscriptions are $4 per year, newsstJ' copies 50¢.

The New Journal © 1967 Copyright~ Gerald L. Bruck. Jr., Daniel H . Yergin ttl Peter E. Yaeger.

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3l'lbe New Journal! December 10, 1967

Exile's Cry: The Memoirs of George Kennan

By Gaddis Smith Memoirs 1925-1950 by George Kennan Atlantic-Little Brown, 1967. '

"We Americans," George F. Kennan wrote in his private diary in the spring of 1949, "have won great wars and assumed to ourselves great powers. And we have thus become the least free of all peoples." Had Kennan, then head of the Policy Planning Staff of the Department of State, made this observation directly to Secretary of State Dean Acheson or to President Truman or to the innumerable jo.urnalistic pundits busy celebrating the tnumph of American virtue, he would have been regarded as perverse and wrongheaded beyond belief.

Was not American leadership in the cause of freedom the hope of the world?

What of the success of the Truman Doctrine in Greece and the Marshall Plan in Western Europe? Did not the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty in Washington that spring prove the willingness of the United States to defend Europe against Soviet aggression? Had we not democratized Japan and Germany through enlightened military occupation?

Was not Japan ready for a peace treaty and Germany for self-government? In the face of such achievement could any but a madman assert that we were the least free of all peoples?

George Kennan's intellectual autobiography, Memoirs 1925-1950 is fundamentally an explanation of his extraordinary, even shocking, but persuasive dissent. The book is the most remarkable personal account ever written by an American diplomat and ranks with the most important autobiographies by Americans in any field. It should be read simultaneously as an essay on ethics in international relations and as a code of personal conduct for diplomats; as a penetrating and ironic set of observations about peoples under totalitarian government; as a contribution to the history of important events in which the autho~ participated-for example, the esta~hshm~nt of American diplomatic relations wtth the Soviet Union the transformation of official Amerlcan policy toward the Soviet Union in 1946 the formulation of the Marshall Plan the 1949 and 19 50 debates over NATO ~nd American nuclear strategy; as a series of character sketches of diplomats already famous or deserving to be better remembered-Charles Bohlen William C. B~llitt, Wilbur J. Carr, Jose~h E. Davtes, John Paton Davies, Averell Harriman, Alexander Kirk, George Mess~rsmith; as a moving self-study of the dtplomat as outsider; but above all as ~ sustaine~ exp~a?ation of how and why, m Kennan s optnton, the United States beca":Je "the least free of all peoples."

Here ts a more formidable attack on the complacent conventional view of American diplomacy in the Cold War than is likely to be found in a whole library of revisionist works by neo-Beardian economic determinists.

Kennan sees himself as an outsider, a GADDIS SMITH t~ach~s Am~rican diplomatic history at Y a/~ and is now wrilina.a hook. nnDPn.n..A rlt1uuo n~

detached and troubled observer of the thought and life of the twentieth century.

Even the outwardly trivial episodes of his life emphasize his inherited partiality for the eighteenth century of his pioneer farming ancestors, and his discomfort in the highly organized present. He was admitted to a modern university Princeton, but as the last student to arrive was exiled to a remote rooming house on the outskirts of town. After trying to cope with a Christmas mail delivery route in the slums of Trenton he caught scarlet fever and missed several months of freshman year. He joined an eat!ng club and on second thought re~tgned to be with the pariah minority of Pnnceton undergraduates not invited into the clubs. Throughout his career in the Foreign Service he was forever missing trains, or being overlooked and left behind by his superiors. When after ten years abroad he returned to his native Wisconsin for a summer, he noted in his diary, "In the course of a one-hundredmile journey I was destined to encounter on t~e open road no single fellow-cyclist, no smgle pedestrian, no single horsedrawn vehicle.... The occupants of the occasional machines that went whirring by ... obviously had no connection in the. social sense with the highway over whtch they were driving.... They were lost spirits, hovering for brief periods on another plane, where space existed only in time."

Reflecting now on that experience, Kennan writes: "I came away from the summer's visit aware that I was no longer a part of what I had once been a part ofno longer, infact, a part of anything at all. It was not just that I had left the world of my boyhood, although this was true; it was that this world had left me.

It had left everyone else, for that matter¡ but its departure had been sufficiently ' gradual so that those who remained had be~n less aware of its passage, and had adJ.usted in varying degrees to the change.

I, hke all other expatriates, simply had been left behind."

Other prominent participants in recent American diplomacy have felt a nostalgic longing for an earlier age, but not for the same pre-industrial eighteenth century so dear to Kennan. Dean Acheson, for eumple, finds his "Radiant Morn" at the turn of the nineteenth century (see the evocat.ive first chapter of his memoir, Mormng and Noon) when American self-confidence and British imperial power made the world both joyous and predictable-at least to a patrician growing up in Middletown, Connecticut.

John Foster Dulles, as another example, emulated the Christian fervor and sense of American moral supremacy characteristic of Woodrow Wilson's vision of the League of Nations.

But Kennan's ideal society is the America of Jefferson, of self-reliant farmers who worked hard, set their own standards of right conduct, and did not meddle in the affairs of others. "They asked of government only that it leave them alone to struggle in their own way.

When times were hard, as they often were, groans and lamentations went up to God, but never to Washington."

The implications of these different ideal pasts are obvious. Acheson, admiring the power of Britain in her imperial greatness, believed that America had of necessity assumed Britain's place an<Lmus.t ac~theJocomotiv_e o[

41 The New Journal! December 10, 1967

lost opportunity, was confident that the United States must accept and enforce moral standards of international behavior. Kennan, in contrast, believes that men and nations are happiest and most free when they intervene the least in the life of others.

Upon graduation from Princeton in 1925, Kennan decided to apply for the Foreign Service. He was accepted in 1926 as one of the first to enter the new, revamped professionalized service established by the Rogers Act of 1924.

The next half-dozen years were sheer delight. After brief tours as a consul in Europe he was allowed to undertake special training as a Russian specialist.

The State Department was able and willing to detach a few officers from operational duties and assign them to intensive language training capped by formal postgraduate study of the affairs of the country in which they were specializing. The United States at the time had no diplomatic relations with Russia; therefore, Kennan spent nearly six years in the tiny Baltic republics then in their brief interlude of independence, and in Berlin. No Ph.D. program today in Russian Studies is as thorough.

The completion of this idyllic period of scholarship coincided with the decision of incoming President Franklin D. Roosevelt to establish formal diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. Kennan, applying his new knowledge of Soviet affairs, warned the State Department of pitfalls to be avoided in the language of any agreement with Russia concerning the rights of Americans in Russia and economic espionage. Kennan was ignored. The resulting agreement with Russia contained clauses which looked to the uninformed as if American rights were protected but which in fact failed utterly.

Kennan drew a bitter lesson from the episode--that American statesmen care more for the appearance they make at home than for the real meaning of their action. "The question, in these circumstances, became not: how effective is what I am doing in terms of the impact it makes on our world environment? but rather: how do I look. in the mirror of domestic American opinion, as I do it? Do I look shrewd, determined, defiantly patriotic, imbued with the necessary vigilance before the wiles of foreign governments? If so, this is what I do, even though it may prove meaningless, or even counterproductive, when applied to the realities of the external situation."

Kennan spent the next four years as a member of the new American Embassy in Moscow. He served first under effervescent Ambassador William C. Bullitt, whom be admired, and then under Ambassador Joseph E. Davies, whom be abominated and about whom he writes: "We saw every evidence that his motives in accepting the post were personal and political and ulterior in any sense of the solemnity of the task itself.

We suspected him (and there could have been no more grievous failing in our eyes) of a readiness to bend both the mission and its function to the purposes of personal publicity at home."

Kennan was assigned to Czechoslovakia in 1938, just in time to see that country extinguished by Hitler.

He remained until 1942 in Nazidominated Europe and was imprisoned for several months by the Germans after

Pearl Harbor. His close study of Germany and German occupation policies led to two lasting conclusions.

First, he decided that even the most demonic of regimes could not destroy the basic humanity of the people. The long diary account of his midnight encounter with an honorable whore, a fellow outcast in wartime Berlin, is one of the most brilliant passages in the book and the immediate occasion for bis observation "that in the face of such experiences it was hard for me, in the ensuing years, to go along with the devil image American opinion invariably ascribes to its particular political opponent of the moment." The second and related conclusion was that the Nazis, or any occupying power, could not impose their will permanently on other peoples.

He writes: "One must not be too frightened of those who aspire to world domination. No one people is great enough to establish a world hegemony.

There are built-in impediments to the permanent exertion by any power of dominating influence in areas which it is unable to garrison and police, or at least to overshadow from positions of close proximity, by its own troops."

