vol4-no2

Volume Four � WINTER, 1962 � Number Two

J. Allen Hynek: Cosmic Provincialism and the New Astronomy

James Hazard: Two Poems

Rohley W. Sundmacher: The Personal Vision of Ingmar Bergman

George E. Spink: Poem

George D. Dilts: Norris's Wake

Ralph J. Mills, Jr.: Denise Levertov: Poetry of the Immediate

Ingehorg Hough: Artists

Patricia A. Rahhy: Poems

$.70 per copy $2.00 per year

RALPH J. MILLS, JR.: Denise Levertov: Poetry

The Tri-QUARTERLY is a magazme devoted to fiction, poetry, and articles of general interest, published in the fall, winter, and spring quarters at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois. Subscription rates: $2.00 yearly within the United States; $2.15, Canada; $2.25, foreign. Single copies will be sold locally for $.70. Contributions, correspondence, and subscriptions should be addressed to The Tri-QUARTERLY, care of the Northwestern University Press, 1840 Sheridan Road, Evanston, Illinois. Contributions unaccompanied by a selfaddressed envelope and return postage will not be returned. Except by invitation, contributors are limited to persons who have some connection with the University. Copyright, 1962, by Northwestern University. All rights reserved.

Editorial Board

The editor is EDWARD B. Hll:\GERFORD. Senior members of the advisory board are Professors RAY A. BILLINGTON and MELVILLE HERSKOVITS of the College of Liberal Arts, Dean JAMES H. MC BURNEY of the School of Speech. Dr. WILLIAM B. WARTMAN of the School of I\Iedicine, and Mr. JAMES M. BARKER of the Board of Trustees.

Undergraduate editors: LOUISE M. ORCUTI, SUSAN F. MCILVAINE, and FORREST G. ROBINSON

The Tri-QUARTERLY is distributed by Northwestern University Press, and is under the business management of the Press.

J Allen Hynek

J. Allen Hynek was born and educated in Chicago, receiving both his undergraduate and graduate degrees at the University of Chicago (B.A., '31, Ph.D., '35). From 1935-55, except for the war years, he taught at the Ohio State University. During WorLd War II he served as civilian scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, where he had a considerable part in the development of the Navy's radio-proximity fuzeso important in the defense against V-1's in England and the kamikaze attacks in the Pacific. From 1956-60 he was Associate Director of the Smithsonian Astro-Physical Observatory at Harvard, where he directed the U.S. Optical Satellite Tracking Program. He also taught astronomy at Harvard.

In 1960 Dr. Hynek came to Northwestern as Professor of Astronomy, Chairman of the Department of Astronomy, and Director of the Dearborn Observatory. He has published in the learned journals in his field, has prepared for the United States Government many classified reports of a technical nature, and both contributed to and edited the symposium volume Astrophysics published by McGraw-Hill in 1951. Mr. Hynek's article was written at the invitation of the editors.

COSMIC PROVINCIALISM AND THE NEW ASTRONOMY

THE MARCH OF ASTRONOMY has been the story of the cosmic decentralization of the earth but, oddly enough, not of man. Mankind, bolstered by its many religious systems, has refused to submit to a parallel "psychic decentralization" and adamantly maintains a position of psychological centrality. Call it a sort of psychic geocentricity - or egocentricity (the interchange of the first two letters is of little consequence).

A new cosmic round, however, seems upon us and, as surely as Copernicus and Galileo initiated the dethronement of the earth from its pivotal central cosmic position, so may the explosive strides of the New Astronomy, which has opened the possibility of a plurality of inhabited worlds, soon unseat man from a pivotal position in the psychic universe.

This cosmic provincialism is now challenged by the results of the great telescopes of the world and especially by the great promise the new instruments and techniques of astronomy - introduced in only the past few years - show for even greater acceleration in the investigation of the universe.

Winter, 1962

The travail the challenge almost surely entails may be severe, but the promise it holds for grander and nobler concepts of the nature of man in the universe is fully commensurate with our present concepts of the universe as compared to the dime-store universe of the ancients.

The words spoken at the dedication, in 1948, of the world's largest telescope, on Mount Palomar (by Raymond Fosdick, .President of the Rockefeller Foundation), apply well in our present context. "This great new window to the stars," Fosdick said, "will bring us into touch with those outposts of time and space which have beckoned from immemorial ages. It will bring into fresh focus the mystery of the universe, its order, its beauty, its power. It will dramatize the questions which mankind has always asked and to which no answers have been found, and perhaps can never be found. Why are we here on this dwarf planet? Are there other planets that have burst into consciousness like our own? Is there an answering intelligence anywhere in space? Is there purpose behind the apparent meaninglessness and incomprehensibility of the universe?

"In the face of these supreme mysteries and against this majestic background of space and time, the petty squabbling of nations on this small planet is not only irrelevant but contemptible. Adrift in a cosmos whose shores he cannot even imagine, man spends his energies in fighting with his fellow man over issues which a single look through this telescope would show to be utterly inconsequential.

"We need in this sick world the perspective of the astronomer ."

It is my purpose here to examine this perspective and the new "Space Age" techniques of astronomy which are the instruments of new perspective, and to look at their impact on the questions enunciated at the dedication of the mighty 200-inch telescope. Perhaps man will find an answer to some of them sooner than one might have hoped even a few years ago.

First off, there has been a "perspective explosion" in the past few decades: in just the past decade it attained especial violence; and now there appears to be a new "blast" virtually upon us. For "the great new window to the stars" which almost single-handedly has presented us recently with an observable universe a hundred-fold greater in volume than the one we thought we had before this great instrument went to work (and so in a sense has made the "petty squabbling of nations" more petty in the same proportion) is already being joined by novel instruments and powerful new techniques for astronomical investigation. These will extend and enhance our universal perspective and may indeed alter our entire outlook on the universe. Our relationship as sentient beings to the vast, apparently inanimate, insensate universe around us would undergo a drastic revision should, for example, projects like Ozma (radio monitoring of nearby stars for evidence of intelligent "intermural" signals) give positive results. Or we would give a real wallop to our Weltanschaung should the breakthrough, now at hand, to the heretofore inaccessible regions of the electromagnetic spectrum - and the coming space rockets to the planets - reveal that we do not represent the only combination of a handful of chemical elements that has developed the introvertive ability to examine itself, and to question the very universe out of which it is fashioned. Suppose, in short, that the universe supports countless "islands of consciousness," of which we may be a minor representative.

