Volume 2 - Issue 2

Volume two, number two I October 20, 1968

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Forsaking words, she roses with pistol pointed at you, the startled reader. Her portrait is her poem.

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21 The New Journal! October 20, 1968

,3

Girlsnow

by Jonathan Lear

6

Heroes, hawks and hacks

by James Green

12

Young poets

by Susan Holahan

16

Biafran genocide

by Richard N. Henderson

19

Letters In Comment: the real Clark Kent sits down, Cream forgets the sounds of silence, and an illusion is an illusion in an illusion.

Peiffer During most of September the site of the old Yale Co-op-a room above Gnomon Copy Service-was cluttered with military gear. M-1 and automatic rifles, steel helmets, grenades, knives and ammunition packs lay piled on a wooden table. On the floor nearby, a US Army tripod-mounted machine gun pointed vaguely in the direction of Morse College.

The weapons were intended for use in the Second American Revolution, whose early history is chronicled in Jules Peiffer's new play, God Bless, the Yale Repertory Theatre's current production.

In a corner of the room, temporarily used for rehearsal, stood Peiffer, slouching a bit, his broad face slightly in advance of the rest of his body. After glancing around the room with worried eyes (his eyes, it seems, are always worried), he went over to Harold Stone, the director, to find out how much time we would have before the beginning of rehearsal.

A ring of wispy, light-brown hair keeps Peiffer's baldness at bay. He walks with small, shuffling steps, as if testing the floor for a spot solid enough to support his foot.

He seems to view chairs, tables and objects in general with suspicion and keeps his distance. Not surprisingly, this shrewd critic of our world does not feel quite at home in it.

Inevitably, he invites comparison with his own cartoon creatures. Despite his success and his obvious sense of his worth, Peiffer bears a strong family resemblance to Bernard Mergendeiler, the hero of many of his cartoons. Bernard, born into a world less sensitive than he, cowers under a continual rain of social slings and arrows.

People look through him at Parties. Girlfriends break up with him after he has bared his soul to them.

Peiffer's success has no doubt relieved him of some of the burdens of being a Mergendeiler, but he still shares Bernard's basic dilemma. Both fight the same battle: Bernard and Peiffer in this corner, the rest of the world in that. When we went down to Hungry Charley's for lunch, Peiffer ordered a ham and cheese sandwich and something about the way he examined it, lifting up a corner and peeking in, was very Bernardish, as if the sandwich presented a possible threat or challenge.

Peiffer's cartoons first appeared in the Village Voice-on the condition that they not pay him anything. They now appear in dozens of newspapers and magazines here and abroad and are, needless to say, very well paid indeed. Crawling Arnold, a one-act play, was performed at Spoleto ·n the Festival of Two Worlds in 1961; eiffer's animated cartoon, Munro, won Academy Award; he has published a cessful novel, and his first full-length

play, Little Murders, ran on Broadway (though not for long). God Bless will open in London shortly after its New Haven premiere and is scheduled for performance in Los Angeles later in the season.

Peiffer is attracted by forms other than cartoon, which he considers somewhat limited in scope. He has written columns, but not many because he finds them "such hard work." He would like to write novels but, again, this kind of writing is difficult for him. "Two years of sheer agony" is his description of the time spent on Harry, the Rat with Women, his only published novel. Two years of work, he decided, was a lot of effort for 181 pages.

Cartooning and playwriting do come easily for him, but he was hesitant about writing plays because he believes a play must be bad to succeed in New York.

"I knew if I ever wrote one that was any good, it would close right away," he explained. "That's what happened to Little Murders; that's what will probably happen to God Bless."

Peiffer insists that his method of writing a play is entirely distinct from that of drawing cartoons, but the characters in God Bless are obviously Peiffer people, related to the men, women and children who talk their way through his cartoons.

Like them, the characters in the play love to give advice and to justify their existence to themselves and to the world at large.

Peiffer is obviously quite pleased with his play. He has always wanted to write a political play and wrote the first draft of God Bless last February under the inspiration (if that is the correct word) of the politics of the Great Society. His own political philosophy might be described as optimistic cynicism; he believes the country must go through a period of right-wing repression before true social reform can be achieved. But he does feel that the country will survive and reform will come.

Newsweek once described Peiffer as "a Clark Kent who takes off his clothes and is still Clark Kent." He is the total unhero, the odd-man-out whose isolation gives him understanding. As the man least able to leap tall buildings at a single bound-least able, in fact, to leap anything in any number of bounds-Feiffer is more aware than the rest of us of the dangers lurking in the world and more willing to point them out.

Don Cohen

Cream Silence is as important to music as blank space is to a sketch; to know when not to play is as important as to know when to play. Last Friday night at the Arena, the Cream forgot-or at least ignored-the value of being quiet sometimes.

Eric Clapton used to sing with his guitar (buy the album he and John Mayall did together). He used to attack the music savagely, with contrasts. Like dark and light lines in a drawing, he used loud and soft, sharp, and sweet notes. Snatches of guitar on the three Cream albums show that Clapton can still discriminate, but his solo in "Spoonful'' Friday night was solid sound without breathing, every note on beat in an endless diarrhea. And Ginger Baker's drum solo in "Toad" suffered the same ailment: an endless rolling and shapeless emission of sound. There was little dialogue between the three musicians, just three people belting out noise at once, or, for variation, in solo. But there were of course standing ovations for Ginger after "Toad,'' for Eric after "Spoonful" and for

Jack Bruce after his harmonica solo in "Traintime."

Perhaps it takes too much energy to make good music every night, or perhaps the Cream don't care what they playyou'd get bored too, playing "Toad" before shrieking kids for two years. Perhaps I was expecting too much after their excellent Wheels of Fire album-in the studio, not live. With the six dollars I spent to go to the concert, I should have bought the new Jimi Hendrix album.

Marty Friedman

Lylah Robert Aldrich's career in film-making has been faithfully inconsistent. For example, only Aldrich could blast show business in general and Hollywood in particular so passionately in The Big Knife (1955) and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane (1963), while cranking out banal and efficient mediocrities (Sodom and Gomorrah, Four for Texas) with the apparent imperviousness of a John Sturges or a Richard Brooks.

In recent years, Aldrich bas seemingly settled down into a comfortable commercial groove with The Flight of the Phoenix and The Dirty Dozen, films in which frequent lapses in taste and artistic judgment are concealed by excellent ensemble acting and shrewd hucksterism.

Aldrich was clever enough to contract 15 per cent of Dozen's huge gross, and he used these riches to gain control of what Orson Welles called "the biggest toy train set in the world"-his own studio.

The Killing of Sister George, first product of Aldrich Studios, is now in the final stages of editing. Aldrich's press agent assures us that not only will Sister George set Hollywood on its ear, but that it will make The Fox look like Mary Poppins. In between Dirty Dozen and Sister George, while Aldrich Studios was being formed, The Legend of Lylah Clare was filmed to complete Aldrich's M-G-M commitments. Lylah, then, is to all outward appearances a lame-duck production, a contract-filler. It is also the most exciting new American film I have seen this year.

I recommend that the film be seen at least twice or not at all. Obviously, the latter course has been overwhelmingly the most popular. Lylalt Clare expired quickly on the New York circuit after three weeks, shunned even by the 42nd Street vultures who pick the bones of recent failures. In Los Angeles it was an immediate flop at Grauman's Chinese. And it seemed oddly appropriate that Loew's 47th was razed by wrecking balls the day after Lylah closed.

For Aldrich has reversed field on us again.

This visual vaudevillean has shifted gears from the dependable hucksterism of Dirty Dozen to one of the most intentionally anti-commercial films ever to come out of Hollywood. Aldrich has chosen to launch a ruthless attack on the sensibilities of his once-sacrosanct audience.

The original intent of the screenplay seems clear and simple. Lewis Zarkin (Peter Finch), a movie director, has been in "retirement" for 20 years after the mysterious death of his Galatea, Lylah Clare (Kim Novak). He attempts a comeback by using a look-alike, Elsa Brinkman (also Novak), to launch the bio-pic Lylah Clare -Film Star. The girl gradually assumes her screen role in real life, and the events of the past reveal themselves by repeating themselves. continued on page 18

Volume two, number two October 20, 1968 Editors: Jeffrey Pollock Jonathan Lear Business Manager: Jean-Pierre Jordan Executive Editor: Herman Hong Designer: Bruce Mcintosh Associate Editor: Lawrence Lasker Advertising Manager: K. Elia Georgiades Photography Editor: Peter M. C. Choy Copy Editor: Paul Bennett Circulation Manager: John Adams Contributing Editors: Jonathan Aaron Susan Holahan Mopsy S. Kennedy Michael Lerner Leo Ribuffo Derek Shearer Staff: Joseph Fincke, Barry Greenberg, Ka Grossman, Rodger Kamenetz, Barne Rubin, Steve Thomas, Nancy Vicker: Warner Wada, Michael Waltuch THIRD CLASS PERMIT: Third Clas: age PAID in New Haven, Coon. The Journal is published by The New Jc 3432 Yale Station, New Haven, Conn. I and is printed at The Carl Purington F Printing-Office of the Yale University P New Haven. Published bi-weekly duril academic year and distributed by qu controlled circulation to the Yale Como: For all oth.ers, subscriptions a.r e $7.50 pe ($4.50 for students) and newsstand copie The New Journal ©copyright 1968 b New Journal at Yale, Inc., a non-profit, ration.

Letters welcome. Unsolicited manu: should be accompanied by a stamped addressed envelope. Opinions expreS! articles are not necessarily those of The Journal.

Credits: Samantha Barnes: 6 t., m.

Peter M. C. Choy: 3 1., 5 Jean-Pierre Jordan: 6 b .. 10m., b.

Bruce Mcintosh: 3 r., 4, 16 Frank Mouris: Cover, 12, 13, 14

ALL •

31 The New Journal! October 20, 1968

Yale has waited for girls too long

by Jonathan Lear

Debbie Brewster, a brown-haired Vassar freshman, thinks Yale should be coed.

"Especially since Vassar had to go and shoot those poor Yalies down." She would like to see the day when she could enroll at Yale; and, as a matter of fact, there are a lot of people who would like to see that day come quickly.

Two weeks ago, a militant minority of the Student Advisory Board printed a wall poster suggesting the immediate construction of a geodesic dome over the Cross Campus and inviting 500 girls to camp out there aIa Resurrection City.

A Coeducation Now Committee, presently in embryonic form, is planning to have students vacate certain entryways of the residential colleges. Girls will take their places ... for a week or two.

David Kaetz, one of Yale's resident good people, is starting a collection for funds to buy doors for all the stalls in the bathrooms-this being in his mind the only obstacle to immediate and complete coeducation.

One man who sees a few other problems besides doors to bathroom stalls, but is somewhat less convinced of the advantages of girls camping out on the Cross Campus, is the deciding force in bringing girls to Yale: Debbie Brewster's father.

Kingman Brewster wants undergraduate women in the Yale community. "The social and moral value of having two thousand college girls of outstanding intellectual and personal qualification resident in New Haven is apparent. Their absence has, in the eyes of the faculty and University Council Committee on Yale College, put Yale at a serious disadvantage both socially and morally. The crash week-end, the degrading form of social activity known as the Mixer, have been distasteful. They are a most unhealthy and unnatural part of the four Yale undergraduate years. Such an environment is not conducive to the development of a considerate, mature and normal relationship among the sexes."

Yes, Brewster does want undergraduate women at Yale. The two questions are how and when. The whole push for women at Yale centers on these; and Brewster, imbued with the need to listen to student opinion, seriously wants a meaningfulbut needless to say responsible-sign of what students want.

Should Yale just admit women into a completely coeducational set-up, or should it build a separate female coordinate college? If the trend of other educational institutions is an influencing factor, then Yale should aim towards coeducation. The historic reasons behind coordinate education, with a separate administration, faculty and board of trustees-which spring from the belief that men's education is an elitist luxury not in keeping with women's needs-are dead, or at least in death throes. Coordinate institutions such as Harvard and Radcliffe or Brown and Pembroke are moving toward coeducation.

Radcliffe women, for example, are taught

by Harvard faculty, attend Harvard courses and receive Harvard degrees. Radcliffe remains coordinate, however, with its own trustees, administration, endowment and admissions policy.