Also in those years Kennan learned from Alexander Kirk, the charge in Berlin, the importance of means as compared to ends. As Kennan later stated the lesson: "Objectives were normally vainglorious, unreal, extravagant, even pathetic-little likely to be realized, scarcely to be taken seriously. People had to have them, or to believe they had them.

It was part of their weakness as human beings. But methods were another matter.

These were real. It was out of their immediate effects that the quality of life was really molded. In war as in peace I found myself concerned less with what people thought they were striving for than with the manner in which they strove for it." This attitude subsequently became the basis for his futile opposition to the development of the H-bomb.

From 1942 to 1944 Kennan was on the fringe of wartime diplomacy, like the State Department and the Foreign Service whose functions bad been taken over by the military, special wartime agencies, and the White House. He noted sadly the trend of wartime planning for Germany, specifically a proposal to bar 3,000,0QO Germans from positions of responsibility because of association with the Nazi regime. We should demonstrate to the Germans that aggression does not pay and cannot be resumed, he argued, but beyond that we should let the Germans go to work with a minimum of interference.

'The political development of great peoples is conditioned and determined by their national experiences, but never by the manipulations of foreign powers in their internal affairs."

After being assigned again to Moscow in the spring of 1944. as second in command to Ambassador Harriman, Kennan began to combat the prevailing Rooseveltian assumption of automatic collaboration between the Soviet Union and the West in the postwar period.

Long essays for the eyes of Harriman and journal entries for himself flowed from his pen. All the while his own sense of isolation deepened.

Nearly two-thirds of the M~moirs deals with the period 1944-1950, when

Kennan rose to the top echelons of the Department of State before exiling himself to a second and private career as historian. But the years before 1944 were formative, the time when the basic lessons were learned and the fundamental image of the world was painted in.

Kennan's account of the prominent years -buttressed by 65 pages of contemporary documents--consists of fascinating elaboration on themes already introduced. Here perversity has full rein as barbed spears are thrown into nearly all the sacred cows of American postwar foreign relations.

He was skeptical of the value of the United Nations as more than a limited convenience and was particularly repelled by the American tactics of begging Soviet leaders to support the world organization. When supplication was joined with apparent sanction (in contrast to stem and silent disapproval) of Soviet behavior, Kennan was sickened.

Proposals for American postwar credits for the Soviet Union established deep doubts about "possibilities of for~ign aid in general-with respect to the whole concept of wreaking, by intervention, even benevolent intervention, from without-great and useful changes in the lives of other people." The universalism of the Truman Doctrine staggered him by its potential for limitless American intervention everywhere in the world.

The emphasis on European self-help in the Marshall Plan, of which he was a principal author, is good, but even here he sees dark implications. "The congenital American aversion to regional approaches, and the yearning for universal ones, were too strong to be entirely overcome even by the success of the Marshall Plan--on the contrary, they were only stimulated by it."

Kennan's most sustained criticism is directed against our military posture in Europe. By his own reading of Soviet intentions, Russia was no military threat to Western Europe. The coup in Czechoslovakia and the Berlin blockade, he believes, were defensive gestures-not preludes to aggression. NATO as devised was unnecessary and dangerous.

The solidifying of the two Germanies was also a mistake, perhaps avoidable had American policy been more flexible.

But American leaders, moved by shadows, not substance, exaggerated Soviet capabilities and ignored intentions.

For Kennan, intentions discovered through long study of Soviet behavior were substance, while capabilities were shadows and the basis of irrational fears.

To most American leaders, however, only capabilities were real; intentions were ambiguous and essentially unknowable.

In contrast to the self-congratulation with which historians tend to view American military occupation policy.

Kennan attacked wholesale "purging" of the defeated population. In Japan we "had proceeded on a scale. and with a dogmatic, impersonal vindictiveness. for which there were few examples outside the totalitarian countries themselves."

And in Germany our military personnel and their families set "an example of empty materialism and cultural poverty before a people desperately in need of spiritual and intellectual guidance, taking for granted-as though it were their natural due--a disparity in privilege and comfort between themselves and their German neighbors no smaller than

those that had once divided lord and peasant in that feudal Germany which it had been our declared purpose in two world wars to destroy.... The tragedy of the decent Germany was in just sufficient degree my own tragedy that I could not ' close my eyes to it. That I overreacted is possible. That I could not react otherwise, and that this affected my political views, is clear."

In mid-1947 Secretary of State Marshall made Kennan the first head of the Policy Planning Staff. By the end of 1949 Kennan's differences of opinion ant temperament with his superiors, including Secretary Acheson, suggested a leave of absence. The outbreak of the Korean War delayed the leave by two months. But in August, 1950, Kennan moved to Princeton and the Institute for Advanced Study to begin his second career. He hoped through historical writing to win a hearing for views so Io01 ignored or rejected when voiced from within the Government. As he noted at the time: "no one in my position can contribute very much more ... unless he first turns historian, earns public confidence and respect through the study ¡ of an earlier day, and then gradually carries the public up to a clear and comprehensive view of the occurrences of these recent years." The Memoirs and the eight previous volumes published since 1951 are the result.

Secretary of State Acheson found Kennan in 1950 an unhelpful romantic, an introverted theoretician whose views contributed nothing to the solution of tbt immediate economic and military problems confronting the United States.

This is easy to understand, for the two men thought in different worlds.

Acheson's was a world of certainty whert only the resolute, unremitting amassing of American power could save Europe. stop Russia, and thus preserve Western civilization. Acheson's great objective was to extend American and Allied power against an implacable enemy.

Acheson was an embodiment of conventional American foreign policy since 1941.

But Kennan hoped to restrain American power, to withdraw from intervention in the lives of other nations and to let humanity's natural resistance to totalitarianism operate freely. There were few absolutes in Kennan's world. llc saw freedom in totalitarian Germany and among the Soviet people; he saw totalitarianism in American occupation policy in Germany and Japan and a dangerous absolutism in American attitudes and policies toward the enemY in the Cold War. Bound to this absolutism, we were the least free of all people, precisely becaust we were the most powerful. Our interventions., our amassing of great powers. would-Kennan believedcreate resistance and ultimately tragedY for ourselves and the world. 'We were not fitted," he wrote, "either institutionally or temperamentally, to bt. an imperial power in the grand manner¡ Nor was any nation so fitted. In eventUII general recognition of this fact lies the one great hope in Kennan's otherwise dark world. â&#x20AC;˘

Congratulations Joseph Heller on your new play ''We Bombed in New Haven''from the publisher of your two million copy bestseller CATCH-22!

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New York, New York 10017

61 The New Journal I December 10, 1967

Existentialist sheriff

By Jonathan Aaron JONATHAN AARON, a graduate student in English, has had his poetry published in the Sewanee Review and Poetry Magazine.

On November 20th, Norman Mailer, sponsored by the English Department, gave the year's second Bergen Lecture in the Yale Law School Auditorium.

His subject had been billed as "Some Thoughts On Censorship and Obscenity," but in a subtly bizarre fashion the audience ended up the topic of the evening.

Norman Mailer is a stocky; almost portly man who makes many claims for himself. One of them is that he is "the dwarf alter ego of Lyndon Johnson."

Another is that he is 5'8". He has black hair streaked now with gray, hair so curly when it's not combed that it makes him look like a male Medusa from the Catskills. You can't be more precise in describing Norman Mailer because he partakes of so many things. That's ~ot to say he's derivative, but rather to pomt out how much he so aptly represents the diversely gifted and diversely cursed society he has with such loyalty cajoled and harangued for years. His voice is nasal and rather high. He speaks quickly, and sounds like James Cagney with a Harvard accent. He has a habit of smiling and squinting his eyes and putting his hands on either side of his stomach. When he does this he looks like a magnate with a business secret, or perhaps your uncle about to tell a dirty joke.

Norman Mailer has rude charisma. He makes you think of W.C. Fields, of Mr. Hyde, of Erasmus, of Celine, of Lawrence, of Bierce, and so forth.

Anyway you look at him, however, the honesty of his moral engagement with America isn't hard to see.

The overflow audience he faced was in high, slightly hysterical spirits-a college audience at a movie show. "Some Thoughts on Censorship and Obscenity" was a thrillingly vague title, on the order of "The Brides of Dracula." It was as much the uncertainty about what Norman Mailer might do as what he might say that had many in the audience leering into the abyss of scatological possibility, leering and, really, wanting to be pushed by this man who has had the misfortune to be in recent years a public aspect of our private minds.

Irredeemably engagt, he is the existential man made manifest, his essence revealed in a lot more ways than one. ( He loves to speak of "existential" acts and moments.) He has allowed himself through his variegated notoriety to become a public scapegoat. If you take upon yourself the job of being a genuine existentialist hero, which Norman Mailer has done-<>f acting for everyone, with apocalyptic dispatch-then one of the consequences of your resolve is that everyone will have you act for them, in their stead, and laugh at you or hate you for it.