The religious and philosophical implications of such a contretemps are obvious yet core-shaking, and most astronomers do not enjoy contemplating their immediate consequences. Yet

the history of astronomy has been that of the physical decentralization of man; indeed, extreme geocentricity became untenable three centuries ago, although the non-central position of the sun in our galaxy and the existence of other galaxies were not irrevocably established until well into the present century. Psychic egocentricity, however, is still paramount, and has stood until now on just as good scientific grounds as geocentricity did in 1600, when the absence of stellar parallax argued against the motion of the earth. But stellar parallax was there, though man had not yet fashioned instruments and techniques for detecting it. We may now be on the verge of the discovery of our psychic parallax, and man's psychic geocentricity may well be the next outpost to fall in the accelerated pace of the newly instrumented blitzkrieg on the universe.

Instruments and techniques of astronomical research are in the midst of an "explosion" of their own, triggered, in a measure peace-loving men scarcely care to admit, by World War II. The technological advances of the past decade that have found direct application in scientific research are, bluntly, superb, and should have put to rout any remaining shibboleth about a hard and fast distinction between technology and "pure science.

Man cannot think in a sense-vacuum; his processes of thought must be fed and stimulated by his sensory contact with the outside "real" world, and his instruments are simply means of extending his sense perceptions. The better and more "sophisticated" (to use a current term of highly questionable taste) his instrumentation, the better his thought and therefore his science. Man's perspective upon both the universe and his immediate world is perforce dictated by his research instruments. It is interesting but hardly profitable to speculate on the course of human events had an enterprising Egyptian taken some "burning glasses" and fashioned an elementary telescope, instead of leaving the happy task to a European spectacle-maker many centuries later. Could there have been the Dark Ages, the Inquisition, or even Christianity had the satellites of Jupiter been discovered in 2000 B.C. instead of in 1610 A.D.? Profitless, of course, to pursue such thoughts, but beguiling. World outlook and instruments are indissolubly bound, and it is therefore necessary to look ,at our present and developing instruments and techniques before we can meaningfully discuss the changing perspective of the astronomer.

In a modest way, we at the Dearborn Observatory are helping to fashion this changing perspecNORTHWESTERN

tive in our application to astronomical research of two techniques of great promise - the use of TV techniques in the enhancement of astronom ical images (more technically, the use of photoelectric image-scanning devices), and the use of large balloons to carry observer, telescope and auxiliary instruments to altitudes of 80,000-100,000 feet, where less than 2% of the earth's atmosphere (by weight) remains to impede astronomical observation. To evaluate these and the related techniques of orbiting astronomical observatories and the electronic techniques of data-recording and processing, it will be well to look briefly at the changes in perspective that almost immediately flowed from the introduction of the major steps in astronomical instrumentation in the past.

The raw material of the astronomer is light, or, more broadly, radiation from any part of the electromagnetic spectrum from the long waves of the radio broadcast and global communications bands to the most energetic and deadly of the ultra-short wave, high-frequency gamma rays. But unlike other scientists, the astronomer cannot taste, smell, hear or touch (with the minor exception of meteorites) any cosmic object other than the earth itself. He must depend solely on the radiation his own little outpost in space, his observatory on earth, intercepts. This is a woefully small amount. The brightest star we see on the night sky (Sirius) sends us ten billion times less light than does the sun, and the faintest objects the largest telescope in the world can sense (so far) are ten billion times fainter than the brightest star.

The constant cry of the astronomer for light, more light, is about as legitimate a demand as can be reckoned. For long centuries, however, there was no cry: there didn't seem to be any conceivable way of gathering more light, and even if there had been, neither the climate for, nor the technique of, asking questions of nature, the essence of the scientific method, was available to provide the motivation. The telescope and the scientific method, and the notion that it was permissible and not sacrilegious to question nature by observation and experiment, came at about the same time, and almost certainly not coincidentally.

A large telescope can gather of the order of a quarter of a million more light photons than can the eye. But if these are merely fed into the eye, to be dissipated at the retina, the chief value is merely to increase the magnification by spreading, by means of an eyepiece, the now copious flood of photons. This represented a great extension of the sense of sight, but clearly

Winter, 1962

some way of storing this precious raw material of the astronomer was needed. Not only could such storing give a permanent record of the image, but by integrating the effects of the incoming photons, instead of using them instantaneously and continuously at the retina, it could provide an effectively much larger "light bucket." Even a small pail can fill a large container by repeated emptyings of the bucket.

Two centuries elapsed, however, before, again more by accident than by a direct attack on the problem of light storage, the photographic process provided the answer. In 1839 the Daguerreotype made its appearance; then the "wet-plate"; but not until three decades later was the forerunner of the present "dry-plate" photograph introduced. First extremely inefficient, the photographic emulsion has now reached a plateau of efficiency and is still an invaluable tool. Its contribution to the astronomer's perspective has been pivotal. Every four-fold increase in photographic speed, as the techniques of photography advanced, has been the equivalent of doubling the aperture of the telescope. The Dearborn telescope (an 181f2-inch refractor) is approximately as old as the modern photographic process. Yet today, with the aid of modern high-speed photographic emulsions, it is the equivalent in light-gathering power of a 200-inch telescope shortly before the turn of the century. Yet, even so, only one out of every few hundred photons gathered by the telescope is effective in producing a perceptible image on a photograph. Here clearly the new goal must be making every incoming photon count. This is indeed the goal of the work now going on at the Dearborn Observatory and, of course, at other major institutions. Photoelectric imaging-devices presently in use on the Dearborn telescope have already transformed it, for some purposes, into an effective 200-inch telescope.

It is not enough to store the astronomer's "raw material" in one bin. Light is a "many-splendored thing," and its many colors must be recorded separately with as high a resolution from color to color as possible. In short, radiation has a spectrum of frequencies, and the physics of the stars and the universe cannot properly be attacked without recording with a spectrograph the separate behavior of starlight along its entire available spectrum. This is the lifeblood of astrophysics, a discipline born with the spectrograph about a century ago. Brief mention should also be made of the precision micrometer and "measuring engine," for they have made possible the direct determination of the distances of the nearer stars and of stellar masses, two utterly

indispensable items in the astronomer's astrophysical tool kit.

Despite the extremely short period, relatively, that astronomers have learned to "process" their raw cosmic material effectively, the "end product" has been enormously gratifying, and quite truly unexpected. The present conception of the universe is so staggering that one· is regularly driven to the employment of such distasteful terms as "vast," "colossal," "countless," "astronomical," "beggars description," "insignificance of man," "unimaginable," "impossible to conceive," and a similar host of weak attempts to present to the earth-bound "intelligent layman" some concept of the things which astronomical research has recently revealed, but which serve only to illustrate the inadequacy of language to express and describe anything for which our own experience has not already in some measure prepared us. It is, frankly, beyond language. Numerical representation helps, but only if one has had some practice in translating numbers into visual concepts.