Stanford has gone all the way. Three years ago Stanford experimented with a coed dormitory.lt was such a success that now over 25% of Stanford students live in coed houses. It all began when David Harris, now Joan Baez's husband but then student body president, decided coed living was the only healthy way for people to get to know each other. J oseph Katz, a professor of psychology at Stanford, believes that the situation prevents overidealization of the opposite sex and leads to healthy relationships, ultimately to better marriages. Katz also speaks of an "incest effect"-residents of the same house treat each other as brothers and sisters, with a resulting moratorium on casual sex. A slight variation of the don't-seducea-girl-Saturday-night-with-whom-youhave-to-eat-breakfast-Sunday-morning rule. The houses usually focus around a theme--<:ommunity development or French literature, for example. Girls are delighted to talk about things other than clothes and dates, and boys are delighted to listen. The less attractive girls, who would take a two-hour bus ride from Vassar to stand in a comer at a Yale mixer, interact daily with boys and can be judged as whole people, not just potential sex machines.

Brewster understands this trend toward coeducation, and his thinking has moved quite a distance since he dreamed of Vassar a mile or two away. Hopefully he's ready to keep moving.

He presently favors a "coordinate" education developed along coeducational lines: he wants two separate administrations but one faculty, and says he's flexible about the rest. Brewster feels he could attract a "better and more interesting" person as president of a coordinate college for women than as just another member of the Yale administration hierarchy.

But some people disagree. "The separate women's administration at Brown," arecent Pembroke graduate noted, "only attracts the around-forty unmarried career woman who is unsure of her own place in a male-oriented society. She passes on this sense of insecurity to her students; the result is a Jot of uptight women within the University. The bad parts of my experience at Brown had to do with that which was particularly Pembroke."

But women do have special problems and needs, Brewster believes, and a separate administration might be the best way to deal with them. "I feel that it is ridiculous to think of women as just childbearing men," he says.

Brewster sees the coordinate arrangement as a chance to be creative, to try new methods of education. This innovative urge is part of Brewster's sincere desire to offer the best in undergraduate education for women at Yale.

"I can't avoid feeling that the introduction of 1500 women should be used as an occasion for experimentation in Yale College." He feels that coed residential colleges are possible under his plan for coordinate education, and can be considered separately from the coed-coordinate issue.

But there are those who are not convinced that Brewster's plans are innovative at all. R. Inslee Clark, dean of undergraduate admissions, feels coordinate education is a backward step: "If we go coordinate, that only means that in the next ten or twenty years we will want to go coed.

We should set up an institution that is forward looking for the next thirty or forty years, and not sometime later regret we tied ourselves down."

The coordinate system at Brown and Pembroke has in the past few years experienced such difficulties with the transition towards coeducation. The coordinate women's institution has undergone a series of identity crises, fighting to retain a distinct status within the University but only ending up holding itself back. Two years ago, on the occasion of Pembroke's 75th anniversary, the Brown Daily Herald declared the death of Pembroke as a separate institution, and little has been said since in defense of the coordinate system save some vague don't-let-go cries for tradition.

But the underlying factor in any decision about girls at Yale, as Brewster well knows, is money. Any idea has to be sold to rich alumni or a very rich alumnus, and this is probably a strong influence in pushing Brewster towards coordinate education. It is, he reasons, easier to sell the soand-so College for Women than to raise money for simply absorbing girls into Yale.

And the chances of attracting more capital, he continues, will be greater if the coodinate trusteeship is not just a biproduct of the Yale Corporation: "two teller windows instead of one."

Yale can, of course, make certain compromises to a donor's wishes, but it should never be caught accepting money on conditions that violate faculty and student opinion. Th1s has been a rule that Brewster has adhered to in the past; there is no reason why he should not follow it with the issue of coeducation vs. coordinate education.

4 I The New J ournall October 20, 1968

The financial problems, alas, directly influence the speed with which Yale can admit women. Brewster expects the $50 million he wants or the $30 million he'll settle for to come from a source that would not normally donate to any other function of the University. He does not want Yale to be subject to a charge of "taking away" money from areas such as bio-medical research to get women to Yale.

"I try to avoid thinking of priorities," says Brewster. "We ought to be able to do this without downgrading the other needs."

One result of this stance is his avoiding setting up priorities which recognize the urgency of bringing women to Yale.

Attempting to evade the question of time, Yale overlooks perhaps its biggest mistake: Yale has waited too long. Now only a radical move will keep it from being behind the times. Vassar, Wesleyan, Williams, even Bennington, can be understood if not dismissed. But Princeton?

The Princeton Report, a 50-page detailed document delving into every aspect of education of women at Princeton, decided in favor of immediate coeducation.

This report, which Brewster admits is relevant, with a few minor exceptions, for Yale, finds that coeducation is less expensive and generally more viable than coordinate education.

Why wasn't the Princeton Report the Yale Report? The intended Vassar merger is a weak answer. With Dartmouth the only bedfellow left, questions of urgency cannot be passed off. Yale is behind, and unless it moves it will suffer.

Part of Yale's institutional pride is its insistence on doing things "right." There is perhaps nothing wrong with doing things right, unless "right" is not a little like the arrogance that turned Vassar off. At this point, "right" certainly does not mean haltingly, conservatively or with the fear of not doing things right.

Brewster understands student demands for coeducation but is a bit skeptical of the students' sense of urgency concerning their social lives. This skepticism towards the students' sense of urgency, towards their desire for an improved New Haven social scene, ignores the sick and unhealthy environment to which a Yale student is subjected. To pass off the demands of urgency as self-interest alone ignores the reality of the conditions that exist and their effect on the student body. But the question of urgency transcends just the unnatural living conditions.

Yale has systematically ignored the n~ed to educate women. "Yale cannot serve her underlying purpose or the nation by not educating women," says Trumbull Master Ronald Dworkin. The horrifying Jack of women's educational opportunities on a national level only increases the demand on Yale to act.

"Nice as it would be to move slowly, the problem of educating women is too urgent," says Dworkin. "I am in favor of something of a crash program-admitting women immediately." To this end, Dworkin advocates doing with Jess than ideal physical needs, if it means that girls could come to Yale now, in a coed arrangement.

That Yale's duty to educate women does not seem as compelling or urgent as other arguments betrays an Old Blue attitude toward women: they are somewhat different ; you know, not quite as good. This attitude also affects the decision to go coed or coordinate.

"Coordinate education suggests a separation, and presumably you create separate things when there is something unique about the two things," says Inslee Clark.

"To my mind there is nothing about living, sharing ideas, and learning that is unique or better for one group than for the other."

Clark agrees with Dworkin that it is too late to wait and that women must be admitted to Yale immediately.

More compelling, but no more important than the other reasons, is the fact that the quality of Yale students is going to suffer due to Brewster's hesitancy. Right now the students who turn Yale down to go somewhere else are among the students Yale most wants. They almost all go to coeducational institutions. As the entire admissions staff well knows, the bright young student is no longer buying the men's school idea. They only have to read the paper to know that if they can't live in what they consider a natural environment at Yale, there are other fine institutions where they can. The Princeton Report admits that only about half of a class is considered "top rate". The other half are not quite as good but are needed to fill the class out. There is no doubt this situation exists at Yale. Inslee Clark has met privately with both the faculty and the administration and warned them of the immediate drop in the quality of students at Yale if it does not go coed immediately.

Brewster is quite aware that the crisis is nigh. With the donation in hand, Brewster would probably be willing to take some bold steps; without it, he is more cautious.

Yet, a valid argument suggests that if Yale plunged into coeducation right now it could convince donors of the sincerity of its desire to improve women's education.

"If we admitted women immediately," says Ronald Dworkin, "we would get the best women in the United States. We would get girls of an intellectual quality that would make plain our reasons."

Surprisingly, the Princeton Report concluded that alumni giving would increase if coeducation were adopted. First, the younger alumni are generally in favor of coeducation and are beginning to enter income brackets where they could make sizeable donations. Second, increasing the undergraduate body by 25 or 40 per cent necessarily increases the number of future donors. Finally, any major issue on campus tends to focus almuni attention and increases their financial support of the University.

But these arguments, which can be bantered back and forth, pale next to the question of attitude. To rush forward does not necessarily mean to be haphazard.

Yale must rush if it is not going.to fall seriously behind. This move should be approached not with a fear of rushing but with the optimism of m aking Yale a forward-looking educational institution. To hesitate rather than make a wrong move is the old mixer attitude: the boy is out to impress the girl rather than meet her.

"You can't build a perfect institution for women before they come," says lnslee Clark. "You have to let them come and then adjust." Yale doesn't need another monument or inflexible institution. If Brewster is committed to flexibility, rather than fear of future problems, he should act-and then meet the problems that will arise with a confident enthusiasm.

Now, how could women be admitted to Yale next year? Easy. Classroom space and faculty-student ratio are the least complicated problems. The scheduling would be tighter at first, but there is plenty of unused classroom space at Yale. The Princeton

Report studied the increases in faculty and faculty salaries that would be necessary if 1000 women were admitted to Princeton.

They assumed that the faculty-student ratio would be maintained and that the quality of teaching would remain the same.

They also assumed that women would make approximately the same course selections as men, a variable open to some question but valid enough to work with.

The increase in needed finances is surprisingly small, the Princeton Report found. One reason is that in a large lecture course, the women students could be added without affecting the class or the lecturer. The greatest increase in faculty would be needed on lower levels--more graduate student instructors to lead discussion sections. But these are the lowest paid members of the faculty. The total cost of increase in faculty that would be needed at all levels to add I 000 women, the Princeton Report estimates, would be $577,932. Not bad compared with $50 million.

51 The New Journal I October 20, 1968

And Yale could absorb women much more easily than Princeton. Because Yale is more of a university, there are many departments and faculty that do not reach nearly as many students as they could. This is true of any university that wants to "push the forefronts of knowledge"; some administrators call it inefficiency, but Brewster rightly cringes at the word. In any case, admitting girls to a university like Yale would be much easier than at a college like Williams, Wesleyan, Vassar, Bennington or a small university like Princeton-and all of them are managing to muddle through.

Residence problems provide the biggest ruQ, but they too can be overcome. Eventually more residential colleges will have to be built, and men like Rev. Coffin, Dworkin, Clark, and R. W. B. Lewis hope that the colleges will be on a coed basis.

"I'd like to see Calhoun thirty per cent girls," says Master J.,ewis. "I would almost say to the administration, 'aw c'mon and take five entryways in Calhoun right away.'"

In the existing colleges the community bathrooms would probably make it inconvenient to have each entryway coed, but there is no obstacle to having certain entryways of the same college for men and others for women. If future colleges were built with private bathrooms for each suite as is done at Harvard, then even this problem would be eliminated.

Since residential colleges cannot be built by next September, there must be some means of freeing space in the existing colleges. The easiest way would be to make all triple suites into quads. (In the present triple there are two bedrooms and a livingroom; instead of having just one double bedroom put another bed in the single bedroom. Voila.)

There are approximately 400 triples in Yale College. Assuming Yale would admit the traditional number of men, a rule not quite as sacred as some would have it, then there would be 400 places open to women in September. Off-campus housing could be encouraged for the cause, which would also add to the number of women admitted.

If Brewster is hesitant about simply admitting 400 women to Yale next year, he could instead accept the same number of transfers from colleges such as Vassar, Smith, Connecticut College, Sarah Lawrence and Wellesley. These women would be here for a year-a modified junior year abroad-and would then return and get their degrees at their own colleges. If Yale did this for a year or two, it would learn about the various problems encountered in providing excellent women's education.

By 1970 or 1971, after a couple of years of educating women on campus, Yale could make the step to coeducation with more confidence.

Looking back at the Vassar-Yale report, now only a year old, one sees the anachronisms of a coordinate institution-with its own faculty, located possibly miles away from Yale in its own very separate kitchen -as overwhelming. Yale cannot afford to step backwards into the future by creating a new institution that is dated, rigid and behind the times before it is born. Yale must become coeducational. And it must do it now. Or, at least, by next year. ~

Vale Film Festival October 19, 20, 1968, 8:30 p.m.