Norman Mailer is jeeringly, naggingly, vengefully forthright. He makes a lot of mistakes, and therefore he is an easy mark. Furthermore, it's open season on him all year round. You may find it hard to disagree with your spouse, your friendly neighborhood policeman, your Congressman, or the New York Times, but it's awfully easy to disagree with Norman Mailer. After all, we all know what good taste is.

He was probably a little nervous as he stepped over the aisle-sitters on his way to the podium, smiling his mysterious, engaging smile and wearing a battered Brooks Brothers trencb-<:oat.

Perhaps deliberately, his entrance was that of a prize-fighter making his way, in this case through scattered applause, towards the circumscribed arena in which he would engage in yet another contest.

Once on stage, he took off his trench-coat, and you could almost read "NORMAN" stitched in gold letters across the back of it.

Mailer, a Harvard graduate, began with a joke about "Yalies", drew some hisses as well as laughter, and so initially tried to tease an unknown and threatening audience in a strange situation.

He leaned forward and with a bit of difficulty rested his elbows on the podium, which apparently had been made for tall, honest, close-<:ropped lawyers and not for this Santa Claus-Hephaestus figure from Brooklyn.

He gave his shoulders a bellicose hunch, looked out glitteringly at the audience, and declared, "What do you want me to do tonight. Is it going to be reading, or is it going to be extempore?"

No answer from the pit; they didn't know what they wanted, though they did want something. He asked for a show of hands on the matter.

"Extempore it is, then," he said, almost as if he were deciding "double or nothing," and, smiling, he stared at the faces that waited for him to begin. To begin speaking on "Censorship and Obscenity"?

Well, maybe not, but to begin on something. He spoke now, somewhat haltingly, making some round-about jokes, one of which was about LBJ. He shook his bag of verbal tricks and came up with an uncharacteristically crippled metaphor that had to do with education and a surf board. He laughed when be realized he bad actually said it.

"Will someone please tell me what was wrong with that last metaphor?" be asked. This was an illuminating moment, Norman Mailer laughing at himself, fully

capable of self-mockery and therefore having more both of an ability and a right to mock you than you had previously been willing to grant.

But the audience didn't laugh with Norman Mailer-it didn't understand him as he himself did-and at this point a contest began, Norman Mailer against the public, with Norman Mailer carrying the fight. "You people are pretty good at football, but you're pretty slow with your wits," he snapped. More hisses, applause, some jeers.

With that, Part I of An Evening With Norman Mailer got underway. He himself would probably call it, were be asked, Plan A. He was no longer speaking with, or to his audience, but at it and against it, and for a while at least, the audience was very much against him.

He seemed to become smaller behind the podium, caught in the midst of a trUlY eclectic mass reaction that he himself had triggered.

For a while, the audience became a crowd, with no manners and no self-<:ontrol. Norman Mailer had communicated to those he faced his own excitability, his irritability, and his impoliteness, but none of his subtle, ironic self-awareness, none of his deep, if crude, generosity and humor.

A female voice called with nervous petulance from the balcony: "What do you want from us?'' and there was a supporting boom from a number of voices seconding the question.

A student persisted in throwing wads of paper at him and was summarily invited to step up on stage. A microphone dialogue ensued, noteworthy mainly for the gusto with which Norman Mailer good-humoredly refused to take other than lightly the student's complaint about being bored. When he said to the boy "I thought I was being pretty funny," the boy answered " That's why I was bored," and the house roared.

....

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71 The New Journal ! December 10, 1967

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Norman Mailer claimed, "This gentleman has just employed the technique of the Big Lie," then sportingly allowed that the boy had won the round.

But that didn't settle matters, for the matinee festivity of the occasion had by this time been transformed into what might be called a bread-and-circuses blood-lust on the part of the (by this time) mob.

For the next twenty minutes Norman Mailer sparred with various voices in the melee: "Hey, why don't you read something, Mr. Mailer?"

"So far this evening, Mr. Mailer, all you've done here is make an ass of yourself...."

"I disagree, and I'm on your side, Mr. Mailer. Come on and put down President Johnson!"

At one point, somebody called, again from the balcony, "Come on and say something!" · Norman Mailer roared "FUG yoo!" in reply, which may have been a piece of splendid impromptu mockery on both himself and the mob. For hadn't many come primarily to hear Norman Mailer swear in public, and hadn't Norman Mailer, way back in 1948, scandalized the public at large by his daring use of fug (here for the first time, if you don't count Ulysses) in The Naked and the Dead?

For a while he was like Horatio at the Bridge. The heckling and applauding continued, the audience, if you could call it that, completely disunited and disoriented. No one knew what was happening, least of all, you began to feel, Norman Mailer. He had tried for a grandstand play by opting for extempore, and he'd missed the ball completely. The people before him were close to being entirely out of control, and as the situation proceeded minute after minute unchanged, the heroic element in it of one gladiator facing an enemy host vanished, to be replaced by the sense that what was happening was not merely an unfortunate mistake, but an unpleasant one.

All at once, Norman Mailer seemed Punchy, a set-up of a kind, not noble in the least, but "almost, at times, the Fool." The clarity of the issues underlying the confrontation that was taking place had become blurred.

All you saw was a short little man with a pink face and a lot of dark curly hair waving his arms in front of a bunch of people who would like nothing better than to see him go down-although not, perhaps, until he had exposed himself in the process.

Re disappointed them. Suddenly, he cut down a questioner/heckler in midsentence and announced he had decided to read something after all. It was much too long, he said, but he'd do the best he COuld with it, anyhow.

Part II of An Evening With Norman ~ailer began; Plan B went into effect.

•. ue noise subsided as, with the delibera110n of a snail, he shuffled through a sheaf of papers he took from a slim attache-case of olive drab leather. The J)apers he hefted seemed to have the "eiabt of galley proofs. They lent biro an ~~f academic seriousness, as was no -uot his wish.

"Now rd like to read a selection from ~avorite magazine," he announced. ~thing fluttered in his hand, a single ~of paper, and he read about a man ~rank whiskey from a tea-cup in 91asbington and who boozily spoke of

"shit" and LBJ in the same breath, most disrespectfully.

"Where's this from?" asked Norman Mailer, not quite willing to let his debate with the public evaporate completely.

"Time magazine!" some voices called back to him.

From then on, the polarities of the situation were appreciably reversed, and almost everyone, socially and dynamically, was on Norman Mailer's side. If it's easy to disagree with Norman Mailer, you can't not disagree with Time. Unless you're Norman Mailer, that is, for what followed was not, really, something which undercut or invalidated Time's account of Norman Mailer's actions on the weekend of the Washington March, but rather it was a long autobiographical article which, while explaining his actions there, revealed that what Time reported was, after all, substantially correct, as far as the facts went, anyway.

This evening at Yale, he had lost his audience through what seemed to be the poor execution of a nicely conceived rhetorical stance. He now proceeded to recapture popular support by reading about what life was like in front of another auditorium crowd, that one in Washington and apparently as unruly and unpredictable as the one he was now facing.

He read about that other audience so quickly that at times you thought he was reading French-the rather Gallic rush of dependent clauses and then the verb, with uncertain inflection, like something falling off a table, yet giving you the impression, because of its uncertainty of tone, that it meant a lot more than met the ear.

He read about being on stage in Washington with Dwight MacDonald, Robert Lowell, and Paul Goodman. He read about, or rather elaborated on, what Time had reported with such spinsterish grandiloquence: missing the bowl in the men's room qua universal male experience; his "strong arm" tactics in usurping the position of m.c.; his notorious (yet) statement that "LBJ is as full of crap as I am."

What he read was all the more striking (vivid and exact as it was) for what had preceded. The care and logic of what could only be called art began to assert itself against disorder. His description of Lowell on the Washington stage (LoweU, imposing, ambivalent, repelled by the crowd that looked at him, feeling compelled to be on its side, to read from Lord Weary's Castle to those about to face the army protecting the Pentagon) was what many in the Law School Auditorium said later was the best moment of the night.

And Norman Mailer read about being raucously alone in front of the Washington audience, which he couldn't see but whose mixed reaction he could hear. And he read of stepping from the stage and noting, again with self-irony, that no one stood up to applaud birO. He read with increasing rapidity, so that he sometimes slurred the words he had written with such care and earnestness. After Part II/ Plan B had been going on for about forty minutes, someone-in the balcony-yelled "Slower!"

Genuinely worried about taking too much time, of losing the audience he had rewon. he was irked to think he might be doing just that. He stopped reading and said that those who wanted to go could go and those who wanted to stay could

stay. He'd be done in ten or fifteen minutes.