It is often helpful in this attempt at visualization to try a mental model. Weare all familiar with the schoolroom device of using an orange for the sun, a pea for the earth, placed some convenient distance away, etc. Suppose we now extend this concept: let the entire United States represent a plane through the observable universe; that is, let us thus represent, to scale, those celestial objects that can be sensed with the world's largest telescopes. On that scale, the earth could easily get in the eye of a man boarding a bus in some suburb of Kansas City without his in the least noticing it. The earth, on that scale, is a sub-microscopic speck that not even an electron microscope could reveal. Whether such an analogy helps is questionable; it is hard to visualize, say, the number of particles of dust and lint in the pockets of 175 million U.S. citizens, let alone much smaller sub-microscopic specks!

Or, we might look at it in a more practical and sobering way. With manned space flight essentially here, many non-critical enthusiasts envision that at long last man can explore the universe at first hand. Even if we are most sanguine toward future developments, the volume of space that man can conceivably, in his person, explore is, to the volume of the telescopically observable universe, as the volume of a pebble is to the volume of the earth itself.

Exploration of space, except in what we might term the immediate environment of the solar system, must continue to be done through the

receipt of radiation across the great stretches of space. And herein lies the primary significance of Space Age technology for the exploration of space. It does not lie in sending man personally to explore (save, of course, in his "space backyard") but in giving him a new vantage point, allowing him to explore in what is virtually a new dimension.

For as mighty as the 200-inch telescope and its companion "giant eyes" are, they are anchored to the bottom of a vast and turbulent ocean of atmosphere, an ocean which not only distorts and blurs incoming signals from the stars, and dilutes them with its own haze of scattered light, but completely blocks entrance to information-packed radiation in the ultra-violet, the X-ray and gamma ray regions of the electromagnetic spectrum, and in large portions of the infrared and radio spectrum as well. This is as frustrating to the astronomer as it would be to a radio listener to have the dial on his radio set so limited in its turning that only one station out of hundreds could be tuned in! (Of course, the astronomer will grudgingly admit that the atmospheric blocking of the deadly high-frequency radiation does allow life to exist on earth, and that without it there would be no astronomers around to take advantage of the pristine and complete electromagnetic spectrum.)

No matter how large and mighty ground-based telescopes may become, they cannot break the atmospheric opacity barrier. But the barrier was broken with the launching of the first man-made satellite, scarce a decade after the Palomar telescope was dedicated. That launching broke open a vast new window onto the universe and made available for the first time a new dimension of access to knowledge, a new avenue to the exploration of the universe which may easily be as significant as the invention of the telescope. It is a real breakthrough, literally and figuratively. In the coming decade veritable astronomical observatories will be placed into orbit around the earth; their telescopes will not be as large as the 200-inch but for many purposes they will be far more powerful. They will have sensors for all portions of the spectrum rather than solely for the optical, or color, portion of the spectrum.

Oddly enough, and a point of significance for astronomy at Northwestern, for many purposes it is not necessary to fly as high as satellites do in order to gain these new dimensions of exploration. It is almost paradoxical that with the development of the new-age technique of artificial satellites there came almost simultaneously

NORTHWESTERN TRI-QUARTERLY

the renaissance of the comparatively ancient device, the balloon. It has suddenly emerged as a new and powerful tool of astronomical research. Two things were needed to transform the balloon, long associated with fairs and sideshows, into a scientific instrument of great potential: reliable, thin plastic materials for the balloon itself, and precision gyroscopic stabilization which can hold a telescope "on course" even though the balloon turns and swings.

Balloons can reach 100,000 feet carrying two or three tons of equipment, and can stay aloft for a day or more. The equipment they carry is recoverable and a man can go aloft with it with considerably greater ease than he can at present in a satellite. Such a balloon can float above 98 and even 99% of the earth's atmosphere (by weight), and although this is not quite high enough to give access to the ultra-violet and shorter wave-length regions of the spectrum, it does give a crystal clear view of the skies in the visual and infrared portions of the spectrum and opens up a treasure house heretofore denied to earthbased man.

We at the Dearborn Observatory are engaged in the "Star Gazer" balloon astronomy program in which a modest telescope and two men are carried aloft for many hours of observation. While not as glamorous (nor as expensive) as satellite astronomy, balloon astronomy promises to develop into an extremely important and permanent technique. By no means should the use of balloons be considered an interim technique, to be abandoned when observatories in orbit become commonplace, for even then a satellite should not be sent to do a job a balloon can do better. Balloon astronomy is scheduled to carry a good portion of the astronomical "freight" of the future.

Only when, someday, permanent observatories on the moon have become routinely established can we dispense with balloons (as well as local earth satellites), for then we shall realize in real life what the late Princeton astronomer, Henry Norris Russell, meant when he quipped. "When good astronomers die, they don't go to heaven; they go to the moon." The airless moon, of course, would make as close to an ideal observing platform as can today be imagined. The moon has a 14-day night but the stars are visible even during its 14-day long "day," since in the absence of an atmosphere the sky is a near solid black and only in the immediate vicinity of the sun would it be difficult to see stars. From the moon the sky would appear in a manner denied to viewers at the bottom of an atmospheric ocean:

Winter, 1962

a jet-black, crystalline sphere, jewel-studded with untwinkling stars.

Poets may extol the twinkling of stars, but they certainly have not the astronomer's welfare in mind. For twinkling, or scintillation, is a product of the small-scale turbulence in the tropospheric regions of the atmosphere. Twinkling, and the related phenomena of "star dancing" and image pulsation, are all atmosphere-produced, and are all direct evidence that the astronomer's raw material is being tampered with. It is a matter of deep philosophical frustration for the land-based astronomer to realize that a pristine light ray, that may have been speeding on its way to his telescope at the limiting speed allowed in the universe -186,300 miles a second - since the time of Christ, or even long before man appeared on earth, suffers ruinous adulteration in less than the last one-thousandth of a second of its journey! The magnified image of a star, particularly in a large telescope, resembles a luminous, highly agitated amoeba, mute testimony to the devastating toll of the atmosphere.

Any hope of observing fine details on the surface of the planets - the so-called canals on Mars, for instance - rests on our ability to rise above the seeing limitations imposed by our atmosphere.

Aristotle and his contemporaries are said to have believed that the stars twinkled because the "radar-like" effluvia which, they theorized, went out from our eyes in search of objects to see, was so greatly weakened by its long journey that it trembled, or twinkled, on its return. Proof that it is not the stars themselves that twinkle can easily be had simply by looking crosseyed at an obviously twinkling star and noting that each of the two images, one formed by each eye, frequently twinkles separately. Any proof that it is not our eyes that deceive us into believing that stars twinkle is likewise easily had by substituting a photoelectric cell for our eyes and noting its fluctuating output when starlight is allowed to fall upon its sensitive surface.