Yale Law Schooi.Auditorium Advance ticket sales: $1 at Yale Co-op, Davenport Photo, Yale Audio Visual Dept., Information Office

An open competition to encourage creative film-making

/ Heroes, hawks, and hacks: in which New Raven's white knights battle political untouchables to change the system and wonder if the system just might change them

by James Green "Reformers," reflected George Washington Plunkett, that durable sage of Tammany Hall, "were only mornin' glories-looked lovely in the mornin' and withered up in short time, while the regular machines went on tlourishin' forever, like fine oaks."

Few can deny the historical accuracy of Plunkett's remark. Reformers from the days of the mugwumps to the "club" Democrats of Manhattan have traditionally vented their spleen, usually to the discomfort if not the dislocation of the regulars, and then departed from the scene.

New Haven has never really had a genuine reform movement. The Yankees, who were pushed to the sidelines and later to the suburbs by "the great unwashed," did not return to challenge the political power of the ethnic groups. Apparently the old stock did not suffer from status anxiety when it lost control of the political parties to the likes of Davey Fitzgerald and the Ullman brothers-the WASPs still controlled the law firms, school boards, banks and everything else that really mattered in New Haven. With the exception of a brief flurry of reform activity connected with the campaigns of Adlai Stevenson and Richard Lee in the early fifties, the only real challenge to the local party organization was launched this year when the McCarthy campaign struck New Haven with rather surprising force.

The entire slate of delegates pledged to McCarthy was elected in the April primary, and in the next week the embryonic Reform Democratic Movement (RDM) succeeded in placing eight of its members on the Democratic Town Committee. But in spite of these stunning victories by the McCarthyites, the G. W. Plunkett of New Haven was sanguine.

"This is a thing that will pass," mused Arthur Barbieri. "In the meantime it is my job as town chairman to make sure that everyone gets a fair shake." Thereformers have other ideas; they fully intend to remain active in New Haven and within a few years to win control of the Democratic Party from the man they call King Arthur.

The reformers have no illusions about the enormity of their task; they admit it will be difficult to hold the support they woo on the war issue in April and to expand their voting base among blacks and working-class whites. During the summer Irv Stolberg, then a reform candidate for the State Senate, predicted that the success of the RDM would depend to a great degree on the outcome of the primary challenges to the organization in September.

The insurgents had considerable difficulties with their primary campaigns this fall. Most of the student canvassers were still on vacation, and those who spent the summer in New Haven were "on an emotional down" after the events in Chica~o. Stolberg reluctantly bowed out of his somewhat symbolic race against State Senate majority leader Ed Marcus, and on primary day all three of the RDM candidates for State Assembly lost to organization incumbents. The Reform Democrats will now concentrate on Senator Abraham Ribicoff's campaign for re-election instead of a fourth-party effort and act as a left-of-center interest group in New Haven politics until the next elections.

James Green, a third-year graduate student in American History, is currently preparing a dissertation on American radicalism in the early twentieth century.

The September primaries were not an unmitigated disaster for the reformers. In the 11 Oth Assembly District Rich Norling, a uniquely practical student of political science in the Yale Graduate School, lost to the incumbent by the agonizing margin of five votes. This contest between a young reformer and a gnarled regular illustrated with remarkable clarity the challenges that the RDM faces.

First of all, the hard-fought campaign for the 11 Oth showed the reformers that they face an old-time machine which is still alive and kicking. Norling lost the Thirteenth Ward, a working-class area with a sizeable Polish enclave, by a margin of almost two to one, because the organization "got their people out." The old politics which the reformers scorn was perfectly symbolized in the Thirteenth.

Across the street from the polling place at St. Stanislaus School, the proprietor of a Polish meat market proudly displayed a picture of the incumbent in his window.

Attached was a large sign in. royal blue letters which read: "Vote for your friend, Ed Gudelski."

The large ethnic vote for the machine in the Thirteenth Ward did not surprise the reformers. What disturbed them most was their inability to get out the "friendly" vote. On primary day ROM workers noted that a "substantial" number of voters who had supported the McCarthy slate in April simply did not come out to vote for the ROM in September. This problem can be explained in part by the lack of student canvassers and by the apathetic or "dazed" attitude of many of the voters who bad supported the McCarthy-Reform slate in the spring.

The long-term problem of voter transiency reared its ugly head in the September skirmishness. Much of the McCarthy support from the April cam. paign had scattered over the summer. The RDM draws most of its voting support, not to mention its leadership, from the ranks of the young professionals-"Yale people and other transients," as one organization politician put it. "The only stable base of support we have," complained one ROM committeeman," is a group of lovely old ladies who seemed to have been weaned on the politics of Horace Greeley." In order to keep pace with their highly mobile constituency, the reformers must spend an inordinate amount of time registering new voters, circulating nominating petitions, battling with the registrar of voters, publicizing meetings and canvassing voters.

However, the rewards of bringing the growing professional-academic group into local politics can be substantial, as the results of the September primary in the heavily student Twenty-First Ward indicated: Norling carried it by a margin of 138 to 11. The recruitment of this new professional-academic group has, in effect, made the reform movement in New Haven, but it has also exacerbated towngown tensions, especially in wards like the Thirteenth, where the ethnic working class and new intellectual class face each other head on. William Miller in his book The Fifteenth Ward and the Great Society wrote of the "sizzling hatred" of Yale on the part of most New Haveners, which has resulted in part from the fact that "there is no longer a shock-absorbing collegeeducated non-Yale middle class." The McCarthy campaign has taken deeprooted conflict between native and transient into the political arena.

The endurance of the ROM will depend

John Bailey: "It's a matter of pride with John."

Bailey, Ribicof}, and Dempsey: conference on the mound, with the score 33-9.

Arthur Barbieri: "Give 'em zero."

71 The New Journal! October 20, 1968

to a great extent on its ability to continue to capitalize on voter discontent as it did this spring when the voters of New Haven expressed an amazing degree of anti-war or at least anti-administration sentiment.

The concern voters expressed over a national issue, in fact, stimulated a local reform impulse. Reform Democrats realize, however, that local political struggles in America rarely ascend to debates on foreign policy. A sachem of Tammany Hall put it rather succinctly when he described the futility of the Democratic Party's crusade against imperialism in 1900: The Party spent all its breath on that issue in the last campaign. That was all right, but you can't get people excited about the Phillipines. They're too busy makin' a livin' to bother about the niggers in the Pacific.

The reform leaders of New Haven were made painfully aware of the volatility of national issues on the night of March 31.

"At first the McCarthy movement here was really motivated almost wholly by concern for the war," said Professor Van Dorn Ooms, one of the principal organizers of the peace campaign in New Haven. "But after Johnson withdrew a good deal of wind left our sails and we bad to concentrate more on local issues."

Nevertheless the war in Vietnam did act as a catalyst for local political insurgency. The unprecedented coverage of the war in the media and the strenuous effort made by the McCarthyites to inject the peace issue into the primaries caused national and local issues to be mixed in a way that was quite unique.

Whatever effect the peace issue and McCarthy's candidacy bad on the birth of the reform movement, it was clear by the end of the summer that the organized challenge to the Democratic machine in New Haven had taken on an identity and a stt"ength of its own. When the Reform Democratic Movement began organizing within the ranks of the McCarthy campaign it created a good bit of tension. One group was committed almost exclusively to nominating McCarthy in Chicago and, with that end in sight, to obtaining fair representation at the State Convention in Hartford. A spokesman for this group felt that "the young reformers" bad taken over the McCarthy operation to work for local political causes, a development which he felt had hurt the effort to secure McCarthy's nomination. Furthermore be complained that the young people in the RDM "wanted to fight and agitate rather than work within the party to reform it."

This gentleman, who complained that the young people called him a "patrician reformer" and a "Stevenson re-tread," is the spokesman for a middle-aged group, many of them veterans of Dick Lee's campaigns, who are skeptical about the RDM. The Democratic Party for them is a monumental verity, somewhat like Red China: it must be reformed and captured if possible, but God forbid that it be fought head on.

The core of young activists in the ROM have different priorities. These "new" reformers-some who have flirted with the New Left and many more who were brought into politics by the hope and the tragedy that was called Kennedy-felt that McCarthy never really had a chance.

There is some irony in the fact that the Senator seemed less important to them than he did to the older group; he was, in a way, a means to an end. Although some of these people look back nostalgically to

the snowy hills of New Hampshire, many more look forward to open conflict with the machine in New Haven. The McCarthy campaign gave them a unique opportunity to infiltrate the Democratic machine, and so throughout the summer they concentrated on expanding their local power rather than campaigning on the long road to Chicago.

Many of these Reform Democrats feel uneasy and, in a sense, embarrassed working within the regular organization.

After all, it makes them the colleagues of political untouchables like Barbieri and Bailey, Dempsey and Dodd. The reformers an!, of course, sensitive to leftist charges that they are tainted with the odors of machine politics. A spokesman for the American Independent Movement (AIM) said that electoral cooperation with the Reform Democrats might be possible but that basically the two groups were ideologically incompatible. "In the first place," he said, "most AIM people are in some sense socialists. We also have no faith in the American political system. The Reform Democrats even seem to have faith in the Democratic Party of Connecticut. They say, 'It's hopeless to work in the system, but we'll do it anyway. â&#x20AC;˘ " Some of the reformers are receptive to this criticism. One of their leaders, Lee Wallace, said that he too had "no faith in the party system as it operates today. We will have to break it down, but we can start by trying to take over the Democratic Party," he contin ued, echoing the old NonPartisan League strategy, "because it is the party of power in New Haven just as it is in most of the South."

Those who agree with Wallace have supported the New Party even without McCarthy as a nominee. This form of insurgency is not simply a symbolic gesture to prove the reformers' militancy; it is an alternative strategy for disrupting the machine; and, more importantly it is a form of moral protest against the perversion of democracy which took place in Chicago and, to a lesser extent, in Hartford.

The older group who worked exclusively on the McCarthy campaign finds this strategy objectionable. Like Senator McCarthy and his Connecticut leader, Reverend Joseph Duffey, they will stay in the party and work for peace candidates, wherever those may be found.

In spite of the strategic and ideological differences which separated the young Reform Democrats from the McCarthy for President people all of the New Haven reformers found a basis for cooperation at the Hartford convention in June. In battling for proportional representation, abolition of the unit rule and sweeping reform of state election laws, the young activists discovered causes with which to confront the machine, and the McCarthy parti ans found issues which affected their candidate¡s chances for nomination.

In general, the ideological focus of most of the reformers has been on making the political system, especiaiJy the Democratic Party, more responsive to the will of the people. Some of the people involved in the movement go the full distance toward government by plebiscite and favor the abolition of conventions and the institution of a national primary. But there are not many thoroughgoing populists among the reformers. Van Ooms, the leader of the New Haven delegation at Hartford, said that he was "not convinced that a national presidential primary is the answer": Parties have to weigh things other than pure public opinion. A national primary would be

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brute democracy and binding state-level primaries also leave something to be desired.

I think that political conventions still have some value.

This statement characterizes the strong progressive strain in the reform movement.

Although the Reform Democrats' attack on the unresponsive party structure and restrictive election laws plus their rhetorical commitment to participatory democracy suggest a stro ng populist faith in the will of the people, in fact the reformers tend more toward the liberal theory that bad people are the cause of corruption and inflexibility in the political system.

And, like the progressives of the early twentieth century, their aim is to replace those bad people-the bosses-with good folks who will faithfully represent the people-themselves.

The Democratic Convention in Hartford was one of those classic confrontations between professional and amateur, between pragmatist and idealist-the kind that students of American politics conjure up in their fondest dreams. The images were sharp and colorful: the master John Bailey, glasses on forehead, orchestrating his convention; young reformers shouting their suggestions from the floor and laughing at the puppets they saw performing; a ghostly Tom Dodd retiring from the convention amid a chorus of boos; Arthur Miller reading an anti-war resolution to a vacuous audience. Who could ask for more?

The mood of the convention was boisterous and ill-tempered, but it contained none of the viciousness that characterized Stalag '68 in Chicago. The McCarthyites knew that they would be frustrated by Bailey's vast majority, but they were not willing to take it sitting down; they continually interrupted speakers with boos and cheers, much to the amazement of the regulars who thought that they had seen the last of this in 1924. "These McCarthy delegates are a tough, tough group of people," said Morris Olmer of the New Haven organization. "I have developed a political philosophy over the years, and it does not exclude compromise. There is no such attitude on the part of the McCarthy people."