Perhaps fifty people, or about 5% of the audience, left the auditorium. When people sat down again, you could see a few empty seats like shell holes here and there. Genial were the faithful now that the bored, the disappointed, the angry, and the sleepy had quit the scene.

A few minutes later, Norman Mailer said "Thank you" and left the podium.

Perhaps mindful of the Washington crowd whom they had just heard about and to whom by implication they had been compared, many in the audience now stood as they clapped to Norman Mailer's exit. He grinned a little at this obvious triumph, and with trench-coat and attache case went out of the auditorium.

What, finally, had happened? Apparently, "you got two shows for the price of one," as a bemused young lady put it afterward. You'd been put down a Ia Lenny Bruce, and you'd been lifted back up again as you are by a good book or a good painting or, for that matter, a good joke.

Where had "Censorship and Obscenity" come in, though? What you ended up with was really neither fish nor fowl. Or rather, it was both, a declamatory bouillabaisse mixed in subtle proportions and dished out with a sprezzatura all the more impressive for its rowdiness, once you'd thought about it.

Nor man Mailer had first of all made the audience look at itself by reading about another audience whose actions had mirrored those of its own. The ordinary conventions of speakeraudience relations had been broken up in such a way as to allow the audience to become, finally, the subject the speaker was concerned with.

Censorship, after all, has to do with intolerance, which, in turn, comes from fear-the fear (to put it one way) that what you rely on is wrong, or that you're not who you think you are.

People were amazed, disgusted, delighted, or disturbed by Norman Mailer in the Law School, and their reactions, varied as they were, reminded you of one thing: that censorship is bred as much from being caught with your pants down as from ignorance and superstition.

Professor R.W.B. Lewis has likened Norman Mailer's most recent novel, Why Are We In Vietnam?, to "a rabbinical terror sermon." The talk at Yale was a speech as process, rather than product-if you will, a sermon of sorts: Norman Martin Mailer Luther.

Drinking bourbon in a Law School lounge minutes later, Norman Mailer chatted with students about writing novels, about football, about this and that. He smiled a lot, mysterious, avuncular. He talked a lot, ebullient, expansive, always "gracious", however, especially with the ladies, the Richard Burton of the literary world taking off the grease-paint with alcohol. Finally he put on his trench-coat, and looking a little like Vic Gatto in a field-poncho, he departed to take a late train. The next day the Law School would be up in arms about a balcony door, which had been taken off its hinges by some people anxious for seats who had found it locked. The Law School said the English Department could never use the Law School Auditorium again. •

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81 The New Journal! December 10, 1967

More Stately Mansions: Eugene O'Neill at a crossroad

By Albert Rothenberg, M.D.

â&#x20AC;˘

More Stately Mansions, currently playing in New York, is probably the last play of Eugene O'Neill that will ever have an American premiere. Every other play that he wrote has been produced, published and ignored, or been destroyed forever.

Psychologically, it is somehow fitting that this play should appear here long after all major O'Neill plays have been produced. It is an unfinished work, but more than almost any other O'Neill play it reveals a pervading issue in the background of his entire dramaturgy: the psychological relationship between himself and his mother.

Furthermore, More Stately Mansions was written immediately prior to the two O'Neill masterpieces, The Iceman Cometh and Long Day's Journey Into Night and seems to contain the raw material out of which those plays arose.

Its characters speak the inner turmoil and the beginnings of wisdom which O'Neill was only able to harness into artistic greatness in the later plays.

More Stately Mansions was meant to be the fourth play in O'Neill's cycle of nine plays about the history of an American family from revolutionary times to the present. This cycle was to be entitled, A Tale of Possessors Selfdispossessed. More Stately Mansions was written during what appeared to the world as O'Neill's fa1low period, between the production of Days Without End in 1 934 and the first production of The Iceman C~meth in 1946. Far from being truly unproductive during this period, O'Neill was¡ actively at work the entire time on drafts of the cycle plays and his five completed last plays.

Of the nine or possibly eleven planned plays in the cycle, only A Touch of the Poet and More Stately Mansions are extant. In 1953, O'Neill burned at least six cycle plays in their scenario or rough draft form because he wanted no-one else to finish them. It is of interest that More Stately Mansions survived this literary holocaust. In their biography of O'Neill, the Gelbs suggest that another version of the play was on hand and presumably O'Neill overlooked or forgot about the surviving draft. However, O'Neill had always been highly scrupulous and perfectionistic about his writings throughout his life. I don't think, therefore, that I would be making too much psychiatric hay over this circumstance by suggesting that O'Neill may have been unconsciously motivated to allow this play to survive. In the light of what the play reveals, it seems possible that he had some need to expose the underlying psychodynamics of his relationship to his mother.

Another circumstance in the history of !his play bespeaks its psychological 1mportance to O'Neill. As far as we know, he was actively working on More Sta!ely Mansions in February, 1939, but he mterrupted his work to write the entire The Iceman Cometh and then immediately turned to Long Day's Journey Into Night. There is a good deal ALBERT ROTHENBERG is an assistant professor of psychiatry at the Yale Medical School.

of reason to believe that the story of The Iceman Cometh had intense personal importance to O'Neill. It is set in the year 1912 and portrays an actual bar he frequented at that time. Many of the characters are composites of people whom he knew. Furthermore, the year 1912 had special significance for O'Neill: It was the year he made a serious suicide attempt and was divorced from his first wife; it was the year he entered a tuberculosis sanatorium and began to write plays; it was a year during which his mother returned to her drug habit.

In addition, elements in The Iceman Cometh suggest that his relationship to his mother may have been specifically on his mind when he wrote this play. The young man in the play, Parritt, a character who bears a good deal of resemblance to O'Neill in his youth, is depicted as having betrayed his mother and all the derelicts are caught up in " pipe dreams," a choice of term which strikingly conjures up the image of Ella O'Neill's drug addiction.

There is, of course, no doubt that Ella's drug addiction was very much on O'Neill's mind when he wrote Long Day's Journey Into Night. This play was . also set in the year 1912 and it would seem that the concerns or inspirations which led O'Neill to interrupt the writing of More Stately Mansions continued to operate in both of the n ext two plays.

More Stately Mansions is a family story. It concerns Simon and Sara Harford, the young couple who are about to marry at the end of A Touch of the Poet, and Simon's mother, Deborah, who appears briefly in that play. In More Stately Mansions, Simon becomes an immensely successful businessman and gets caught up in a triangle involving himself, Sara and Deborah.

Strikingly, the mother Deborah is depicted as a woman who throughout Simon's life withdrew into a summer house where she fantasied herself as a king's courtesan. This is not the first time O'Neill portrayed a woman who is trapped or traps herself in a house.

Mourning Becomes Electra and Strange Interlude are previous examples of this theme. It is the first time, however, that O'Neill portrayed a character whose behavior was so closely analagous to that of his own mother. Although Deborah is not a narcotics addict she is strongly reminiscent of the mother Mary in Long Day's Journey Into Night who withdraws into a special room upstairs to take her morphine. Actually, the O'Neill house in New London has a summer house on the grounds which is exactly like that described in More Stately Mansions and it is possible that Ella O'Neill herself withdrew there.

In order to spell out the particular ways in which More Stately Mansions depicts the underlying psychological relationship between O'Neill and his mother, I would first like to review Edmund's relationship to his mother in Long Day's Journey Into Night, assuminl it is a naturalistic play. In other words, I will talk about the relationship between Edmund and his mother as if it were a real relationship between two living people. In doing this, I will not be violating the aesthetic context of the play since it is a psychological tragedy and does not seem to be symbolic or directed to a social

continued on page ]0

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Coming during reading period: lngmar Bergman's The Naked Night Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound Orson Welles' Citizen Kane Jean Renoir's Boudu Saved From Drowning Leo McCarey's Duck Soup, (with the Marx bros)

10 I The New Journal! December 10, 1967

continued from page 8 or supernatural referent or other levels of meaning.

Throughout this play, Edmund's relationship to his mother is highly complex and many different feelings are implied: love, pity, frustration, anger, guilt. With regard to his mother's addiction, Edmund appears to be constantly struggling throughout the play to keep his mother from withdrawing. There is a tendency to blame his father's miserliness for his mother's condition, but at the end everyone, including Mary herself, seems helpless and partly responsible for the illness.

Focusing on the ending specifically, however, a particular configuration of the mother-son relationship is suggested.

Edmund learns he bas tuberculosis, a serious and terrifying physical illness which could lead to his death, and at th e same time his mother withdraws into mental illness. In O'Neill's own life, we know that these two events were actually separated by several months. However, the artistic juxtaposition of them as occuring on the same day conveys a special psychological meaning.

If these two events had actually occurred on the same day as represented, it is likely that Edmund would have been torn and distressed by certain specific feelings. He would have felt remorse and concern for h is mother, fear and certainly an overwhelming helplessness for himself.