The stars do not twinkle when observed at heights greater than 70,000 feet or so. Neither do their images dance or pulsate. Their light beams have been intercepted just before it is too late. If balloon observatories did nothing more than take us above the disturbances that cause bad "seeing" and allow us to realize the theoretical capabilities of our optical instruments which cannot· be realized on the surface of the earth, they would be eminently worth-while. But balloons do more: they also open for us an undistorted infrared window upon the universe. One can only surmise what fine sights we shall see through

this window. We can envision in the relatively near future a national "balloon facility" to enable astronomers from various institutions to make routine observations aloft as they now do from our national optical observatory in Arizona and from our national radio observatory in West Virginia. We hope the balloon astronomy here at Northwestern may develop into such a facility.

Even above the atmosphere, of course, the radiation we receive from distant cosmic sources is extremely weak. The photographic process, pivotal boon to cosmic investigation though it has been and still is, is grossly inefficient; it is wasteful of the feeble stream of light photons that finally find their way to the earth. If only some way were known to make each photon count! When that ideal is reached, "that's it." It is the end of the line, for when every bit of "raw material" is processed, that sets an obvious limit to the output to the finished product. In the past few years a momentous stride toward that ideal has been made. That forward stride is of such significance to our thesis that a non-technical description in some detail is appropriate.

The story begins with the first application of the photoelectric effect - the ejection of an electron from a sensitive surface by an incident light photon. If the ejected electron can be put to work, then the possibility exists of recording each photon of incoming, feeble starlight.

The photoelectric cell, and its evolutionary derivative, the modern photomultiplier, does just this. The latter indeed seemingly goes beyond this limit. It is a device in which the incoming light photon acts as a trigger for an electronic chain reaction. Ideally, this would seem to offer limitless possibilities, and is akin, in result, to the dramatic effect used at the opening of the Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago, in 1933, when light from a distant star (light which had left the star, incidentally, forty years earlier when the great Columbian exposition was in progress) was collected by the nearby Yerkes telescope (which had been on exhibition at that Fair) and used to trigger the switches that flooded the grounds with light.

But something has not been obtained for nothing. In the case of the multiplied photon, even though by the action of the photomultiplier cell one photon produces a flood of electrons, no new information has been added. Each incoming photon is an information-bit barrier, and once its bit has been used, mere multiplication serves no additional purpose. Further, in the realm of individual photons, the "noise" of spurious and spontaneous electrons introduced by the photocell

or other multiplying devices, and their associated circuitry, soon sets a useful limit to which electron multiplication can be carried.

The photomultiplier is, on the whole, some 100 times more efficient than a photographic plate. It can operate, under ideal conditions, as a counter of individual photons. We get some notion of its power when we consider that a faint night light used in the home emits 10,000,000,000, 000,000,000 photons per second. Yet some celestial sources are so faint that even their light, collected with a very large telescope, amounts to but a few photons per second.

Most unfortunately, the photomultiplier can be used on but one object at a time and often requires an hour or more per object to obtain a statistically significant and recordable signal. There are not enough years in the lifetimes of the next 100 generations of astronomers, working full time with photomultipliers, to canvass the sky even once.

What is needed is a device that can do simultaneously. for a wide field of celestial objects what the photomultiplier can do for one object. The answer apparently has come in the last few years, and it is with pride that we can point out that some of the pioneering work has been done at Northwestern, at both our Evanston and Organ Pass, New Mexico, observatories. The answer is - television.

Here again is an example of how the astronomer has learned to take advantage of the "breaks" in the technological game. Indeed, the astronomer is an eclectic, taking this and borrowing that, in the pursuit of his quest. (It could be said that astronomy is to the sciences what opera is to the arts: opera borrows from stagecraft, the ballet, orchestral music, acting, and, of course, singing, and welds them into a desired entity; astronomy borrows from mathematics, physics, chemistry, photography, optics, engineering, electronics, rocketry, ballooning, etc., for its desired ends - it is not a pure discipline in the sense that mathematics is.)

Astronomers quickly recognized that what was needed was an army of miniscule photomultipliers used in conjunction with a telescope, so that an entire field of the sky could be covered simultaneously. But it is most unlikely that astronomers could ever have marshalled the sums of money and manpower necessary for the accomplishment of this means of increasing mankind's astronomical perspective, and thus perhaps altering the course of his philosophy and his religious and world outlook, if a much greater number of people had not had a yen to watch

wrestling matches, prize fights, football, latelate shows, and funny men, all in the comfort of their own living rooms. The astronomer, allis, owes much to the man in the gray flannel suit.

For a TV camera tube is, in effect, such a mosaic of photocells, although the actual photosensitive surface is a continuum. In the photoelectric effect, as is well known, a light photon impinging upon a photo-emissive surface can eject one photoelectron. If one electron were emitted for each incident photon, the limit of efficiency would have been reached. As it is, only about one in ten photons is so effective, but this is still two orders of magnitude more effective than is the photographic plate.

In a studio TV camera, the image of the scene to be transmitted is focused upon the photosensitive surface by an ordinary camera. In astronomy, the conventional telescope serves this purpose, imaging a portion of the sky directly onto the TV tube. Whenever the picture is bright, photoelectrons are ejected from the corresponding point of the TV tube surface; the brighter the image spot, the more electrons emitted. The sequence of events is then of such interest and complexity that I should be remiss in not briefly describing them.

The ejected electrons are focused magnetically onto a very thin material target, deep in the TV camera tube. Wherever these bombarding electrons strike, they leave a positive charge rather than the expected negative charge, because they in turn eject secondary electrons, a process which, therefore, leaves a "minus negative," or a positive residual charge.

At this stage the target has "painted" on it, with "positive electricity paint," a faithful image of the sky. The great trick in the image-orthicon TV tube, in its commercial application, is the successive "wiping off" of this electric paint many times a second and translating it into an electronic signal that can be transmitted to the home TV set and re-transforrned into the picture we view.

In its astronomical application, the target is allowed to integrate the incoming feeble light (we part company here completely with the uncomfortably high light levels used in the TV studio) and to build up its electronically painted picture for a matter of seconds or minutes. Furthermore, when the time comes to "wipe the target," this can be done more accurately than need be done in the TV studio. The picture, instead of being transmitted, can be viewed by "closed television" or, more profitably, it can be stored on video tape, where its millions of "in-

Winter, 1962

formation bits" can remain safely or can be played back and analyzed repeatedly.

All this raises a point of considerable philosophical interest. The telescope, originally regarded as a direct aid to human vision, has effectively bypassed the human eye, which is now used mainly as a monitor of the operations involved in processing, transforming, and interpreting the information bits, or elements, inherent in the electromagnetic radiation from space intercepted by the earth (or by a satellite of the earth). It is now ready to by-pass the photograph, too, for our "cosmic information" need not at any time be presented to us as a picture. It is often more profitable to store the information on tape, in the form of magnetized particles, and to interpret and use the information by means of wiggles on an oscilloscope screen, the scratching on paper of the pen of an electronic recorder, or as a set of meter readings, which quantify, or assign numbers to the integrated information. Numbers! These are the coinage of science, needed to buy one's way into prediction and further theories. And numbers can often more easily be obtained by by-passing the pretty picture of a galaxy or star field and going directly to the numerical questions: how much, how bright, how displaced, how distributed, etc.