Part of the explanation for what Olmer called the reformers' "straight-backed, narrow-minded" behavior is that they fear compromise with the machine politicians.

Doing business with the organization can be, in their view, the first step toward cooption. Their fears of being taken in by the enemy were no doubt deepened by the magnanimous response the chief villi an made to their movement. Arthur Barbieri said that "the April primaries were the best thing that ever happened to the Democratic Party in New Haven. I welcome whole-heartedly the new blood which has been brought into the party. We need these intelligent young people."

In a strange and perhaps perverse way, the behavior of the McCarthy delegates at Hartford and at Chicago resembled that of the Goldwater zealots at the Cow Palace fiasco in 1964. They too were dedicated enthusiasts, hitherto political amateurs, who preferred defeat to compromise. Of the Goldwater odyssey Richard Hofstadter has written: These delegates were moved more by a desire to dominate the party than to rule the country, concerned ... to express resentments, ... to justify a set of values and assert grandiose and militant visions ....

Although the Goldwaterites were probably more fantactical and certainly more

91 The New Journal I October 20, 1968

"In a short time the regulars did get their cues-from John Bailey, a ringmaster who could teach Dick Daley a few tricks." successful than the McCarthy enthusiasts, both groups showed the same disdain for ordinary party politics, convention rituals and that staple of American partisanship, compromise. In short, they were men and women sent on a sacred mission.

Some of the insurgents were embarrassed by their colleagues' belligerence, but Richard Goodwin, whose political manners are impeccable, did not think that the McCarthyites' continuous displays of emotion at the state convention were in poor taste. "It's interesting," he said after delivering a witty, intellectual speech, "that one quarter of the delegates in this auditorium are making all of the noise. Those other people," he concluded, referring to minions of the organization assembled in Hartford, "seem lost without a cue from their leaders."

Well, in a short time the regulars did get their cues-from J ohn Bailey, a ringmaster who could no doubt teach Dick Daley a few tricks. The McCarthy delegates introduced resolutions calling for an immediate end to the bombing of North Vietnam, for sweeping election reforms and for an investigation of an obnoxious case of vote frauds in New Haven; they were all resoundingly defeated by Bailey's people.

The only interesting vote came on the question of proportional representation.

Senator Abraham Ribicoff once again moved confidently into the spotlight and made a dramatic speech in favor of "fair" -not necessarily proportional-representation in which he offered up his seat to the national convention as a sacrificial lamb. The McCarthy delegates applauded this'gesture wildly but were still not convinced of his sincerity until be denounced the "gestapo tactics" of the police later in Chicago.

When the vote came, everyone wondered if Ribicotrs attempt at a bloodless coup would be successful. Bailey's line did waver slightly but not nearly enough to change the final outcome: the McCarthy forces would not receive any pre-determined number of delegates, they would get just as many as the state chairman thought they should have. That number, as fate would have it, was nine. Bailey, it seems, had to fight with the bosses in order to offer the McCarthyites this many delegates. "Give 'em zero," town chairman Barbieri was reported to have answered when Bailey asked his opinion.

The McCarthy delegation had agreed to accept no Jess than ten delegates and three alternates, which in the opinion of some dissidents, including most of the New Haveners, was less than full proportional representation (i.e., twelve or thirteen delegates). But Bailey had done all the compromising he had to do for that day and wouldn't give an inch to the McCarthyites. "lfs a matter of pride with John," said one party functionary adoringly.lt was also a matter of principle with the McCarthy delegates; they walked out of the convention that had tried to shut them out.

State chairman Joe Duffey was conciliatory, however; his people would continue to work within the party and they would take their complaint to the credentials committee in Chicago and possibly to the courts. Addressing his followers

after the walkout, Duffey made a sad prediction which sounded like an angry threat. He said , "If this party is hell-bent on nominating Hubert Humphrey, there will be white rioters as well as black in Chicago."

But the militant protest of the McCarthyites was soon muted by orders from the¡ national headquarters. The Senator asked Duffey to accept Bailey's offer of nine delegates "under protest." Professor Peter Rose, a delegate with radical political views, wrote in a recent issue of the AIM Newsletter that the compromise confirmed his "worst misgivings" about the McCarthy movement: "The decision was made at the express urging of Senator McCarthy, who, in the last analysis, was not content to let us do what we thought was right. An additional concession

by Bailey [an offer of two state committee seats) was apparently enough of a Jure to induce the Senator to ignore and undercut the significance of our walkout, to allow Bailey to claim, as he did immediately, that his offer had been fair all along."

Another Yale professor, who spoke for the moderates, did not feel that the compromise was a sell-out. "We were not happy with the final acceptance of nine delegates," said Van Ooms, who led the New Haven delegation. "But this was seen as a political rather than a moral issue."

The tensions within the McCarthy movement, both generational and ideological, were heightened by the inability of many

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young activists to make such delicate distinctions.

Throughout the convention there was a continuing undertone in what many of the McCarthy delegates were saying, which could only be characterized as good, oldfashioned anti-bossism. This might have been expected, for on the stage at the Buschnell sat two classic specimens, John Bailey and Arthur Barbieri. The insurgents felt that the bosses personified the undemocratic nature of the political order in Connecticut. What is more, the reformers have learned from their forebearers that it is much easier to direct a campaign against personalities than it is to attack archaic laws and procedures.

The Reform Democrats have, of course, been given a real shot in the arm by the antics of Boss Daley and his enforcers.

The Chicago debacle may not help thereformers win a great number of votes among the lower and middle class ethnic groups in New H aven, because Daley is a hero for most of the "lawnorder" folks who feel that the Yippies as well as the McCarthyites got exactly what they deserved. But for the middle class voters who have vaguely liberal sentiments and who may feel loyal to Humphrey, or perhaps to Mayor Lee, the results of the Chicago Convention have made the reformers' protests against the evils of bossism seem much more realistic. Jrv Stolberg of the ROM, who is running against State Senator Ed M arcus, a very smooth pol, was ¡

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interviewed on the local media after his return from Chicago and has probably gained a few votes as a result of his articulate description of the outrages which took place there.

The bosses are quick to defend themselves against the reformers' charges. "Of course the organization has power," said one veteran alderman. "But it wouldn't if it wasn't responsive. We don't have patronage any more, and so we can't control people. After all," he concluded smugly, "this isn't Chicago."

Have the bosses of New Haven heard their last hurrah? Apparently so, according to Morris Olmer, who bravely defended his chief: "The people like Arthur Barbieri," he argued, "and they think be's responsive. If he wasn't they wouldn't elect him town chairman. He is a mediator, not a boss like John Golden, who ruled before him with an iron hand."

The heart of the professionals' argument is that they represent a majority of the voters. Barbieri's men maintain. that the victory of the McCarthy slate in April was less than a sweeping mandate. The reformers are a minority, a snobbish intellectual one at that, who are "using the bossism issue as a guise for their own power drive" and "attempting to inflict their will on the people." It is a classic example of what William Lee Miller called "populist conservatism" in his entertaining book on the perils of politics in New Haven's Fifteenth Ward.

It is understandably difficult, however, for the reformers to accept the benevolent, majoritarian intentions that the regulars claim when confronted with incidents like the one which occurred in the Second Ward during the local primaries. St. Michael's hall resembled a court house in Lowndes County on April15. Voters of the Second Ward were intimidated, harassed and literaJly prevented from voting in elections for ward committeemen. The chief villain of this piece, one Albert Annunziata, attempted to use his power as a machine tender to disfranchise as many potential reform voters as possible. Using various delaying tactics which often bordered on the obscene, this gentleman managed to prevent at least twenty people from voting, a margin large enough to cost the Reform candidate for committeewoman the election.

Much to the surprise of the reformers, the machine did not get away with this reckless bit of chicanery. The three organiation men who executed, but probably did not instigate, the disfranchisement activities were convicted of vote fraud and the court recommended that Annunziata, who is an attorney for the city, be debarred.

But due to one of those wonderous vagaries of Connecticut election law the judge maintained that the ruling statute did not permit him to order a new election or to offer any other remedy to the aggrieved voters! For those who are of a conspiratorial frame of mind, the reformers point out that attorney Alexander Goldfarb, a hired gun for the Democratic Party in Connecticut who defended Annunziata et al., is also the draftsman of the aforementioned statute.

There is of course something more to the Reform Democrats' ideology than antibossism. They speak of creating "participatory democracy" within their party by throwing open the decision-making process to all who would participate. The RDM bas in fact formalized this concept in their new constitution, which provides for monthly policy meetings open to all.

There is much of the old New England town meeting in all of this, but very little of the trust implied in that image. Thereformers fear power in a way that would do Lord Acton proud and tend to spin out elaborate checks and balances on leadership when they discuss their organizational plans for the future. This fear of the corrupting influence of power is very evident in the reformers' attack on the present condition of the Democratic Party. Although they have presented a very intelligent critique of the existing political machinery, of primary laws, convention procedures, ward organizations etc., it seems that at the heart of their attack is a very deep distrust of those who have power. "Arthur Barbieri" said one of the leaders of the McCarthy campaign, "is a bad man."

Critics of the .RDM doubt that thereformers have the capacity to be responsive leaders. "They're not participatory at all," State Representative Morris Olmer, an outspoken regular, said of the Reform Democratic Movement. "They won't meet with us to discuss the issues. Their attitude seems to be, 'We don't knoW what the people want, but we will tell them.' Really, they're fascistic-minded." This critique of the reformers by a professional is ironically supported by a man of the New Left, Yale Professor Peter Rose, who said he feared that the reformers were "not really committed to changing the decisionmaking processes in New Haven. In fact, they have not really consulted the people before making their moves.'' Rose was also distressed that the reformers we,re too concerned with the traditional, liberal, dueprocess approach to problems. "Their fixation with Roberts' Rules of Order doesn't encourage involvement," said Rose. "It actually precludes participation by the average ghetto resident." After observing a few of the reformers' seemingly interminable organizational meetings, it is easy to apply to them the following characterization of amateur club politics offered by James Q. Wilson: Meetings begin late and end very late.

Everyone may speak and virtually everyone does. Roberts' Rules of Order is very much in evidence; indeed it is perhaps the only source of authority one can detect .... The amateur Democrats are extremely sensitive to the charge that amateur politics is nothing but a debating society. But ... there is an almost irresistible urge among the intellectual amateurs to get into the discussion in order to attack a weak argument, display a fact, dissect an inconsistency or make a point.

Whatever the inherent inadequacies of the reformers' approach to participatory democracy, the fact remains that there are several young activists out in the wards of New Haven working to bring more people into the political system without waiting for it to be completely revolutionized.

Bruce Payne, who was recently elected a Democratic ward committeeman on the Reform ticket, is a graduate student in political science who calls himself a resident activist. "I can't provide many of the old services," he said describing the limits of his role, "like getting city jobs for people; but the machine can't either. Many people are really lonely and distanced from the political order, and I simply try to channel their estrangement in useful directions."

Payne said that people in his ward were often anxious to talk about their own troubles and to suggest remedies for community problems. And so he has instituted open ward meetings which will serve an educational as well as a political function.

The role of a committeeman as Payne

sees it combines the talents of a therapist, an agitator and an old-time ward heeler.

Talking to old ladies about their rheumatism, the war in Vietnam and the corner street-light all seem to be mixed in the same bag. This is certainly not radical reform of existing structures-although the RDM has worked out some new concepts of intra-party democracy. It is, however, an attempt to make the system, the ancient apparatus which has served this city for so long, a bit more responsive to the people who live in the New Haven of 1968.

But good intentions, say critics of the reform movement, cannot disguise the basically elitist posture of the reformers. A critic on the left feels that,

Abe Ribicoff: "How hard it is to accept the truth."

Basically, the reformers in New Haven want to talk to their own kind. They disdain the bigotry of the lower-class ethnic groups, but they dQn't attempt to understand it. Part of the problem is that so many of these people are academics. The more the reform movementis University based, the less chance it has to understand the problems of the community.