Also, since no-one can really experience psychiatric illness in a parent with total compassion and objectivity, he would have felt intense anger and rage at her for having deserted him.

Furthermore, contracting a serious illness like tuberculosis is often experienced ambivalently. The prospect of long hospitalization in a sanitarium, although it is distressful, can also represent a chance to escape from an unpleasant reality. Considering the painful family experience which is depicted throughout Long Day's Journey Into Night, it is likely that Edmund would have unconsciously or in dim consciousness wished for an excuse to escape, even an excuse as frightening and unpleasant as tuberculosis. Hospitals and sanitaria offer a caring environment and, unconsciously, often represent a nurturing mother for those whose real mothers have been uncaring and unnurturant.

If Edmund would have experienced such feelings of rage and wished to escape, it is also likely that he would have felt intensely guilty about them. Indeed, he would have felt responsible for his mother's withdrawal in some way and felt that he himself drove her away from him further. The idea that he felt responsible for his mother's difficulties 'becomes especially plausible in light of the fact that Edmund knew that Mary first became addicted to narcotics immediately following h is birth.

The implication of such tortured

feelings would account for some of the emotional impact at the end of the play for those who empathize with Edmund.

Significantly, these very same feelings are graphically represented in the mother-son relationship throughout the earlier play, More Stately Mansions. There, too, Simon's relationship to his mother focuses primarily on her tendency to withdraw.

Throughout the play, Simon's behavior with his mother is intense and conftictual.

From an early age, it appears that he and his mother shared a special world of fantasy. As an adult, he married and turned to the pursuit of money. He never became free of his mother, however, and as time went on he, his wife and his mother became locked in constant conflict about their money, their power and their love. Finally, Simon achieved a great deal of financial success but life had become truly unbearable and meaningless. When he began to admit his feelings of desperation to his mother, she responded by talking of her own withdrawal in the following way: I bad once reached a point where I bad grown so lost, I bad not even a dream left that I could dream without screaming scornful laughter at myself. I would sit locked in the summerhouse here -sit there for hours in wisdomridiculing contemplation of myself, and spit in my mind, and my heart, like a village idiot in a country store spitting at the

belly of a stove--cursing the day I was born, the day I indifferently conceived, the day I bore-(witb a terrible intensity.) Until I swear to you I felt I could by just one tiny further wish, one little effort more of will, push open the door to madness where I could at least believe in a dream again! And bow I longed for that final escape!

(She suddenly turns and stares at him with hatred.) Ah! And you wondered why I hate you!

(Abruptly overcome by a panic of dread, starting to her feet.)

Simoni What are you trying to do? Leave me alone! Leave the past in its forgotten grave! ...

The mother's dramatic revelation of her feelings for her son in this passage is a direct formulation of the concerns I just attributed to Edmund in Long Day's Journey Into Night. Here, Deborah has told her son, Simon, that his birth was responsible for her withdrawal. Also, she indicates that she actually hates her son.

Her reference to coming close to insanity draws a direct parallel between her and Edmund's mother. Simon responds to his mother's outburst by making a confession of his own: I began to remember latelyand lonaed for this garden- and you, as you used to be and are no longer--and as I was thenin this safe haven-where we could repose our souls in fantasy--evade, escape, forget, rest in peace! I regret that paradise in which you were the

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111 The New Journal! December 10, 1967

good, kind, beloved, beautiful Queen. I have become so weary of what they call life beyond the wall, Mother.

As a response to Deborah's admission of hatred, Simon seems to be acknowledging his own guilty wishes. It is as if he were saying, "you hate me because I want to escape back to you as you were." Simon's wishes and longings here are analagous to Edmund's postulated wishes to escape. Simon tells his mother directly that he longs for a return to a state where he felt more cared for by her. For Edmund, I suggested that be would have wished to achieve a state of being cared for by entering a is sanitarium.

There is, of course, a seductive quality y'~ to Simon's remarks to his mother. Indeed, IS the summer house itself is an important symbol throughout the play of Simon and ;he Deborah's basic relationship. Deborah has n. locted Simon out of the summer house 1ity but always seductively lures him to it.

Simon talks of the meaning of the d bis summer house in the following way: ;ion (Tensely) I know very well it is a wooden door-but in the deeper reality inside us, it has the meaning our minds have given it. Your opening it will be the necessary physical act by which your mind wills to take me back into your love, and become again the mother who loved me alone, whom alone I love!

Again, it is relatively easy to parallel Simon's description of his feelings with Edmund's feeling deserted and rejected by his mother's withdrawal into fantasy and hoping that by joining her he will retrieve her love. Simon himself draws the analogy between the locked door of the summer house and a mental process-a mental process which, for Edmund, was his mothers' narcotics dream: (He smiles at her with a sudden awkward tenderness.) So you see it is all perfectly rational and logical, and there is 'nothing insane about it, Mother. The kingdom of peace and happiness in your story is love. You dispossessed yourself when you dispossessed me. Since then both have been condemned to an insatiable greed for substitutes-(he stares obsessedJy at the door, again) But you have only to open that door, Mother-really a door in your own mind-.

He says this almost at the end of the play. The play ends with Deborah's actual rejection and desertion of Simon at the door of the summer house. She enters and locks him out. Simon is bewildered and his wife Sara enters the scene, takes him in her arms and manifestly adopts the role of being his mother with the following final words in the play: (With a fierce, passionate, possessive tenderness.) Yes, I'll be your mother, too, now, and your peace and happiness

and all you'll ever need in life!

Come!

More Stately Mansions is a raw, passionate and almost violent play.

Simon's attachment to his mother is so intense and obvious that it is almost bizarre. Even the skillful editing of Karl Raynar Gierow of the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm, the man who is responsible for the published and produced version, has not removed this quality-nor, indeed, should it do so.

However, it does seem plausible that O'Neill himself did not finish this play and consciously preferred never to have it produced because of this very quality of bizarreness.

In calling it bizarre, I am especially referring to the way in which feelings and thoughts which are usually unconscious are made explicit and dictate the actions of the characters in the play.

As a person interested in the process of literary creation, I would suggest that O'Neill's writing these feelings and thoughts out helped him in some way to attain balance and perspective on his relationship to his mother, balance and perspective which seems so evident and monumental in the later play, Long Day's Journey Into Night.

As for The Iceman Cometh, all that I have said so far about O'Neill's feeling of guilt about his mother's illness and Simon's guilt about his mother's withdrawal seems to pertain to the theme of the young Parritt who betrayed his

mother. Parritt is portrayed as being responsible for his mother's going to jail, a circumstance which seems directly analagous to Ella O'Neill's going to a sanitarium. More specifically, however, in More Stately Mansions Simon says to his mother, "when finally the bride or the bridegroom cometh, we discover we are kissing Death."

If we remember that O'Neill makes very explicit in The Iceman Cometh that the iceman of the title is a symbol of death, it is striking to find this phrase in the unfinished More Stately Mansions.

For one thing, the appearance of the phrase bears out Cyrus Day's assertion, in his brilliant essay on The Iceman Cometh, that O'Neill based the title of the play on the biblical quotation, "Behold, the bridegroom cometh." Furthermore, Simon uses the phrase to his mother at a time when he and she are discussing the possibility of Simon's killing his wife.

In The Iceman Cometh, a major dramatic concern is the fact that Hickey, the main character, has killed his wife.

At the very least, it appears that the germ for the conception of The Iceman Cometh is contained in More Stately Mansions. It is possible that the idea of the "bridegroom cometh" phrase in conjunction with killing one's wife occurred to O'Neill during the writing of the latter play and, more than anything

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12IIThe New Journal! December 10, 1967

Kingman Brewster in television's department of clarification

By Daniel Y ergin President Brewster's office phoned the producers of the David Susskind Show in New York City after Brewster's Parents Day Speech and offered them a package: Brewster, the Rev. William Sloane Coffin and Yale corporation member J. Irwin Miller, discussing the draft, civil disobedience, conscientious objection and related issues.

The idea for the show grew out of the controversy surrounding the Parents Day Speech, in which Brewster had seemed to attack Coffin by criticizing "strident voices which urge draft resistance as a political tactic." As with many Brewster pronouncements, some thought Brewster had a specific target-the Rev. Coffin, while others weren't quite sure what Brewster had been saying or whom he had been attacking. Thus the show would be an effort at clarification.

The show worked; issues and personalities were clarified. One came to some understanding of how thinks J. Irwin Miller, former president of the National Council of Churches, Esquire's nominee for President, the Corporation member supposedly closest to Brewster, and part of the band of enlightened industrialists who allow themselves doubts about Vietnam.