The two new great techniques of balloon and satellite astronomy, and of "TV astronomy" are such "naturals" that marriage is inevitable - a "high altitude marriage," one might call it. For it is obvious that the union of the great breakthrough in information availability and quality represented by the smashing of the atmospheric opacity barrier, with the companion breakthrough in information recording, storing and use, represents a promise of "astronomical dimensions" - as apt a phrase in this context as one could wish.

Do we dare predict what this great new composite window to the stars will do, when we are a scarce dozen years removed from the opening of the last great window, which has in so short a time exploded our perspective on the universe? No words of dedication have been said on the occasion of the opening of this window, which has happened, and is happening, quietly and unsung. Let us rather borrow once again from that earlier dedication. Speaking of the promise of the 200inch, Fosdick continued: "The search for truth is the noblest expression of the human spirit. Man's insatiable desire for knowledge about himself, about his environment and the forces by which he is surrounded, gives life its meaning and purpose, and clothes it with final dignity

There is nothing which so glorifies the human race, or lends it such dignity and nobility as the gallant and inextinguishable urge to bring this vast, illimitable complexity within the range of human understanding. In the last analysis, the mind which encompasses the universe is more marvelous than the universe which encompasses the mind."

It is highly probable that we shall find that we are not the only ones who are attempting to encompass the universe. There may well be other civilizations that are now engaged in launching space probes and guiding them by radio over relatively long distances. If so, there is a chance that with radio telescopes placed in orbit around the earth, or on the moon, and thus away from ,the "noise" of the earth, we may be able to sift out of the general random cosmic radio noise background, systematic even though not understandable signals. This was indeed the object of the pioneering "Project Ozma." So far no "intelligent" signals have been received. But this was only a preliminary earth-bound attempt. Should future "patrols," made away from the surface of the earth (the permanently hidden side of the moon is ideal for the purpose), we shall be plunged into the midst of a new Copernican revolution of astounding proportions.

The present astronomical perspective has something quite definite to say about the statistical distribution of intelligence in the universe. It can be summed up in a homely manner: Why should this tiny "mote in the eye of the man in Kansas City" be the unique speck of sub-dust in the United States? On the face of it, confronted with a universe which so utterly incapacitates our most vivid imagination, what possible reason is there to believe that we hold a unique place in the universe? Statistically, it is unthinkable that other solar systems should not exist, and likewise unthinkable, if life developed on this "mote" that it shouldn't have developed elsewhere. We once thought - and a very short time ago at that - that the earth was physically unique in the Universe, a uniqueness that vested interests fought long and bitterly to justify. Will we have another such fight and another "trial" for the Galileo who tries to put earth intelligences into their proper place as once Galileo tried to put the earth in its proper place? The devastating impact on orthodoxy and to "cosmic provincialism" of a clear indication that "we are not alone" is an awesome thing to contemplate. Consider the issues! If there are many inhabited worlds, did the Son of God save everyone of them too? Did God so love man on planet

X 397221 Z that He also gave his His only begotten Son to save it? And what is the cosmic schedule for world saving? How many Bethlehems and how many crucifixions per annum?

Mark Twain, who once called the light year "without doubt the most stupendous and impressive phrase that exists in any language," clearly saw the plight of man and his cosmic provincialism. In his "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven," perhaps the first literary work to make use of the "new" perspective offered by the astronomy of the turn of the century, Twain has the doughty old sea captain race a comet and thereby go off course and land at a gate of heaven intended for "sky-blue men with seven heads and only one leg." His turn in line comes and the conversation goes something like this:

"Well, quick! Where are you from?"

"San Francisco."

"San Fran - what. Is it a planet?"

"Oh, I beg your pardon. Put me down for California.

"I don't know any such planet - is it a constellation ?"

And so on, until finally the clerk says, "Once and for all, where - areyou - from?"

"Well, I don't know anything more to say, - unless I lump things, and just say I'm from the world.

"Ah, - now that's something like! What world?"

"Why, the world, of course."

"The world - H'm. There's billions of them! Next!"

At last the captain returns, puzzled and humbled, "Well, sir, I don't seem to make out which world it is I'm from. But you may know it from this - it's the one the Saviour saved."

The clerk bent his head, and then said gently, - "The worlds He has saved are like to the gates of heaven in number - none can count them. What astronomical system is your world inperhaps that may assist."

How neatly Twain got around this particular dilemma of the plurality of inhabited worlds! One wonders how he would have treated the many others, themselves like the gates of heaven in number!

In a final friendly attempt to help Stormfield get his bearings, the clerk has an assistant take a balloon (how appropriate) and sail up in front of a map "as big as Rhode Island." He "went on till he was out of sight, and by and by he came down and got something to eat and went up again. To cut a long story short, he kept on doing this for a day or two, and finally he came down and said he thought he had found that NORTHWESTERN

solar system, but it might be fly-specks. So he got a microscope and went back. It turned out better than he feared. He had rousted out our system, sure enough. He got me to describe our planet and its distance from the sun, and then he says to his chief, 'Oh, I know the one he means now, sir. It is on the map. It is called the Wart!'

Twain was intrigued by the findings of astronomy and by the fulsome naivete of the religious thought of the day. He would have been pleased that modern astronomy makes his map not the size of Rhode Island but of the entire United States, and the earth invisible in the most powerful microscope.

Like a literary Copernicus, he too feared to publish his work until death was close. "Captain Stormfield" lay in a basement for forty years and, when a friend finally advised publication he also advised, as Copernicus was advised, that an endorsement be obtained from a high prelate to "draw some of the teeth of the religious press."

And now, in our present decade, we have spiralled around to a new round of astronomy versus man's cosmic egotism - and the result appears just as certain as it was in the Copernican-Galilean round. Faced with an expanding universe of galaxies (Yes, our U.S. model must be a stretchable one, so that San Francisco is receding from Kansas City at the rate of - on our scale - t50 inch per year, corresponding to an actual observed recession of about half the speed of light per second), man's cosmic provincialism must

give way in the light of the new - and coming - astronomy, provided, always, that man does not relinquish his right to think under political and religious pressures.

A misanthropic cynic once said, "What is man but the organic scum on the surface of an insignificant planet that goes around a tiny star, one of billions of suns in a system which itself is but one of billions of other such systesm ." At the dedication of the 200-inch, quite an opposite view was taken, as we have seen. Yet, the ultimate wonder and mystery of the universe lies not in its immensity (a multiplication table can lead us to equally impressive numbers) but in the overriding fact that, after long ages of evolution, this "organic scum" - a handful of insensate chemical elements - was able to develop the ability to wonder about itself, to write poetry and to compose symphonies, to ask questions of its environment, and finally to guide its own evolution, to "build more stately mansions" for its future evolution. And in how many other places has this happened, and with what diversity? Here is the great wonderment, and herein lies the embryo of new world religions - perhaps as many as there are individuals - in which gods made in man's own image will give way and grow with man's expanding image of his own nature. Perhaps we will discover someday that the distinction - the awful gaping void - between the two, man and his gods, has vanished as shadows in a dark corner when daylight comes.