The radical critique of the reformers was echoed by a machine politician, who also zeroed in on elitism: The McCarthy workers had an easy time of it bringing out the WASP vote, but they really bitched when I brought in old folks and people who didn't speak English and tried to help them out .... [.The reformers) seem to think that only the educated should vote.

James Q. Wilson in his analysis of reform Democrats concluded that class-based elitism was the biggest problem of the organizations he studied: The amateurs seek to mobilize intellectual, not material discontent; to obtain recognition for the cosmopolitan middle class, not for the disadvantaged lower class; and to press for rationalization on the basis of general principles rather than for the distribution of tangible benefits on the basis of personal mediation.

Bruce Payne: resident activist, therapist, agitator and old time war:d heeler.

Lee Wallace: "We will have to break the party system dowr.."

The problem of elitism plagues thereformers for two reasons: first, because their approach to politics and community problems tends to be filtered through the lenses of bourgeois America; and second, because their more or less permanent minority position forces them to project their political views onto the people from what seems to be a position of moral and intellectual superiority. As Wilson pointed out, this is the eternal dilemma of thereformers. "The only alternative to elitism is the reformation of public opinion," which is a vain hope without the ability to organize the mass of the electorate andestablish working alliances with those labor and minority groups which do have a mass base. The ROM in New Haven seems to be caught on the horns of this dilemma. Its membership is predominantly middle class and upper class, and it has no prospect of securing an agreement with labor or the white ethnic groups who are intensely loyal to Lee if not to the machine.

Prospects for working with black organizations should be equally clouded.

Middle-class reform movements have always had difficulty enlisting the aid of blacks, because, as one political scientist has written, Except for a handful with an intellectual orientation or a professional background, most potential Negro leaders seem [to the amateurs] to be primarily interested either in the conventional rewards of the professional politician oroin racist slogans and extreme positions.

~

11 I The New J ournal I October 20, 1968

The New H aven reformers are tempted to accept this dichotomy when they see Barbieri's black henchman Gene McCabe working hard to put together a ghetto machine like Boss Dawson's in Chicago and at the same time they see Fred Harris and other militants expressing their standard view of white liberals with good intentions. A member of AIM offers this pessimistic view: The bourgeois blacks may be willing to go along with the reform movement, but, basically, these liberals don't offer the structural changes the residents of the ghetto demand.

And, what is more, the reformers' dueprocess, organizational approach prevents them from understanding what's really happening among black people. lrv Stolberg, a reform leader, acknowledges the difficulties his group has h ad in securing black interest and cooperation.

"On the one hand, black leaders say that the McCarthy people didn't contact them early enough in the campaign, and on the other hand, when he did speak to them early in the winter, they didn't want to ally with us because we didn't have any power."

In spite of all the obstacles and dire predictions, the McCarthy movement made some progress toward political cooperation with the black community. Shortly after winning the entire block of New Raven's delegates to the Hartford Convention the McCarthy leaders gave four alternate positions to black people, including Bill Jones of the Progressive Democrats and Courtland Wilson of the NAACP. Later J on es and Mrs. Fred Harris accepted two of the positions the McCarthyites had been awarded on the Democratic State Committee. At the convention in H artford, Wilson spoke highly of the McCarthy delegates' walk-out; he said that they would return to New Haven as "winners" in the eyes of his community and predicted that there was definitely a future in an electoral aJiiance between Reform Democrats and the Black Coalition. There is of course some question as to how many blacks share Wilson's optimism. ("After all," said one white radical, "Courtland is a Tom." The reformers have, however, taken legitimate pleasure in the unexpected developments which occurred at the RDM convention in the Conte School on September 7. After an hour of rather boring debate on the constitution, about twenty black people including Wilson and John Barber, who is certainly not a "Tom," strode to the front of the auditorium. Just before their arrival Bill Jones made a speech, which presumably represented more than his own opinion, urging that " blacks not give up o n the political process." In spite of the odious nature of the C hicago convention, Jones was encouraged by the Negro challenges in southern states, by the candidacy of Channing Phillips, and by the fact that wh ite instead of black militants were exposing their heads to police billy clubs.

In a surprise move, an alert reformer nominated Courtland Wilson to oppose the temporary chairman of the convention, lrv Stolberg, for the vice presidency of the ROM. Wilson didn't know quite what to make of it but after caucusing with the black d elegation, decided to accept. Stolberg then withdrew a nd brought the house down with his timely statement that " the success of the movement will depend on a true coalition of all groups in New H aven."

Wilson was elected along with two other members of his delegation who won seats on the executive committee of the RDM.

Apparently, a group of articulate black leaders has decided to take a chance on the white, middle-class reformers.

The future of this alliance is, of course, very uncertain, and the inclusion of the black militants, even for the time being, probably reduces even further the appeal the RDM will have to labor and ethnic groups. There is also considerable doubt as to whether the reformers will be able to ally with AIM (the convention tabled a motion to endorse Robert Cook's candidacy on the AIM ticket) even though the field staffs of both groups will overlap considerably.

There are other weighty imponderables.

Can the ROM maintain the momentum it established in the April prim aries and during the conventions? Will the reformers suffer a serious loss of prestige as a result of their defeat in the September primaries?

If the war issue recedes, will the reformers lose the liberal, non-student support they won on it? There are more basic queries to be raised. Can the reformers really work within the Democratic party for anything like meaningful change in the political machinery, not to mention the social and economic systems, of New Haven. Or will the demands of professional politics eventually force them into the familiar mold-a mold in which their radical critics already place them? Can the reformers really claim to speak for the people even with the majority they attained in the April primary; or does their race, professional status and intellectual pretension prevent them from really understanding what the people, specifically poor whites and Negroes, really wan t or, more importantly, why? If these questions are not on the minds of the reformers at this critical stage in the development of their movement, they should be. ~

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121 The New Journal I October 20, 1968

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On a grey afternoon last spring W. H. Auden appeared at Pierson College. Hundreds of eager listeners were turned away for lack of space, although many readers consider Auden's latest poems to be echoes of his early work.

Around the same time Kenneth Koch read at Branford College. His audience included the friend who had invited him, 8 or I 0 other fellows of Branford who h ad dined with him a t the Master's House, and a few-a very few-undergraduates. But Koch's long poem, "The Pleasures of Peace" (Paris Review, Summer, 1968), which he read that day at Branford, may just be one of the most brilliant works by an y American p oet in years, and his influence on the best younger poets has been enormous.

Auden, of course, is famous. He has lectured and read at Yale many times before; students may read his work in at least one course in the English department. Koch is merely active and important. He teaches at Columbia.

In poetry, as in other areas, Yale suffers from cultural lag. What has already been institutionalized is received with great enthusiasm; what we cannot yet codify we ignore. The curriculum for both undergraduates and graduate students, especially in English, supports, without quite acknowledging it, the goal of turning out competent scholars and critics--nothing so unprofessional as poets and novelists. Particularly not poets, who are at best hard to pin down between Honors and High Pass. A working poet wants and needs to read what other poets are writing now. A budding scholar cares to read only what the tradition has already assimilated. H ence we have a course of studies which dares to reach as far as Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath and James Dickey.

Poets to be studied in class fit the "academic" style, an excellent mode which has simply dominated taste too long. This line starts, for present purposes, with Eliot and Pound, who discovered Tradition. It includes learned allusion, organic metaphor and elaborate form. (Pound revived the sestina, dead since Sidney as far as anyone knows; Eliot adopted and modified it for The Four Quartets.) The " baleful influence" (Koch's phrase) of Eliot and Pound made it obligatory for a self-respecting poet to know and use Latin, 17th-century E nglish poetry and 19th-century French poetry ; to try sestinas, sonnets, villanelles and ballades; to consider as subjects small creatures and smaller disappointments. From their example grew a school someone has called the "cornbelt metaphysicians."

Proficient in prosody, they can ruminate inexhaustibly on the moral and aesthetic implications of, say, an ugly bird which risks its life to obtain food. They "sometimes ... brave a subject like the Villa d' Este or a lighthouse in Rhode Island" (Koch). Like white liberals, they try to overwhelm rebellion by appearing to contain it. Gregory Corso once charged that "No square poet would ever begin a poem with 'Fried Shoes,' "so John Hollander produced not one b ut two, and one of them a villanelle. The example of Mr. H o llander, who taught at Yale for several years, shows what the dedicated academic poet can do with material superficially as unpromising as the descent of a chunk of plaster from Wright Hall or Saybrook College: it yields the ballad, "Near Tragedy Near Yale Station."

While Eliot and Pound packed their neo-neo-classical bags in London and New York, Dr. Williams practiced medicine and wrote poetry in Paterson, New J ersey. Key phrase for his style: "no ideas but in things." In place of philosophy modeled on The Four Quartets or pastiche derived from The Waste Land, the eye of the poet stayed o n the object, often a simple, domestic object. A red wheelbarrow or a handful of plums, whose thingness turns the poem from a meditation into a dramatic event: This Is Just to Say I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold (William Carlos Williams, in Tire Collected Earlier Poems) Susan H olahan teaches English at Yale and is a contributing editor of The New Journal.

Neither the wheelbarrow nor the plums give rise to an elaborate rhetorical gesture. Watch the wheelbarrow, covered with rainwater, and taste the plums; beyond that, it's up to you. Born in 1833 , Williams was a contemporary of Eliot. Yet his style did not come into its own as a model until after 1950.

Following Williams, the Black Mountain poets, led by Charles Olson, based "projectivism" o n things, on direct perception, on composition by field, on process rather than idea. Olson refused to let the years he spent at Yale affect him. He wanted the reader to hear the poet breathing in the verse and the poet to take advantage of the typewriter's distinctive qualities. At Black Mountain College, an enclave in North Carolina, Olson, Creeley, Dorn, Duncan, Levertov and others published magazines and books, developing the means and motives of projectivism from a combination of Williams with more esoteric materials, like Mayan hieroglyphics a nd H asidic mysticism . Later in the fifties traveling New Yorkers studied Williams-plus-Orientalism at the feet of Kenneth Rexroth in San Francisco, published their Whitmanesque incantations with Ferlinghetti at the City Lights Bookstore and began to call themselves the Beat Generation.

Meanwhile, back at the university, the academic literary quarterlies limited themselves to the accepted style of verse, eminently publishable, lamentably perishable.

Commercial publishers made up slim volumes for poets prominent in these quarterlies. Anti-academics countered with little magazines and private presses. Apparently two separate poetic universes coexisted in this country where, after all, the public for any poetry is extremely limited. But then an anthology turned coexistence into war.

An anthology can define a generation of poets exclusively. In 1954 Donald Hall, Louis Simpson and Robert Pack, academic poets who gathered in someone's academic basement, slyly limited " the new poets of England and America" in their anthology to an academic group deeply impressed by the teachings of New Criticism: their metaphors developed organically, their poems encouraged formalistic explication. Leaf through Hall-Simpson and the look of the pages tells the story-solid blocks of print, neat stanzas with lines of equal length. Donald Hall guided the selection of quiet, competent , nostalgic poems like his own appreciation of the Sleeping Giant hill in Hamden. In 1960 Donald Allen retaliated with an anthology of the Other poets, allowing no overlap. He labeled schools: The Projectivists (Olson, Duncan, Levertov, Creeley, et at.), The San Francisco Renaissance (Brother Antoninus, Ferlinghetti, Jack Spicer , Philip Lamantia), The Beat Generation (Kerouac, G insberg, Corso}, The New York G roup (Koch, Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery).

Belligerence shouted from Allen's title, The New American Poetry (a contrast to the internation al style of the academics); and the pages of broken lines, shifting forms, designs and symbols promised to treat experience freshly.

Just possibly the appearance of Allen's anthology signaled the decline into disfavor of the academic style. Only the strongest ivory tower could have withstood Kenneth Koch's attack o n academics "gargling out innocuous (to whom?) poems about maple trees and their children" (Allen, p. 231).

Both older generations influenced the 54 poets in Paul Carroll's new anthology, The Young American P oets.