Coffin, the minority on the 21h to llh line-up (host Susskind was versatile) outlined the tragic absurdities of Vietnam and made clear why resistance is necessary. The idea of giving "sanctuary for consci~nce" within a church, he said, "is not to shield a man but to show that the claims of government and the claims of conscience cannot be reconciled."

Perhaps, most importantly, there seemed to emerge an idea of what's behind Brewster's pronouncementsthat is, how the man views the world.

The show was taped in New York on Monday, November 27, for broadcast on December 10. Most of the audience of 100 arrived at the television studio on 67th Street around six o'clock in the evening, many of them passing the mangled body of a young woman who had just jumped to her death from a nearby apartment.

Inside, host Susskind carne forward to sit on a stool and warm up the audience with a few charming comments, a few abrasive comments designed to get the audience angry enough to come to the microphones to ask questions during the program, a few pompous comments, a few humorous ones.

Then the big voice of the invisible director came over the loudspeaker, ordering Susskind up on the stage so that the taping session could begin.

Susskind's first question went to Brewster: are you worried about a militant and violent turn in the protest on your campus?

"No, it's not militant in the violent sense," said Brewster, much as be had responded to the question, how widespread is student revolt, on Meet the Press last year with, "It's more widespread than revolting."

"Violence is disturbing," be went on to explain to Susskind, "but protest on the Yale campus has not taken a violent turn."

"The amount of judgment the students have combined with their passion is magnificent," added Coffin, but he warned that there could very well be violence in the future. "1. don't say we should condone it," said the reverend, "but we should not condemn it without looking at what's caused it."

The first part of the show continued in this vein, with Brewster warning of the dangers of violence begetting violence and of ignoring laws, while Coffin asked compassion for students so appalled by the violence in Vietnam and so frustrated by normal political channels that they turn to demonstrations.

Miller sat quietly through this, his mouth slightly open, frowning, his eyes on the stage floor, as though he were about to say, "What am I hearing, m y ean must be deceiving me, this sounds lik~ like treason." But Miller turned out notto be that way. He agreed with Brewster about violence begetting violence. If another boy slugged his son, said Miller, it would not in tum be proper for his son to slug back and then say, "He did it and so can 1."

Miller is a lanky man whose high motivations seem to have led him into several quandaries about the war; and so, unsure which course is right, he tends to go along with the establishment of wh ich he is a member. But only "tends." For instance, be believes strongly in rule of law, which means that be does not like demonstrations, but he also happens to be a religious man. So, when a student fr om a Long Island college asked Coffin why ministers and priests don't stick to the religion and leave the rest of life alone, Miller insisted on answering. He said that religion, if it is to mean anything, must deal with daily behavior and not Sunday School attendance. (To the student's question, CQffin simply replied, "I think that position was first taken by the Pharaoh to Moses.") Even more obvious is the conflict between Miller as moral and intelligent man and Miller as businessman. He is self-conscious about it. At one point, be jokingly began a sentence, "As a craven businessman. ..."

The sensitivity is there, the awareness that profit and motive too easily function as one word. All a scholar has to do is worrY whether the things he does have any meaning or importance; a businessman co ¡ the other band must worry whether his livelihood is by definition in opposition to his values. Miller really sounded like a college recruiter complaining that students don't want to go into business when he complained that college students don't want to get involved within the political system.

Miller clearly wanted to examine the merits of Vietnam, and come to a conclusion; but so far he hasn't been able to. Given the choice between two uncomfortable outlooks, he seems to choose that of his friends in government and business, the one more naturally congenial to him. Thus the danger of student violence in this country becomes greater, and the importance of our Vietnam violence consequently diminishes.

"Bill," he said at one point, drawing out the name in a Hoosier twang. ''you'~ trying to say that this bonfire over here IS really over here. ..."

"No, I'm not, Irwin." said Coffin.

"You're trying to make a bonfire out of 1 brushfire, while I'm pointing to the real conflagration."

13 1Tbe New Journal I December 10, 1967

.ts

The position Miller takes or doesn't take on the war is important because be is

1eG

a very influential industrialist. Similarly, it's important to understand what Brewster thinks not simply because he's pnsident of Yale but because he has ..umed the role of spokesman for higher education, serves on Presidential commissions, and is called Dr. Brewster

by David Susskind.

On the Susskind show Brewster relied much less on inflated rhetoric and spoke much more clearly than he has on most previous public occasions. He was uaderstandable, and you cou1d respect him for h is convictions. He does believe ill conscientious objection for moral 1a10ns, he thinks a man should not be fon:ed to kill if he doesn't want to kill.

He attempted to clarify his Parents Day "'lrident voices" statement by saying lblt he d id not mean Coffin, although Brewster discusses Coffin in the next four out of five paragraphs in the speech and .._.in the speech disagrees with Coffin's polition on the draft and deplores his penonal style. Brewster thus did not IUCCCed in making clear whom be did have in mind, if anybody, when he c:rilicized the "strident voices."

Brewster said that he wasn't willing to criticize the war unless he could take over the next morning at nine and offer alternatives. Brewster asked Coffin what alternatives he wou1d have at n ine the next morning.

Coffin mentioned a variety of approaches, but he would have done better simply to raise the problem of iatention; for this is a basic problem.

Pluta and specific proposals are implementation; they devolve from an 09er-all intention, not the other way around. For Brewster to worry about the lpeciftc "how's" means finally that he doesn't think the United States should aet out. Yet the war remains a confusing thing for him.

The problem becomes one of &eneralization. The facts of the situation, the ugly facts, seem to say one thing; but JOur theory tells you something else. You lllalte the decision to go with the theory, bat you remain troubled and confused because reality does not fit snugly within the generalization.

Brewster too views the world with certain basic assumptions that grate banhly with the reality of the war as be perceives it in the tolls of death, destruction, incredibility, and lack of

at D

to

D

l

),

PI'Ogress.

He gave three reasons why he thought

that. while draft resistance on personal

1b0ra1 grounds was permissible, resistance

lilould not be used for political ends::..to ch ange the policy. First, he simply

't think it wou1d be helpfu1 in cla.nging the political situation. Secondly, he said, "it is terribly important for us not tiD abandon the force of persuasion for il iavites the forces of oppressive counterl'eYolution." Thirdly, he opposes it on llloral grounds because it's not the PIOduct of individual conscience.

Coftin responded that draft resistance 4ld DOt at this point mean rejection of Pll'luuion, but was rather a form of Jlnuasion. "We are doing it," he said, ""-cause we care about the finest of ~ traditions. which are being

~ed."

BreWster rejected this interpretation,

1lbic:b finds its models in the efforts of the ciYil rights activists and claims that there "ouucl be no Dissenting Democrats nor a

Candidate McCarthy were it not for the student activists.

Towards the end of the taping, what â&#x20AC;˘seemed to be Brewster's fundamental assumptions finally began to emerge. Ever since J ohnson put Brewster onto the commissi<'n studying the entire selective service system, B rewster h as spoken out about what be considers u nfair and immoral aspects of the system.

Brewster nodded his head 'in agreement when a student in the audience prefaced a question on this attitude by saying that the draft had almost been abolished in the early 1960's. Then, asked the student, how can you talk about the morality of the draft, a system that will always be unpleasant no matter how administered, and not about the morality of the war, of which the draft is only manifestation and symptom?

Brewster explained that he thinks a system must be worked out because the United States will face a series of other such wars over the next several years.

Some might choose to see this response as a sign of Brewster's pragmatism, that be's interested in reforming one evil if be can't reform two.

It seems more likely, however, that this was a hint at Brewster's basic attitude; and by implication, his disagreement with the war finally becomes nothing more than disagreement with how the war is being conducted. He seems to accept the notion that the Communists (emphasizing the) are and will continue to foment wars of national liberation to extend a Communist hegemony. If you believe that and so downplay or even ignore the nationalistic elements, then the Communists do have to be stopped and Vietnam is the stopping ground.

A question disturbing many is bow the men who were the liberals in the late 1940's and early 1950's can regard the world that way today. But it should not be forgotten that many of them, like Brewster, worked in the Marshall Plan, which, while a tremendously impressive and benign program in many ways, came about as a reaction to the fear of Communist domination extending over Western Europe.

The world has changed a great deal since then, but the only change that seems to have occurred in the thinking of many policymakers is geographic: the capital of "international aggressive Communism" bas moved from Moscow to Peking.

Anybody who looked at Soviet Communism in 1948 as he did in 1928, when that country was slipping into the throes of industrialization and collectivization, would have been considered rigid in his thinking. Another 20 years and another generation have now gone past; but, because there have been no dramatic events like depression and cold war, too many people have permitted the old ideas to remain unchallenged in their minds.