Perhaps in us He moves and has His being.

The Tri-QuarterZy would like to publish, in each issue, a set of short articles by undergraduates and graduate students on aspects of the collegiate experience. We have in mind something a little more formally considered and less locally directed than letters of protest to the Daily Northwestern about campus affairs, but would welcome spirited expressions of opinion that would be of interest to readers both on and off the campus. Students who would like to say something about college and the educational process are invited to contribute. The r-ight length would be about four pages of double-spaced typescript. Please address your manuscripts to The Editors, The Tri-QuarterZy, University Hall 204D.

James A. Hazard

James Hazard, who lives in Whiting, Indiana, first attended Butler University and the Calumet Center of Indiana University. At Northwestern he majored in American Literature and Civilization, and received his B.A. in 1958.

Intruder

This morning I walked along the channel of weeds, lined left and right by railroad tracks, that separates this factory town from lake and beach. Often I've seen a hawk hunting there. As I walked something stirred at the edge of my sight: a man running hunched, cautious; then (not seeing me) he fell to the ground and hid himself, tensely, from some thing. A bird-watcher, I figured, and passed him by quietly, invisibly as possible, to respect the privacy of his purpose. Past him a few moments I felt the silence break wickedly with the blam of a man's gun. I turned and saw a scatter of pigeons pulling up away, One puny laggard. beating weakly behind. Twice more the gun. The laggard stopped suddenly in air and tumbled gracelessly dead, downward. The man scurried from his weedy shelter and ratlike grabbed his prize.

City: Late Autumn

Gardens are brittle and brown. Wind strips trees of counterfeit domesticity. Even the little lawns turn wild.

I like these days. Unruly clouds dim, and make clear that despite all the disguises we contrive, we stitz live (a raucous wedge of geese enters our attention honking seriously in the same speech as last year) within the thought that spawned us.

Robley Sundmacher

Robley SundmacheT was born in Chicago and went to school in Park Ridge, Ill. At Northwestern he remained after graduation for a quarter in the Graduate School. His interests are literature, phiLosophy, and various aspects of the theater and television. He believes that film is the art form of the twentieth century, and that it should receive the kind of attention now usually reserved for playwrights and novelists. He is presently at work on a study of the film critics of the past two decades.

Mr. Sundmacher (Speech '60) is on the Public Relations staff of Ford Company, in Dearborn, Michigan.

THE PERSONAL VISION OF INGMAR BERGMAN

AS A RELIGIOUS ARTIST in a thoroughly secular welfare state, Ingmar Bergman is something of an anomaly. Yet Sweden's most compelling influence today is not its social philosophy but the films of her leading artist who is using the cinema for undistinguished metaphysical inquiry.

Bergman has won world-wide acclaim and fourteen major film prizes while denying what his countrymen affirm: that man's fundamental problems are social and that the millenium is at hand. He claims to have no social conscience nor do his films reflect concern for social causation.

No mere subject for cocktail conversation, Bergman has been enthusiastically received by thousands of filmgoers the world over who have turned from the intellectual gymnastics of Pound and Kafka to the obscure symbolism of the strange Norseman.

Fifteen years after Bergman wrote his first screenplay he was given a gold plaque honoring him as Sweden's finest film-maker. "Now I have received all the prizes that exist," said the fortyone year old director; "all that remains to do now is for someone to stuff me and place me in a showcase in a film museum." But Bergman is in no danger of becoming a relic, at least not in his own time. The world-wide public and criti-

Winter, 1962

cal enthusiasm which has accompanied his career is not likely to abate for a long while to come. The crowds that willingly line up for a Bergman premiere, together with the success of a book containing four of his screenplays in English, testify to his popularity.

But what of the strange genius behind the films? As writer, editor and director, Bergman is able to make each film an expression of his personal vision; for better or worse, his films are his alone.

Ernest Ingrnar Bergman was born July 14, 1918, in the Swedish university town of Uppsala. His youth was characterized by stern restraint and rigid moral discipline. His father was a Lutheran minister, and the sensitive Ingmar became well acquainted with the sin-theology of orthodox Protestantism.

In the Bergman home the display of emotions was a sin. Guilt became an everyday reality and was commensurate with the stringent moral demands of the Church. According to Luther, salvation hinged upon faith, consequently the greatest threat to salvation was doubt. Doubt was something of an original sin in that religious community. To the extent that man doubted, he was sinful, and to the extent that he sinned he was beset by guilt.

"I am really a conjurer," says Bergman today. "When I show a film I am guilty of deceit

I am either an imposter or, when the audience is willing to be taken in, a conjurer." This conception of the artist as a charlatan reaches its fullest expression in Tile Magician. where Bergman examines with some ambivalence the role of the artist in society. The magician's psychic legerdemain is presented as obvious fraud - but his power to influence others is real. The artist, Bergman is saying, must be all things to all people and though his means are "illusion" the end result is often "truth." But the artist viewing himself is capable of seeing only the fraud. He is behind the scenes, knows his techniques, and is denied the comfort of illusion which he imparts to others.

There is some dispute as to just how original Bergman really is. Certainly he owes much to the Swedish film tradition, and his producer sees him as "a link in the chain which joins the past and present in Swedish film history." Early Swedish cinema drew from novels, legends, and myths for its thematic content. The saga-like novels of Selma Lagerlof served as a basis for many films. Certainly Bergman learned a great deal from the work of directors Seastrom and Stiller with regard to the pictorial beauty and technical brilliance of his pictures.

The Swedes were quickly aware of the power of the new medium and they turned to serious themes almost immediately. The peculiar dualism native to that country found expression in her movies, and such classics as The Outlaw and His Wife (1917), Arne's Treasure (1919), The Phantom Carriage (1920) and The Legend of Gosta Berling (1923) probed deeply into the nature of existence.

Because of the antagonisms of climate, the Swedish metaphysical complaint often takes the form of polar forces locked in conflict. The Swedish Weltanschauung is influenced by the elemental powers of an unsubdued nature. This influence is not to be found in the Anglo-Saxon or Latin temperament, where nature has been met and overcome. The Scandinavian identifies his own spiritual turmoil with the turmoil of the elements, and this identification is felt in his art. To the degree that this world-view has affected the substance of Bergman's films it may be said that he is an extension of Swedish film history. But while the impact of history cannot be denied, the test of an artist's work must lie ultimately with his departure from tradition rather than his conformity to it. In Bergman's case, departure is the significant fact.