Young American Poets wear what learning they have more lightly than did the academics in Hall-Simpson; yet many of them think harder than did Allen's " new America n poets." Because Paul Carroll had a poem of his own among the projectivists in the Allen anthology, we should expect a certain sympathy in his collection with open forms and experimentation. And he reveals this sympathy, without letting it become an exclusive preference. His chosen young poets don't line up precisely on one side or the other in the great War of the Anthologies.

In fact , unlike its predecessors, The Young American Poets does not define a generation. The generation of these poets-those who last-will occur 5 to 10 years from now.

(Assume that a poetic generation is when something poetically new happens definitively, or something poetica!Jy old ends decisively. Current opinion puts the generation of the academics in 1947, with the award of the Pulitzer Prize to Lowell's Lord Weary's Castle, and the generation of the Others in about 1962.) Right now, more young poets reveal their teachers than exhibit poetic personalities of their own. Any group of writers 22-35 years old must

13 I The New Jour nail October 20, 1968

flatter someone this way. Their poems don't lose interest for all that.

A Young American Poet, according to Paul Carroll's selection, has in many ways the best of both schools. Your composite Young American Poet was born in 1932, or later. He or she has a B.A., frequently an M.A. from someplace like the Creative Writing Program at Iowa.

May have published a book-some have published many -but, if so, in all likelihood with a small press of exotic title (fibor de Nagy, Black Sparrow, Kayak, etc.). Publication with a commercial press smacks of sell-out, unless, like Aram Saroyan, you can get Random House under contract to put out a ream of blank paper stamped with your copyright when you've stopped trusting words.

Almost certainly has appeared in magazines, little Qr otherwise, most frequently in those edited by friends. (At least 15 of the 54 edit little magazines themselves: the small-press/ little-magazine world seems to run on friendships.) Lives in San Francisco, on New York's Lower East Side or at a State College--sometimes all three. Makes a living teaching, criticizing art or picking up fellowships.

Promulgates a poetics reluctantly but floridly when pressed, disavowing all the while any ability or inclination to explain why or how one writes poetry: I write poetry to tie leashes onto vacuums because it is a city ordinance. I write poetry to be the right person to answer the wrong question .... I suppose you could say I write poetry to find out why I write poetry.

(Julia Vinograd) Young American Poetry is frank, dramatic, experimental with language if not with form, rigorous in its demands on poet and audience. Young American Poets put themselves firmly in the center of their poems. Then they call in wives and children, friends and poetic masters, not as metaphors, emblems or dramatic poses but as facts, even as interruptions to the work of poetry: 36.

Life is boring when you are Tarzan of the Apes e.g. You step out from behind a bush and say Yes, lam M'sieurTarzan 37.

Dick Gallup arrives at this point and says " Life is too boring" 38.

Jacques Louis David is crying in his crib he is not bored Jane has given him a banana 39.

Dick reads those lines but I laugh plenty they bore him (Ted Berrigan, "Tambourine Life")

Berrigan has the gall to record visits, drop names, make lists, tell bad jokes and turn these accidents into an image of a crazy, jangling, thin-skinned existence only the Salvation Army would dream of using for music: tambourine life. For these poets, random acts become the poem, or the poem itself can become an act, a weapon: With its cutting edge With its submarine of survivors With its flagpole that has run down all flags With its shape of a grave-digger's shovel With its vein of ore With its speed of a runner who leaves no tracks I jab into your mouth, this poem, this tongue.

(Jack Marshall, "Forced Entry") Forsaking words, Diane Wakoski, who admits to a fetish about George Washington and a soul from the Minoan age, poses with a pistol pointed at the startled reader. She makes her portrait her best poem. Message from Marshall, Wakoski, et al.: a Young American Poet does not hesitate to hold the reader up, to aim his poems outward and let them explode. To replace Koch's satire of the academic style, the first gasp for poetic "Fresh Air," Saint Geraud addresses himself directly and bitterly to his contemporaries: There's no time left to write poems.

If you wiU write rallying cries, yes, do so, ....

•

•

•

•

•

•

What I mean is: maybe you are the earth's last poets.

(Saint Geraud, "To American Poets'')

Maybe. Koch's poem created a character. Saint Geraud is a character, a pseudonym from an 18th-century porno-

graphic novel which masks the poet. "Saint Geraud" dismisses Bill Knott (his erstwhile self, real-world name) as "a virgin and a suicide." He pubhshed Knott's suicide letter widely in 1966 to announce a personal apocalypse.

Other poets prepare to face the general apocalypse he predicts. Robert Kelly tries to articulate it, with the help of the world's mythologies and poetic strategies out of Blake and Ginsberg. Lou Lipsitz, who has a Ph.D. from Yale in Political Science, hopes (momentarily) to avoid it: We'll stay in the mountains, preaching, singing, weaving and propagating our own kind.

(Lipsitz, "For WFG Who Was Told That He Didn't Publish Enough to be promoted to Associate Professor") Young American Poetry begins with the poet at the center.lt's a fresh start, with no one pretending that poems descend from the air or that poets finally want anything more than what they can make poetically. The enterprise mushrooms; it involves the reader, radicalizing him artistically. The key ideas are confrontation and participation, as: 1 hold in my hands one invaluable, unusually large, circular, hydrated, cellular, fish-spined, shell-pasted, molecular, wood-fitted, lilac scented, pollenated, earth-colored, Katanga-mined, Bantu-smelted, ...

•

•

•

•

mobile, eurhythmic, mechanical non-plastic, free-spinning, winged, elevated, piece of myself.

If you look closely you can see it.

(Morton Marcus, "Look Closely")

•

Any poet wants to make the reader do his share of the poetic work, or "look closely," but 71 adjectives for a bit of the poet's self-the very accumulation has to suggest a new way in this generation to approach the task of poetry. These young poets see it as part of their responsibility not to let the reader escape his reading untouched.

A simple strategy: break a 3-word sentence ("This ... ruins me") with a 43-line parenthesis describing the first word, as Gerald William Barrax (the one black poet in the 54) does in "Second Dance Poem." The reader must meet the thing itself head on and face the poet's dissolution when they both break the spell of the parenthesis. The distant reader finds himself implicated, committedguerrilla poetry (to which supply any available analogy to the Living Theatre).

Whatever the poem does to the reader dramatically, it remains on the page. Therefore, the most exciting work

by Young American Poets tries all imaginable maneuvers with that page. Tricks in this bag are magic to experimenters. Berrigan's "Tambourine Life" places events in time (sequence or simultaneity) by spacing them-making the poem's dramatic strategy a visual one. Barrax's "Second Dance Poem" entangles the reader with the poet in the parentheses of a paradoxical relationship--making the poem's visual strategy a dramatic one. Lines spaced out in one way or another keep meanings and images ftexible in the best work. Only poets like James Applewhite, Marvin Bell, James Tate and a few others, who move in traditional patterns of imagery, take little or no advantage of the possibilities of visual form. Oddly, Applewhite, Bell and Tate all write about the constrictions of traditional form. Once the reader has stumbled happily through the chaotic layout of "Tambourine Life" or meandered dazedly around Vito Hannibal Acconci's "Kay Price and Stella Pajunas," a poem of conventional shape will feel cribbed and confined. Young American poets have surveyed e. e. cummings' experiments in typography; they have followed Olson's advice to mirror breathing in their lines and make the best use of the typewriter. Acconci in "Kay Price ... " met these challenges an<! more (near the end vertical strips 7 or 8 characters wide describe the smalles, largest, longest, quickest books in the world) to the bewilderment and irritation of the reader. Until you reach his note on the title: "Kay Price, of Adelaide, South Australia, typed, nonstop, for 53 hours, ending on June 13, 1962. Stella Pajunas, in 1946, typed 216 words per minute on an IBM machine." By this time, what better

141 The New Journal I October 20, 1968

material than a praise of the machine itself, on that machine?

At some point, poem-shapes abandon the verbal resources of traditional poetry. In "Re," Acconci encloses each line in 0, often depositing further sets of 0 in between. Here and there a set of 0 will contain words, permutations of "here and there" and "I say." "Re" might mean "about," "on the subject of;" it has to do in Latin with "thing," which becomes "affairs," or maybe "event" - a neat succession to describe what happens in the figurepoem when the poet tries to capture his experience in words and the subject becomes action on paper. With a poem like "Scrip Ant," the reader ventures on his own.

The poet or perpetrator, Clark Coolidge, does offer a description of what be's about: As Stein has most clearly & accurately indicated, Words have

a universe of qualities other than those of descriptive relation: Hardness, Density, Sound-Shape, Vector-Force, & Degrees of Transparency/ Opacity. I am attempting to peer through the lines into this possible WoodArt Landscape, work within it & return with Wordscapes, WordObjects to light and refresh the mind so currently overloaded with centuries of medial Language-Tape.

Acconci and Coolidge appropriate techniques from a phenomenon very popular in Europe now: concrete poetry. Concrete poets make graphic symbols of words and windmills of letters. (The Something Else Press has an anthology of concrete poetry with handsome and enlightening examples. Sometimes they can be coaxed into selling it.) One poet in the 54 has contributed work of this type, what he calls "pattern poems." Richard Kostelanetz's "Tribute to Henry Ford-1, 2, 3" are composed of Ts and A's, the first two in simple highway traffic patterns, the third with both letters in a more complicated clover-leaf. These should warn aspirants against choosing novelty out of weakness; other poets in this collection go beyond their depth with forms and styles borrowed from more crafty predecessors or created for the occasion, but only these "pattern poems" exploit a mode cheaply.

Strange that the one poet here who has no art with words should supply the longest biography, a full page of small print detailing all his critical essays and collections of others' writings.

If some young poets move beyond the tradition by pushing form--dramatic and visual-to its limits, others move beyond by moving in, by penetrating the verbal texture of poetry in order to turn it inside out. (A leader like Berrigan bas tried all of these paths. He says he works through a poetics in each book he finishes.) Key concept here: syntax, the interrelation of parts in languagestructures. Beyond syntax of words within the sentence lies a syntax of thoughts, phrases or objects in the poem.

Traditional poetry places its objects in relations either predictable or immediately acceptable. Many Young American Poets test variations of the surrealist style, rejecting common object-, phrase- or thought-syntax, sometimes rejecting even the notion of design, as Sotere Torregian does most emphatically. Torregian calls himself the "spokesman for the Surrealist Movement in America."

(The Movement's motto: "C'est Ia guerre totale"-more guerrila poetry.) Surrealist images rise from the unconscious, according to practitioners. The poet invites; be does not organize. He hopes that alogical connections will create a new syntax, evocative or suggestive, possibly a projection of something hitherto untapped in the reader's unconscious experience. Try, for example: Many students of Greek think a thorn of the foot an Egyptian bird like a heron Three tailors of Tooley Street. He was also the chief Moon God "wandering the blue rocks" live with me (Sotere Torregian, "The Age of Gold") What bells ring: Androcles and the lion? An old Irish folksong? Sir James Frazier, Oisin or Christopher Marlowe?

Collect all associations, then test against the title. You may miss the sound of poetry, but in exchange you gain a kaleidoscope of impossible, beautiful visions at first and a knowledge of u.t ter deprivation as you approach the end: You runaway Where girls are dubbed with race-horse wreaths You return the area is demolished by the robot bomb Cheese and bread our diet again Weare naked (Torregian, "Age of Gold")

Random images in surrealist poetry replace, or sometimes augment, the random events of "reality" in a poem like "Tambourine Life." Although surrealism fashionably emphasizes the aleatory element, poetry that takes off from this style can still convince the reader that a poet remains in control, that he is at the center, still the Hero of Art. To explain the origin of this control, Tyner White makes a game-metaphor for a process many of his contemporaries probably experience in some form: Most of my poems start as nonsense improvisations, but once the material is on the page and the typewriter has given up, I · am in the position of a chess player looking over his boardWhite to play and win ... from a defeated jangle of rubbish one hopes to make a triumph out of the poem. The trouble is knowing what Black will do.

A game played on the ubiquitous Writing Machine provides the battleground for the struggle from rubbish to poem, always against a mysterious adversary who might upset the whole board whenever he chooses.