The world view apparently held by Brewster needs rethinking; for what the Susskind show finally did was clarify the causes of Brewster's indecision and cqnfusion over Vietnam: on the one hand, he sees that almost everything is wrong with our War in Vietnam; on the other, he accepts the basic assumptions which make possible the war.

Coffin had a good point when be objected to people "who can't make up their minds about the war, but point to the immorality of the protestors and not to the immorality of the war." â&#x20AC;˘

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141 The New Journal I December 10, 1967

continu~d from

page 2

a spiraling light which projected patterns on the audience during the hypnotic dance scene.

But the primary ingredient for success was the cast. Trumbull's production exhibited a cast of extraordinary ability.

Spirited and talented, they brought strength to the play, making every moment vital. The small-cast musical is evidently the play most suited to the collegiate theatrical scene. It is doubtful that there are many as captivating and enchanting as Th~ Fantasticks.

-James Ponet Yale College The actors in the Timothy Dwight production of Peter Shaffer's two one-act plays, The Private Ear and Th~ Public Ey~, succeeded very well in making both meaningful and entertaining what are essentially actionless plays.

The little action in each play consisted of variations of triangle situations, which are revealed early in the plays, thus removing any suspense. What is left is only Sh affer's subtle humor and his not so subtle message-how context-bound language and lack of common experience prevent people from communicating.

To be sure, the plays are constructed so that either humor or message could be emphasized, but the TD production managed to handle one without slighting the other. The best scenes were those in which non-communication and nonunderstanding were themseives the central issues. This included the silent resolution of Public Ey~. The directors, Peter Schwenger of Eye and Leonard Barkan of Ear, both did fine jobs.

-Howard Newman

Games Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, as they say in Biology, and so it goes with Harvard weekend in particular, and all weekends in general. Everything seems to be building up and letting down, from hopeful Friday on downhill to hopeless Sunday afternoon, just as on all other weekends-only a thousand times more so because of the mothers and fathers added to the usual droves of dates. The streets seem to be suddenly awash with giggly blonde girls getting dress bags out of the trunks of their illegally parked cars, and boys' rooms are full of people who jus~ slog along Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and then on Saturday serve up that life in pithy self-mocking epithets at parties. But having the parents around makes it all quite different; for one thing it gets in the way of a date, having the four of you aU there in that traveling suburbia of station wagons parked in the field at the Bowl, with the perhaps mother-in-law looking you up and down.

A girl can be made to feel extremely nervous by almost any act perpetrated by that mother of his in her purple tweed Darien, Conn., suit and her thermoses of bloody marys and coffee ( ..coffee, please") and her maddening way of climbing her son, as it were, and putting flags on top of him, and telling him to keep Saturday the 12th free.

Which thing is she thinking behind her polite conversation: Call me Mother?

She's awfully attractive, John? I hope you're having lots and lots of fun and seeing all kinds of girls? Does be want to know if I'm loyal enough to the old

school? Well damn Harvard, damn Yale.

Fab, All, Tide, Lux and Veritas-bahl It's terribly hard, if you only have sort of ad hoc loyalties, to grasp quite why people get so excited about it all. It's understandable, it's touching-to see these fathers and sons going down the streets to hear the sons crisply declaiming about their existence at college, as if they were trying to grab one frame from the film of their present life and say, There, that's typical of me, this minute, at Yale -and to see their fathers hardly listening, fumbling around for the old yellowed photograph that was them, dressed up in old-fashioned clothes, in front of a building that's been torn down since Yale '35. They seem to think they've got something enormous in common, and they are building on the idea that plus 3a change, plus c'est la mem~ Yale, and oh, nothing like Harvard, etc., etc. But we impartial outsiders ask ourselves.

After all, the students, the teachers, the very buildings are different, it's just that ugly little dog that's the same, compliments of the continuity editor. Well, give it up, you probably have to just take it on faith like the Virgin Birth. Indeed, there they all are at The Game, taking it on faith like madmen and acting out year after year their serio-comic rivalry they've inherited along with their name and their nose.

Then there are all th ose undergraduates and recent graduates to watch-especially them because their illusions about Yale are not so cold in their graves. It's funny to watch them being edgy and sentimental, half laughing at their old haunts and organizations--Spaghetti and Grapes, Bible and Belt-and half going there wholeheartedly. Three or four years out, the recent fates of the old heroes and the old drunks are more interesting to bear about than later on, because no one is quite sure whether whatshisname fulfilled his early promise and drank himself to death, or whether be copped out and joined the First Nat City Bank, and plenty of them are still wandering around in a way that would never get into the Alumni Magazine. "Last time I heard he was in some nudist colony in Majorca writing a nov~l." And the ones who come for the weekend and find each other still have a tendency to call whatever they're doing a game-the ad game, the poverty game, the God game-so no-one will think they've gotten too stuffy about themselves. These ones bring their dates for a nostalgic weekend to show them (don't touch) a good time, and how it used to be, and to take them to the old room which is now full of noisy, immature strangers. Some girls have an almost unbelievable capacity for tactful participation in other people's fantasies-which is what Harvard weekend, haunting the old town, and especially football, are. But what is most peculiar especially to a girl who has long since slammed her mind shut on the possibility of ever understanding the actual rules of the game is to think that all of these people who have summoned up in their minds some feeling of the quiddity of their college then go and endow a very footbal l player with it, and get satisfaction from having him enact a ritual put-down of the other colleges by proxy. It's as if two men with two interpreters thought they were having an argument, when in fact the two interpreters, in their own language, were arguing about something entirely different.

People don't just watch it, they castigate it, wheedle it, threaten it, woo it, like schizophrenics holding conversations with the wall. The basic premise that both teams accept, namely that we are wonderful and that they are terrible (or if their team loses, how wronged they were) prompts them to astonishing acts of screaming and toilet paper throwing and other behavior that would be severely frowned upon, say, in the su bway.

Luckily you can sometimes get your date to ignore it part of the time, like a taxi radio droning on in the background by being, yourself, a contrapuntal taxi radio.... Sarah Bernhardt had her leg amputated, you know ... when is a door not a door ... I wish the toe fetishist would come and warm up my feet ... they say watching football gives you cancer ... though sooner or later you are cut off by the rising in unison multitudes, and inevitably you are drowned out by the prayers and lambastings of the man behind you, try as you will to stare him down or embarrass him with a telephoto lens.

Strange to say, it doesn't seem to bother the dates, though, who almost to a girl will admit they don't know what those men are doing on that field, knuckling around in slow motion to the inner music of the spheres-and for the most part they jump and scream in a manner that seems very hypocritical to some of us who stick to our guns and remain seated throughout. It's the twofold

mystery of the game itself, and the blood of Yale. Blood is thicker than water, and bloody marys, drunk on the tailgate with ... with, well hello ... if it isn't ... you son of a gun .•• thicker still.

-Mopsy Strange Kenned!'

Seeger "This machine surrounds hate and makes it surrender," read the neat letten on Pete Seeger's long-necked, five-string banjo. You could read the words if you were sitting down front at his Woolsey Hall concert on Harvard Weekend.

With purple light shining on his face, Seeger sings and preaches about the old songs, and also sings some he's just found about Americans making stands, violent and otherwise, against injustice throughout our history.

This time Seeger looks a little older than he did when you last saw him.

Though he's still as long and lean as a farm kid, the skin on his face wrinkles and pouches like an old baseball glove.

But when he begins to sing, a wonderful thing happens. He sings out to the audience, his head high, his chin way up.

And as the audience gathers momentum and sings back to him in waves, you notice that with his head high and back, the pouches and lines on his face disappear.

Seeger always does things his own way: Even at Woolsey, you, who never thought you could, wind up respecting

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him for singing heck instead of hell. He Jives with his wife Toshi and their three children in a tiny log cabin on the Hudson, sixty miles north of New York City. Seeger built the cabin himself with a little help from his friends. He doesn't think twice about turning down concert engagements to tour Negro colleges in the South or play at peace fairs.

Back in 1938, before Time magazine showed the hippies the way to HaightAsbbury and before Jack Kerouac dreamed of bitting the road, Pete Seeger, u a Harvard sophomore, left Cambridge.

In the next years, he covered thousands of miles, hitchhiking and riding freight e, cars, through our depression-ridden d country. He was singing and picking up md folk songs. nt from American colonists h· whoDescended came here beca~e they were religious dissenters, Pete Seeger was learning America and her history in song.

He took time out to serve three years with the Special Services during World War II. But he was still collecting songsarmy songs this time. :r· By the late 50's Seeger was performing before capacity crowds at Carnegie and tp.

Town Halls. The folk song revival that he m helped to create was in full swing.

In 1955, Seeger refused to answer questions about his political associations and belief when asked by a subcommittee of the House Un-American Activities Committee. The committee was investigating alleged subversive influences in the entertainment field.