Bergman's eclecticism derives less from Swedish film than from certain influences usually associated with literature, painting or theatre. When he released Wild Strawberries in 1957, the critics were quick to point to the obvious surrealism of the highly subjective dream sequences. He. was compared to Cocteau, Murnau, Vigo, and Hans Richter - all of whom chose surrealistic devices for use in their films. There is no mistaking this influence in Professor Borg's weird nightmares in that remarkable film. The first dream finds the old man walking down an unfamiliar, twisting, and empty street. Borg glances at his watch and finds that it has no hands. Similarly, the hands of a clock on a nearby store are missing. He approaches a man whose back is to him and when the man turns around we see that his face is bloated beyond recognition, like that of a drowned corpse. When Borg touches the man the latter shrivels up like a punctured balloon and evaporates into the gutter. Suddenly an unattended horse-driven hearse rounds the corner, a wheel catches on a lamp-post and the coffin spills out onto the pavement. The Professor leans down to peer inside and finds himself face to face with his own corpse. The hand of the dead man reaches out and takes hold of his living counterpart. As the hand begins to draw Borg into the coffin he mercifully awakens. This macabre prologue states a prevailing theme of Bergman's and is done, in this instance, within a surrealistic framework.

All the elements which characterize the Bergman dilemma are contained in this brief scene. Thus we see the isolation of life represented in the empty street; man's inability to communicate with his fellows is symbolized by the faceless bystander. Urgency is lent to the old man's plight by the death symbols - the clock which indicates that time has run out, the approach of Borg's own corpse, whose mute insistence that he occupy the coffin points to the professor's belief that in a sense he is already dead. Subsequent dreams play variations on this theme and probe into his past to explore events which have contributed to his essential meaninglessness. The watch symbol has long been a motif of the surrealists, as has the penchant for distortion of human features. But more important, the emphasis of surrealism upon the subconscious, the insistence that a higher reality can be achieved through subordinating rationality to imagination and free association, is the view which has influenced Bergman in this case.

A friend of Borg's quotes Schopenhauer: "'Dreams are a kind of lunacy and lunacy a kind of dream.' But life is also supposed to be a kind of dream, isn't it?" Everything relevant to

Borg's story is told by his subconscious, and vn: gain greater insight into the nature of the mun through this method.

Told in first person narrative, Wild Strawberries points out that essential truths of the human condition cannot be apprehended through reason and are reducible only to the symbols common to the free association in dreams. This view would have been all but impossible prior to Freud's psychoanalytic theories, and the surrealists are the first to point to his influence upon their art.

A critic once observed that "Bergman shoots with one foot in existentialism and the other in psychoanalysis," but the Swede has been less influenced by Freud than by Eiona Kaila and his book Psychology of the Personality. He writes of Kaila's thesis that "man lives strictly according to his needs - negative and positive," that it was "shattering to me, but terribly true. And I built on this ground." On the surface, such a thesis is anything but shattering and might be considered a commonplace fact of life. But if man lives strictly according to his needs, and if his needs proceed from factors external to himself, then he is no longer a free agent. The thesis implies a psychological determinism. Man is what he is and his needs control his actions. He is incapable of moral choice. "There is nothing which can be called right or wrong," says Evald in Wild Strawberries. "One functions according to one's needs."

As the symbolism of Borg's life unravels in his dreams, we see a man victimized by his own indifference. His isolation and mental suffering derive from no greater crime than his lack of passion and his inability to communicate. He is unable to love but must nevertheless suffer the consequences reserved for those who refuse to love or who are actively cruel. Without love his life is meaningless. Even his great success as a medical researcher (for which he is to receive an honorary degree) pales beside the despair that has come to fill his dreams. Yet his condition is not the result of choice but of chance. In his youth his love for Sara is frustrated because she finds him "cold" and undemonstrative. She chooses another. He marries, not for love, and the union ends in disaster. The turning point in Borg's life occurs when Sara rejects him in favor of his brother. This is a circumstance over which he could not possibly exercise control. Since his "needs" do not call for warmth, since he is distant by nature, he is made to suffer. Thus if man lives according to his needs and his needs do not allow for the understanding and sympathy one must have for communication with others, man's

Winter, 1962

Isolation is not caused by any act of will. It is determined by one's psychological make-up.

It seems natural, then, that Bergman should borrow from surrealism to explore this thesis. As a means of approaching man's non-rational essence, surrealism offers decided advantages, notably the continuity of imaginative symbolism. Consideration of the social causes of Borg's dilemma must involve an objective, rational inquirysuch as is found in the social protest films of de Sica. But to Bergman, as we have seen, the problems are not of a social nature but of a psychological one.

Bergman has also been identified with expressionism, particularly the sort found in the German theatre of the 1920's and in the plays of Strindberg. This latter influence is freely admitted by the film-maker. "It is completely natural," he says, "for artists to take from and give to each other, to borrow from and experience one another. In my own life, my great literary experience was Strindberg." It is his amibition to mount a production of The Dream Play.

But the term "expressionism" has only doubtful application to Bergman. One could, with some justification, claim any artistic distortion of reality to be expressionistic in one sense or another. The highly stylized Magician is intensely subjective and has overtones of German expressionism such as is found in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, but to claim Bergman as an exponent of a particular school implies a parochialism, an implication which would be difficult to defend. Strindberg's dark preoccupation with subjective experience made conventional theatrical techniques an impossibility. Bergman, too, has rejected many of the conventions of his predecessors, and his departure from film tradition closely parallels Strindberg's departure from certain stage traditions. But Bergman is careful to point out that he is no mere extension of Strindberg. "Film," he says, "has nothing to do with literature; the character and substance of the two art forms are usually in conflict."

In his essay on symbolic action, Kenneth Burke speaks of the "ritual" which the writer undergoes in the creation of a literary work. This ritual may be conscious or unconscious, but the work of art becomes a "strategy" for handling or controlling the writer's own problems. The symbolic ac-

tion represents the artist disguising his identity in order to participate in the ancient ceremonies of initiation, rebirth, and purification through the primary ritual of creation. Thus Burke advances the thesis that "if we try to discover what the work is doing for the artist, we may discover a set of generalizations as to what works of art do for everybody."

This approach bears greater fruit the closer we come to writers whose extreme subjectivity makes a careful consideration of their lives necessary to an accurate interpretation of their work. The religious artist, through the aesthetic mask, performs a symbolic act of expiation through the creative process: he achieves redemption through creation. Much of Kafka's symbolism remains hopelessly cryptic because of the intensely personal use of the purification ritual. For this reason pages of dialogue in The Castle seem to bear little if any relevance to the context. In a similar fashion, much of the confusion over Bergman stems from his personal use of visual symbols. The fact that his symbols are visual permits the casual observer to ignore them, and the chance that they will detract from or cloud the film's theme is remote. It is therefore easy for the critic to discuss the central thesis without acknowledging the peripheral symbolism used to support it. This accounts for the charge sometimes leveled at this film-maker that his view, while compelling, lacks enough logic to develop an idea fully. While not questioning the author's right to explore his own imagination, critics have been slow to see the totality of a film because its richest symbolic content is visual and therefore beyond the reach of logic. "I am a film-maker," Bergman protests, "not an author."