Directness that amounts to an assault on the reader, startling visual techniques, old methods under new control are positive and novel qualities of poets in the new anthology. The same qualities, however, lead to characteristic

RE ( here)( )( ( )(th ere)(

) )(her e and ther e - 1 &f\y her e J ) ( I do not s ay now) ( ( I do not say tt now)( )( ) ( )(then and there - I s a y there)( ( . )( )( ""Y there) ( )(I do not say then )( ) (I do not say , then , th1s)( )( ( ) (then I say) ( ( )( ) (here and there) ( )(flrst here)( ) (I sald here second)( )( ) ( )(I do not talk fl rst )( ) ( )( )(there then) ( )(here goes)( ) (I do not say what goes)! )( ) ( )(I do not go on $8ylng)( ) )( ) (there 1 s) ( ( )(that is not to say)( ) (I do not say that)( )( ) ( )(here below) ( . ) ( J( )( I tlo not tf\;).k down) ( )(under II¥ words) ( (under dlSeuaslon) ( )( ( )(all there)( ( )( )(I do not say all) ( )(Rll I say)( )

( (

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failings. Directness becomes flat-footed, prosy. Experimental form overwhelms or excludes substance. Linguistic tricks proliferate into chaos. From young poets tradition expects, even demands, passion, inventiveness and nerve and in return forgives imitation of older poets, inflation of inadequate images/ ideas, cramping of what could be major images/ ideas. Nevertheless, the excitements of novelty more than compensate for the inevitable losses of control.

In poetry with these qualities another problem arises, not strictly new, but very much a part of the new style: Do these poems end, or do they just stop? (Does it matter?)

A slice of life has no necessary structure and conclusion, unlike an academic homiJy upon an ant. The pattern of a concrete poem can close itself, but the open forms derived from cummings, Olson al)d Ginsberg just seem to promise more of the same. And the unconscious, the imagereservoir, of a surrealist runs out of new images sooner than it provides their proper completion, whatever it might be (assuming that the orthodox surrealist leaves the products of his unconscious untampered with). To take these statements negatively, as deprecations of contemporary poetry, is to accept a common critical premise: that the nature of art is to order experience. In the past, poets who took the chance of open-endedness in a poem usually took pains to point their readers in the right direction(s), a kind of ordering. Young poets now might argue (do argue, on the evidence of their work) that, given the universe of experience they confront, exalting order as the only true aim of art would be as false as exalting the heroic couplet as the only true form. For many Young • American Poets, the criterion of completeness is dated, irrelevant. Their poems aproach- become-happenings, happily; and the reader must work to complete the experience of the poem, if he needs to. Ultimately, this adventitiousness becomes a criterion for the new poetry, and editors of little magazines, describing their policies, categorically reject the "well-made" poem. Academic style has thus traveled 180 degrees on a wheel of fortune.

The new style, like the old, has its roots in an attitude toward the language available to the poet. A canny youngster will carve out for himself something like Peter Scheldahl's blob-theory of American English: I'm unalterably stuck with the terrible American language, which is a volatile and often a very messy language....

American words are blobs, rather than clusters, of meaning.

Sticking with the "native speech rhythms" is the only way to know what you yourself are talking about, let alone to communicate it to someone el~.

Altogether, it verges on a political program of novel courage, this insistence that even the artist confront the life around him directly, instead of trying to shape it intellectually.

The Young American Poets as an anthology is distinguished by diversity, inclusiveness rather than exclusiveness. To put this collection together, Paul Carroll read magazines by the hundreds, communicated with scores of older poets, teachers and editors and finally invited poems from 300 poets. Of whom he chose 54. Hard to quarrel with his choices, harder to pick the few who will stay the course, one day to write as patronizing an Introduction-by-a-Major-Poet-of-the-Previous-Generation as the brief essay by James Dickey which begins this book.

I might say: Watch Acconci, Berrigan and Tony Towle, if you like to laugh while doing headstands. Kelly if your visions are naturally mythic. Louise GlUck and Dennis Schmitz if you choose to know, elegantly, where you are in a poem at all times. Ronald J obnson if you appreciate a brilliant meadow when a poet puts you in the middle of one. And James Welch, particularly for his special subject matter: he's a Blackfoot Indian. Under any circumstances or conditions, watch. Almost all of the 54 repay a reading, even a strenuous one, and almost all promise more and better poetry. Their mistakes are instructive, their successes delightful. In one fat volume, with entertaining full-page photographs and even more entertaining biographies-cum-manifestos, they make a zany, furry, sometimes furious, addition to the generative principle in anthologies.

About ten years ago, Paul Carroll was the first editor to publish Kerouac, Burroughs and other important Beats in Big Table. An anthology like this proves that he remains more interested in what a poet is trying to do than in telling him what he ought to do--a healthy if heretical attitude.~

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161 The New Journal ! October 20, 1968

Biafra: the threat of genocide becomes a reality

by Richard N. Henderson

The war between Nigeria and the secessionist Republic of Biafra is now entering a phase in which the densely populated heartland of Biafra will be generally overrun. Many observers have described this war, with its already staggering toll of death by starvation, as a process of "genocide."

This word should never be bandied about lightly; for surely, should it accurately describe a situation in the world today, a morally concerned American public would be expected to demand immediate, drastic, multi-national efforts to forestall such an outcome. It is therefore extremely important for us all to examine very carefully what is happening in Biafra at this time.

Eight years ago, the new nation of Nigeria was widely bailed as the greatest triumph of British colonial policy. But since that time, the r ealities of political life in Nigeria have increasingly shifted from the glittering images of progressive nationhood which seem to fascinate most American and British diplomats arid officials.

Many months ago, at the outset of the Biafran secession, the image which these officials accepted was that of a strong, legally constituted nation embarking upon a "surgical" and humane operation on one of its segments, a segment which had been led astray by a clique of evil men. This police action, it was h~ld, would end in a few weeks at the most, since tbere was "qo popular support" behind the Biafran secession.

However, the realities of the Nigerian scene can be observed today through the eyewitness reports which have filtered out through the international news media since the war began, particularly those from reporters actually in Biafra or at the battlefronts. These accounts have clearly described the stubborn devotion of the Biafran people to the cause of their independence in the face of tre~endous odds and suffering, and they have also reported the terrible consequences which have followed when the Nigerian armies, made victorious by the sheer weight of military equipment supplied them by Britain and Russia, have confronted Biafran populations in those areas they have overrun.

And yet as the death toll mounts, American and British officials continue to minimize it or to dismiss it as an " internal matter" to be resolved "by the Nigerians themselves." Indeed, when the prediction that the people of Biafra had no will to fight proved totally false, the British in particular did not draw from this the logical conclusion that their doctrines had been wrong. Instead, they proceeded to rescue their erroneous theories by providing arms to the Nigerians, a response which our government has quite clearly supported.

How has this state of affairs come about? Ultimately, basic responsibility for the breakdown itself rests squarely upon the shoulders of Great Britain, whose colonial designs made it almost certain, from the beginning, that the Nigerian experiment would fail. On the one hand, they saw to it that almost all of the economic, legal and educational progress would occur Richard N. Henderson, Associate Professor of Anthropology, did research in Nigeria from 1960 until1962 and is currently writing a book on 1 bo society and culture. This article is based on testimony he presented before the African Affairs Subcommittee of the Senate F oreign Relations Committee a few weeks ago.

in the southern regions of Nigeria, not in the North, and they encouraged the people of the overpopulated East (which later became Biafra) to travel as skilled workers into the other regions, thus to serve as the primary social "glue" which bound the country together. But on the other hand, when these same people began leading nationalist, democratic movements towards an independent "one Nigeria," the British created a parliamentary system which ensured that political power would predominantly reside in the more congenial hands of the authoritarian, traditional northern rulers, who themselves insisted prior to independence on either dominating the federation or seceding from it.

For these two reasons, the failure of a nation was unknowingly but largely predetermined. The Federation began in 1960 under a coalition between parties based in the North and the East, but an inexorable series of developments followed independence: In 1962 the first ominous fracturing occurred in the western region, as a result of relentless pressures exerted by the coalition parties in power; by 1963 there were intense ethnic-group conflicts over census returns from various parts of the federation. In 1964 a breakdown of the coalition between the North and the East was followed by party realignments and a disorderly, disputed national election; in 1965 Hausa people were murdered in considerable numbers in turbulent Yorubaland, lbos living in the North were publicly vilified by prominent Northern leaders, and a blatant rigging--endorsed by the federal government--of the Western elections effectively destroyed public confidence in the electoral process.

The first army coup of 1966, led by nationalist young (mostly Eastern) officers, was widely hailed as the beginning of a new national order. But leadership of the state fell not to these men but to an older officer ~ho proved ineffectual. The extent of the coup's failure can be assessed from the fact that the countercoup which followed was an affair of pure tribal wrath which did not even pretend to reflect national consensus.

One cannot assess the subsequent developments of the Biafran secession and war without understanding three crucial facts.

First, any careful observer of the Nigerian scene with the slightest capacity for objectivity is aware of the enormous complexity of the political maneuverings before the pogroms of 1966 and knows that all ethnic groups in Nigeria contributed their full share to the failure of unity. To be fair, there were elites from all parts of the country who were dedicated to true national unity, but these elites had to rely for support on grassroots which were basically tribalistic in outlook. To some degree at least, the populations of Eastern origin were the most strongly nationalistic, precisely because they had emigrated widely to other regions; but they also were irritants in those regions because of their commercial strength and their superior education, which sometimes led to arrogance. In addition, their position as agents of social mixture in those regions made them highly vulnerable as scapegoats when the basis for unity began to dissolve.

But such facts hardly justify blaming these elements for the loss of unity itself; quite the contrary, they were its strongest advocates. When personal accounts of the dissolution become available (assuming

171 The New J ournal ! October 20, 1968

that representatives of both sides survive to write them) the devotion of p r ominent Easterners to the ideal of national unity will be indubitable.

Second , an observer must consider the outcome of the rise in intertribal hostility which derived from political competition on the national level. In September of 1966 tens of thousands of Easterners were slaughtered in the Nor th. Coun tless others were dispossessed, mutilated and terrorized, and well over a million such persons were driven from the North as refugees back to the East. It has been argued by some that this pogrom alone was enough to destr oy the unity of N igeria; but when the Nigerian military government, which itself had ridden to power only a few months earlier over the corpses of more than t\VO hundred Eastern officers, proceeded to cap the pogroms with a public breach of the conciliatory agreements negotiated in Aburi, Ghana, the Biafran secession seemed to most Easterners to be the only realistic way of ensuring their secur ity against what co.uld only appear to them as a devious, hostile federal power.

But the third fact to be emphasized is much more important to the situation now, and it is the least widely understood. This is the fact that, from the time of the pogroms onward, the Nigerian military government adopted the systematic tactic of mak ing a single tribal group the scapegoat in order to isolate and minimize its opposition and to generate a Nigerian u nity where none initially existed.

Since the leader of the East was an Ibo, since the majority of the eastern population was Ibo, since most of the leaders of the first military coup had been I bo, since no major lbo leaders had died in that earlier coup, and since most of the victims of the countercoup and of the pogroms had been Ibo, the.new Nigerian military government found it convenient to identify the lbos as evil conspirators, as scapegoats to be "blamed for the failure of the old federation. In this way, the Nigerians hoped to d raw the support of other tribal groups away from the new Republic of Biafra and to forge a new basis of N igerian unity through shared hatred of imagined Ibo viUains.

The federal government bas of course consistently denied discriminating against any ethnic group in the federation. However, this denial gains no credibility from the "twelve-state" division of the country drawn up by that government, ostensibly to provide every major ethnic unit with its rightful territorial power base. Taking account of the fact that the Hausa, Yoruba and Ibo populations are, very roughly, comparable in numbers (the Hausa being somewhat more numerous than the Ibo, the Yoruba somewhat less), it turns out that in Colonel Gowon's twelve-state scheme, the H ausa and Yoruba would be allocated an effective majority control over three states apiece, cover ing a total area of over 150,000 square miles, while the Ibo population would be deprived of its most valuable lands and given control of a single state covering a tiny region of only 8,000 miles-much less than its r ightful homeland. Quite obviously, this scheme was designed to impoverish the I bo people for the benefit of other tribal groups in the East and Midwest regions.