Seeger cited his rights to freedom of speech and association guaranteed by the F"arst Amendment to the Constitution.

The Fifth Amendment, to avoid selfincrurunation, might have been an easier way out. With the Fifth he could have • avoided prosecution. · Seeger was cited for contempt of Congress on ten counts. A New York court found him guilty and sentenced him to one year in jail. This decision was reversed only a few years ago by the unanimous decision of the United States Court of Appeals.

"I have never in my life supported or done anything subversive to my country," said Seeger at the time of his sentencing. "I am proud I never refused t~ sing for any organization because I diSagreed with its belief."

To illustrate this, Seeger offered to sing a song in the courtroom. He was denied permission.

--Susan Braudy

Recordings 1olulnn Sebastian Bach: Die Kunst der

Fuge (The Art of Fugue), BWV 1080.

Orchestral realization by Marcel Bitsch ll1td Claude Pascal. Chamber Orchestra of the Saar-Karl Ristenpart, conductor. ~onesuch HB 3013 (mono), HB 73013 •stereo). 2-record set.

In 1749, Bach, plagued from childhood by 'Vea.Jt eyes, underwent an operation which

~dered him totally blind. The Art of "iUe was begun during this year; and in 17~0, when Bach died teo days after being ltricken by apoplexy, it remained ~~~~finished.

8ach-composer, performer, and teacher-intended The Art of Fugue to be Pl'acticai textbook for those who wished ~become proficient at fugue-writing. ~use it was created as a pedagogical -YJCe-albeit a dazzling one-and Bach 1

left no indication on the manuscript as to instrumentation, a controversy existed for many years as to whethP.r the composition ought to be performed at all.

In recent years the consensus has been that the piece is well worth listening to; and musicians of all varieties of ability have scored it for organ, string quartet, two pianos, harpsichord, and full symphony orchestra.

The present version, for chamber orchestra of 13 instruments, sensibly attempts neither to counterfeit a genuine Bach orchestration nor·to "improve" the tersely-voiced work by scoring it for full-sized symphony orchestra.

Instead, the 22 pieces which comprise the work are scored sparingly, with different orchestral timbres utilized to bring out the different voices. The result, at times, is eerie--the listener should be prepared to hear solo bassoons; and, in the final (and unfinished) fugue, trombones-but it comes off remarkably well. The orchestration is unobtrusive, and after a while one is aware only of the music. For a piece as timeless as The Art of Fugue, which is hampered by the stylistic cliches of no period but is by turns archaic and atonally far out, such a deference of orchestra to music is ideal.

Ristenpart conducts his excellent orchestra sensitively, and presents the music with subtlety and sophistication.

The recording is by Club Fran~ais du Disque, and was made in Paris. The sound is clean and rich; and stereo separation, which in many European recordings is not pronounced enough for American tastes, is good. Four pages of notes by Jason Farrow are of more than incidental interest.

This recording of The Art of Fugue is strongly recommended as an indication that "budget" records (list price for the set is $5.00, but it is generally available for about a dollar less) are, at their best, as good as any.

-William M. Burstein

Dow On Tuesday, December 12, a recruiter for the Dow Chemical Company, which sells napalm to the US Government, will be interviewing career-seekers at Yale.

Dow and the access it has been accorded to university recruiting facilities have been a target of anti-war activists across the country, and the company's campus recruitment campaign this year has not been a triumph of public relations. At the University of Wisconsin thousands of students disrupted Dow's visit and the Chancellor called in city police to disperse them, and even at Harvard students succeeded in trapping a recruiter in a room for seven hours. Dow executives are reported to be very worried about their image these days.

It seems that Dow will receive a relatively quiet reception at Yale. The students for a Democratic Society will probably picket either Woodbridge Hall or the Career offices. As of a week before the I 2th, there were no plans to disrupt the interviews. SDS chairman Karl Klare is preparing a ten-minute slide show of Vietnamese children burned by napalm which he will screen at various places around the University before Dow arrives, and SDS is preparing a pamphlet describing the effects of napalm and Dow's role in providing it for the counter-insurgency effort. Howard Shrobe, 1968, has written the company

inviting its recruiter to debate the various issues involved, but as yet he has received no reply.

Assistant Dean of Yale College Donald Akenson, who is responsible for the career -advisory office, says that the University has yet to formulate a policy on recruitment, and that he will probably wait until Tuesday and see what happens.

-Jerry Bruck

Letters To the Editors: The reviewer of the Jefferson Airplane concert (November 12) typifies the novice word-thought freak. The first sentence of his review provided a simulacrum of sense; the rest tapered in content to nil while it staggered giddily in description to a helplessly mawkish state of pious panegyric.

Tentatively, in the reviewer's favor, it could be assumed that he is a recent-and thereby pardonable clumsy--convert to the semi-euphoric interparietal gibberish of psychedelic impressionism. It strikes me as puzzling that the Journal should find this puerility novel or intriguing enough to foist it upon its readers.

The Airplane's performance was, compared with others by them and others by others, one of the most turned-off mechanical, and sarcastic displays of what a big name can get away with on the provincial audience at Woolsey that the performance should receive a review of such hemophiliac adulation.

Woolsey Hall itself is ill-suited to the kind of sound which the Airplane produces, but there was no compensation: they just poured out the prerequisite number of decibels and watts to the salivating, analphabetic crowd which crammed the hall to its gilt gunwales. From a number of angles in the hall, it was virtually impossible to hear the vocal at all, and the amount of unintentional (or uncalculated) feedback from the amplifiers did not improve even the effect. (In which case, the reviewer's idea of Grace Slick's voice being ten feet tall in a thousand foot pit is curiously apt.)

The so-called light show was patent ineptitude. It is immaterial whether 'the fellow going wild with colored lights' was moving his hand or a paper plate to get the effect: it remains that there was little if any relation to the rhythm.

The world of the Airplane is, for thereviewer, a mythical realm of fast color and big sound. Every teeny-bopper is permitted a similar fantasy. It is the beauty of much of acid rock and the other periphery of the movement. But the review itself does an unfortunate disservice to the whole thing by ascribing to it a kinematic perfection which is dependent upon such illconsidered impressionability. The Journal does worse by printing the results.

Andrew Sims Graduate student, German To the Editors: Please remove my name from your mailing list as we are leaving New Haven.

I do not especially regret this discontinuation of receiving The New Journal because I find the contents, which I have read fairly carefully for three issues, less a stimulating interchange and ftow of carefully or wittily conceived ideas than a torrent of thinly concealed left-wing polemicism.

M. L. Baily Jr.

continued /rom page 11 else, led him to stop working and develop this idea into a completely new play.

Psychologically, it is also of interest that the wife that Hickey kills in The Iceman Cometh seems very maternal, forgiving him all his sins and accepting him no matter what he does. She refuses to believe he won't improve much as Mary, in Long Day's Journey Into Night, refuses to believe that Edmund has more than a summer cold. Another connection between the feelings O'Neill was struggling with at this time of his life would seem to be that the killing of his wife inThe Iceman Cometh represents a displacement of the anger and rage that he felt towards his mother.

At the end of The Iceman Cometh, all the derelicts return to their "pipe dreams." Many have considered this a tragic ending and, I suppose, many still do. To me, the ending conveys an acceptance of man's foibles and a quiet recognition that men must and do live with illusions. For O'Neill, I think this ending represented his coming to terms with his mother's illness, his mother's "pipe dreams." This acceptance of his mother's illness is, I think, poignantly represented in Long Day's Journey Into Night by the unforgettable image of Mary Tyrone climbing the stairs with the final words, "I fell in love with James Tyrone and was so happy for a time."

O'Neill was at a crossroads when he wrote More Stately Mansions. He was writing a play which depicted his inner feelings towards his mother, feelings be was only able to master in the great plays that came after. For the reader or viewer of More Stately Mansions, the words and images of these later plays will be hauntingly recalled.

Classifieds 20¢per word Ads may be mailed or telephoned to: William M. Burstein 544 Yale Station New Haven, Conn. 06520 776-2551 Monday-Thursday 7-8 p.m.

For the next issue only, The New Journal will accept, at no cost, one classified ad from each member of the Yale Community.

By mail only; deadline Jan. 5. Editing privileges reserved.

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NOW THROUGH DEC 23

THE YALE SCHOOL OF DRAMA REPERTORY THEATRE PRESENTS PRE,.IIERE OF

JD-fhilifS DIRECTED BY

DIRECTED BY

THE YALE SCHOOL OF DRAM A REPERTORY THEATRE PRESENTS PREIIIIIERE OF

new lm arnca

NOW THROUGH DEC 23

new

newaven DIRECTED BY

llrrY amck

NOW THROUGH DEC 23

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DIRECTED BY

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larry amck

NOW THROUGH DEC 2 3