F urthermore, the stereotyping and stigmatizing of lbos has been the major theme of Nigerian gover nment propaganda since the beginning of the war. Nobody can remain long in Nigeria unless be espouses (or at least defers to) this dogma . H owever,

once a person has accepted it, he can then reconcile himself to (and in many cases, relish) the prospect that millions of Ibos may have to die in the interests of "keeping Nigeria one."

These policies have, in fact, been effective in molding attitudes throughout Nigeria. I spoke a few days ago to a serious, mild-mannered and scholarly official, who casually informed me about the war: After affirming his sym pathy for his "Ibo brothers" (an act which has now become something of a Nigerian national r itual) and pointing out that a hundred or so lbo students are prominently in attendance at Ibadan University, be complained about the sympathy of the American public toward Biafra and said it was u nfortunate that Nigeria could not engage in the kinds of propaganda which would answer the Biafran claims. He said to m e, "If we told the Americans the truth, told them the facts that the Ibo people have been evil and wicked and seek to destroy our country, they would ask us, 'Why then do you want them in your country at all?' " So I brought the question back to him and asked, "If you do think they are that way, why do you want them in your country?" "As they are now," he answered, "in their homeland in the center of our country, they are all like a cancer which will destroy us. If we leave them there, they will get arms from France and make war against us. W e will never rest until we have completely rooted out this cancer from our country."

T he frigh tening implication of such views, which can be elicited by anybody from any N igerian official who drops his guard in conversation, seems to be lost on our own government personnel. In fact, the leaders of our State Department appear to have accepted the N iger ian doctrine of total lbo culpability, and perhaps this reliance upon Nigerian views is what has led them to underestimate so grossly the death rate of starving Biafrans. Certainly the recent statements by our State Department parrot the official Nigerian view of this situation, and the views of some of our senators appear to have adopted the Nigerian argument that all blame for the deaths in Biafra must be relegated to the Biafran leaders themselves.

Clearly, however, the death toll by starvation is not the only horror in store for the people of Biafra. We all are aware that the N igerian armies which have encircled the l bo heartlands are heavily armed with British and Russian weapons.

But it can hardly be doubted, in view of reports from the front, that they are also strongly armed with the conviction of fanatics; that as they kiU Biafrans they are destroying a human "cancer" which they describe by the term "lbo." And these two facts, overwhelming military power and overwhelming righteous passion, add up, in my opinion, to genocide taking place in Biafra today.

It matters very little whether or not this result is intended by General Gowoo, or whether a few thousand Ibos are at the same time being allowed by the Nigerians to live in various other parts of the country as helots of the state. Peace Corps people living in Northern Niger ia at the time of the pogroms were astonished at the readiness with which ordinarily pacific local populations accepted the idea of obliterating comm unities of foreign migrants, even after years of peace and considerable integration. After 15 months of ferocious warfare, there is every probability that whatever constraints previously existed in

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Friday, October 25 DRACULA (1931) Bela Lugosl, Helen Chandler Gleeful Gothic perversi ty in a vintage horro r film.

Saturday, October 26 Roger Corman's TOMB OF LIGEIA (1964) VIncent Price, Elizabeth Shepherd Corman's flashy style and a moral p reoccupations produce this best of his Poe adaptations.

Also Wednesday, October 23, Fo rd's SHE WORE A YELLOW RIBBON Saturday , October 19, Bresson's A MAN ESCAPED

lSI The New Journal I October 20, 1968

the populace have been long lost among the Nigerian armies in the field and that exhortations to be moderate, made by Nigerian leaders at a distance, are unlikely to prove effective.

However, yet another frightening development is apparent as this war moves towards its seemingly inexorable outcome.

Parts of the English and American press, which formerly reported the conflict with considerable objectivity and detail, are now beginning to present summaries which try to make the best of what is happening, to shield us all (including, one may presume, their authors) from the raw horror of recent events. We are being told that the starvation of millions is merely an efficient means of warfare which has timehonored precedent, that this is, after all, the first time that an African country has proved itself by winning its own modern war, that the death rate in Biafra seems Jess alarming if we compare it with how many more might die in the future if Nigeria were to disintegrate further.

Perhaps it is emotionally intolerable for us to bear the burden of horror and guilt which we would otherwise have to face; perhaps we must all react in this way. Perhaps our State Department finds it necessary to minimize, justify and dismiss the situation for the same compelling reasons.

But I believe that other reactions remain possible. Although our government has made no effective efforts to stop the fighting, it can still try to minimize the final slaughter by bringing the case decisively before the United Nations as a matter reobservers should be sent into Nigeria in quiring urgent international action. UN large numbers, to forestall the genocide

which is otherwise highly probable. Occasional brief "official missions," guided by Nigerian troops, simply cannot suffice for this situation. And our country can mount, through the UN or through the various agencies now active on the scene, a truly massive relief program, rather than the token efforts we have made to date.

But none of this can wait "until the war is ended." If we wait until that time, there may be very few Biafrans left to save. As we stand by, we are viewing a horror unfolding with a toll in human lives that may rival that of the gas chambers of Europe.

The time to act is now, even though we might prefer inaction. Surely we as anation are guided by some moral standards above our own immediate national selfinterest. ~

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Comment continued from page 2

This transfer of identity could have asserted itself logically with a Rebecca-like osmosis engendered by Elsa's living in the house still haunted by the memory of the dead star. Or by a gradual encroachment of the part she is acting in her' screen debut. Or by the dominance of Zarkin's wildly egotistic personality. Or, most probably, by a combination of these elements.

However, Aldrich is not so much interested in logic or probability as be is in ramming the power of illusion down the audience's throat. Accordingly, Novak/ Elsa begins assuming the personality of Novak/ Lylah long before any rational process can assert itself.

At the very first audition, Elsa momentarily and inexplicably displays the inflections and manerisms of the dead Lylah. During a screening of one of Lylah's old films, the soundtrack is turned off and Elsa's voice drones on, an exact duplication of what was beard on screen.

Grotesque flashbacks of Lylah's life are, for no apparent reason, seen from Elsa's point of view, despite the fact that she could not have been more than a tot when the events in question occurred.

The characters of Elsa and Lylah shuttle back and forth wildly, outside of the film part Elsa is taking, outside of any possible transformation, outside of reason. In opposition to the confusion imposed on the narrative, Aldrich exercises complete control over the shooting of the film: every set-up is carefuUy composed, every cut is precisely timed. The film's visual style is characterized by large plastic shapes as-

serting themselves in the foreground of the frame. This concreteness this control manifested in Lylah Clare's style clashes with and ultimately overrides the narrative which Aldrich has intentionally reduced to a shambles. In other words, although we do not understand how and why Novak/ Elsa switches characters, we are forced to accept her as Lylah when she is Lylah and as Elsa when she is Elsa. In spite of our rational objections, we are completely at the mercy of the director and his art.

Thus, although the film may be confusing on a first viewing, on a second it can be terrifying in its avowal of the triumph of illusion. For example, an under-thecredits shot of Elsa making a funny face in front of an appliance shop as her image is honeycombed by closed-circuit TV on a dozed display sets is not so amusing the second time around. A preceding shot of Elsa writhing among Lylah's fan magazines as the dead star's voice speaks offscreen in harsh German is so chilling that it is difficult to comprehend bow the film was interpreted as "yummy" camp by so many reviewers. Difficult, that is, if we were not used to seeing this catch-all label applied to nearly every HoUywood film the knights of the keyboard fail to understand.

If at the beginning of Lylah Clare we are puzzled by the shifts between illusion and reality in Elsa's personality, as the film progresses they cease to merely shift but rather merge inextricably. By the time of the trapeze scene, we are watching a film of a film of an imaginary circus in which the allegorical death of Lylah and the real deaths of both Elsa and Lylah are

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191 The New Journal! October 20, 1968

contained. Yet, despite the indecipherable complexity of the scene, we still accept it.

Aldrich presses his point savagely. As Elsa lies dying and the cameras incredibly continue to roll, director Zarkin screams at some confused extras, "Cry, you clowns!

You're supposed to to cry!" They cry. In the next scene, at the premiere of "Lylah C lare-Film Star," we hear the audience respond obediently to the silent command of the now-invisible director. It need no longer be spoken, obviated by an intangible but unquestionable force. The bizarre final scene (a TV dog-food commercial which goes beserk) sums up the nature of this power; it exists autonomously and irrationally in the medium itself.

The Legend of Lylah Clare is a Pirandellian statement of such depth and ferocity that even respectable efforts in the same vein such as Godard's Contempt and Minoelli's Two Weeks In Another Town pale somewhat in comparison. And now looks like child's play. Aldrich has created the best film on film ever made and the most convincing conscious testimonial to the power of his art to control and refashion reality. "Live Ghost In An Enchanted Cemetery!" shouts a magazine cover showing Elsa Brinkman standing beneath a portrait of Lylah Clare. But no spooks and seances are necessary to haunt this strange story. It is a projected strip of cellulose acetate, 70mm wide, that gives concrete form to these phantasms; the medium is the medium.

8*

Martin L. Rubin

Letters To the editors: I am rather disturbed to discover in Mopsy Strange Kennedy's article on the Living Theatre a number of statements and attitudes erroneously attributed to me. (A few of tlie students quoted in the piece have told me of a similar problem, but I shall mention only my own objections.)

Since I was never interviewed by Mrs. Kennedy for this article, I am curious to determine how she came to such conclusions and to try to set the record straight.

First of all, I never called the Living Theatre "dull and tedious." Having been an admirer and supporter of this group since 1957 and the first to invite them to this country, I could hardly be expected to hold such a simplistic opinion. I have complicated but generally positive feelings about most of their productions, though I did say in a published statement that their fourth offering, Paradise Now, was "tedious and without much theatrical value, an opinion generally shared by those who did not participate in the proceedings on the stage."

Secondly, I find it extremely presumptuous of Mrs. Kennedy to state that I am "frightened by the radicalization going on at the School of Drama," if such it can be called. The School bas consistently encouraged all forms of radical experimentation, and will, I hope, always continue to do so. I am proud to say that our student body has managed to learn a great deal from the visit of the Living Theatre and to absorb its more valuable achievements, while rejecting what is spurious, without feeling compelled, as you somehow suggest, to annihilate all other existing forms of theatre. Thirdly, I am puzzled by Mrs. Kennedy's statement that I "sat in ... shirtsleeved gloom" when the Becks were in my office foUowing

their arrest the previous evening. I don't remember my state of dress at the time, though Mrs. Kennedy was certainly not there to witness it; but rather than making me gloomy, the Living Theatre filled me with a sense of great exhilaration during its two-week stay. I resent Mrs. Kennedy's further implication that I was somehow forced by Judith and Julian Beck to permit them to continue with their performance.

Everyone who knows the facts in this case is aware of how hard I fought to keep Paradise Now open for its concluding two nights. Nor did I suffer from what Mrs. Kennedy characterizes as a "painful headache" while the Company was here.

Indeed, I was notably free from such complaints until I read her article.

In conclusion, I would like to add that while I was not surprised to be castigated by the New Haven Register and WNHC forhaving brought such unorthodox theatre to New Haven, I am astonished to find The New Journal describing this visit as if the Company had somehow materialized here against my will and to my dismay.

This is obviously absurd. I trust that Tlu New Journal in future issues will cease resorting to a yellow journalism of the left in order to produce jazzy copy against a deadline. This article is most unworthy of the radical but factual standards set last year by your previous editor, Dan Yergin.

Robert Brustein

Editors' note: As Mr. Brustein knows, while Mrs. Kennedy did not personally interview him, several of the New Journal editors conducted interviews for this article and spoke with him personally. We are well aware that Mr. Brustein was instrumental in bringing the Living Theatre back to the United States; rather than trying to attack him, or to suggest that he oppose their going on stage, we tried to present some of the problems that arose during the troupe's stay in New Haven.

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To the editors: I just thought your article on the Living Theatre captured the spirit of our company, the action that took place in the Drama School and the University, and the work we are doing: both the positive and negative aspects.

There is a type of student open to change who wasn't here 10 years ago but is now.

Most institutions and people ought to change. It is a very good thing if the Drama School is changed and shaken by our visit or anyone else's. The word pleased is inadequate. I really dug The New Journal, and I hope the people at the Drama School will not only have the guts to verbalize the change but will have a chance to do something.

Julian Beck

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