Speaking in honor of the late Victor Seastrom, who played the role of Borg in Wild Strawberries, Bergman noted that "His glance is forever trying to pierce through the darkness. He is forever trying to catch the sound of a reply to his terrified questions and despairing prayers. But the silence is complete." The words could have been attributed to anyone of a number of writers of an existential persuasion. Certainly they call to mind Kafka's driving obsession with the inaccessibility of God. The phrase illustrates a basic position of the film-maker and supports the view that, artistically at least, Bergman's vision of the human condition is existential.

There are distinct parallels between Bergman's view of man and that of certain writers most com-

monly associated with the existential "movement." The most striking example of such a parallel is the writing of existentialism's progenitor, Soren Kierkegaard. Bergman shares with the Dane an intense awareness of life's pervading darkness, a sense of suspense resulting from that awareness, and a consequent fear of all life-a "pan-anxiety" typified in the brooding stories of Franz Kafka. Kierkegaard postulated three phases of the complete life which illustrate his existential position. The first phase was the aesthetic, the second ethical, the third religious. In order to approach a full awareness of God, man had to evolve through these progressive phases by conscious effort premised upon faith. Bergman's magician, hence the artist, is unable to transcend the first, or aesthetic phase. He is incomplete. Bergman has written that, in the past, an artist's humanism was assured through anonymity, he was removed socially from his creation and assumed a normal place in society. "Today," he says, "the individual has become the highest form and the greatest bane of artistic creation. The smallest wound or pain of the ego is examined under a microscope as if it were of eternal importance. The artist considers his isolation, his subjectivity, his individualism almost holy we stand and bleat about our loneliness without listening to each other. We walk in circles, so limited by our own anxieties that we can no longer distinguish between true and false ." The modern artist, then, is isolated from the human community by his own genius. He is prevented from assuming his ethical responsibilities-Kierkegaard's second imperative-and is thus emasculated as a total human being. He is blinded by his own vision. The magician, sensing his marginal qualities as a meaningful member of society, assumes the burden of spiritual guilt. The same Lutheran discipline which led Kierkegaard to formulate his three imperatives has left its impact on Bergman's work.

But where the religious existentialists make faith the necessary prerequisite to essence, Bergman's fundamental religious position is doubt. In The Seventh Seal, Bergman's knight says: "Faith is a torment, did you know that? It is like loving someone who is out there in the darkness but never appears, no matter how loudly you call." To Kierkegaard, "God does not think, He creates; God does not exist; He is eternal." And the deity is not to be approached through reason alone but through the insights born of faith. To Bergman, "the religious problem is an intellectual one the relationship of my mind to my intuition." To Kierkegaard, man is in a state of "becoming"; NORTHWESTERN

Bergman's characters simply are: they are unable to alter their basic identity.

The concern with spiritual suffering is one aspect of life shared by all the existentialists, and Bergman is no exception. But while the religious existentialists hold that suffering produces insight, and the atheistic school sees it as something to be overcome by the exercise of will, Bergman sees suffering merely as an unpleasant fact of life dictated by circumstance. "I have no respect for suffering of the soul," Professor Borg advises his daughter-in-law, "so don't come to me and complain. But if you need spiritual masturbation, I can make an appointment for you with some good quack, or perhaps with a minister, it's so popular these days."

Both religious and atheistic existentialism postulate will as the hope of suffering mankind. To Sartre, a man may exercise his will in order to free himself from the prejudices and restrictions of his religious bondage. Sartre's essential dilemma is how to cope with man's new freedom and the isolation it implies. For Bergman, man's estrangement is less from his fellow man than from the source of his own identity as postulated by religion. Kierkegaard saw free will as an instrument by which man could transcend himself and approach God. To Bergman, as we have seen, free will is largely an illusion. Man lives strictly according to his needs, and this psychological determinism precludes the exercise of an independent choice. His characters often realize the source of their unrest but are unable to change their circumstances or their personality. Man's predicament, according to Karl Lowith, is that science has produced the view that "an infinite universe of indefinite limits has no definite place for a finite man." It is in confronting this truth that Bergman closely identifies himself with the existentialists.

Swedish critics have reproved Bergman for his preoccupation with religious questions. "But," says the film-maker, "I will never give up this discussion." An agnostic in terms of organized religion-which, as one of his characters observes, "has for a long time and with great diligence worked for the success of the Devil"-he has nevertheless devoted the greater part of his creative life to trying to explicate the mystery of man's relationship to an inexplicable universe. It would probably be improper to speak of Bergman's religious "position" since he has accepted

Winter, 1962

no particular viewpoint. The aesthetic effort, though, is often conceived of in religious terms. "Art," he argues, "lost its basic creative drive the moment it was separated from worship." In former days, an artist created "to the glory of God." While Bergman does not identify himself with formal Christianity, his major concerns correspond to basic church questions. "To me, religious problems are continuously alive. I never cease to concern myself with them; it goes on every hour of every day." He explains that he has rid himself of religious emotions and "religious sentimentality" but that the question of man's spiritual nature is very much alive for him. The Seventh Seal is a brilliant exploration of the relationship of man to God. Of this picture he has written: "My intention has been to paint in the same way as the medieval church painter, with the same tenderness and joy." Tenderness and joy, however, come off second best.

The story opens in 13th century Sweden. The knight, Antonius Block, has returned from the Crusades to find his native land in the grip of the Black Plague. His first encounter is with the hooded figure of Death, who informs the knight that his time has come. "I have been walking by your side for a long time announces the specter; "I grant no reprieves." But the knight engages him in a chess game to prolong the inevitable and perform "one meaningful deed."

As the knight and his squire travel inland they meet a variety of characters each of whom is relevant to the knight's search for meaning. But as he travels, Block sees less meaning than chaos. Sweden is torn by famine and disease, the Church seems more anxious to toll the bell of doom than offer comfort; and everywhere he encounters despair and brutality. In a church confessional he asks:

How can we have faith in those who believe when we can't have faith in ourselves? What is going to happen to those of us who want to believe but aren't able to? And what is to become of those who neither want to nor are capable of believing? I want knowledge, not faith, not suppositions, but knowledge. I want God to stretch out his hand toward me, reveal Himself and speak to me.. In our fear, we make an image, and that image we call God.

He confides the strategy by which he hopes to prolong the chess game and thus lengthen his life. But the hooded figure on the other side of the screen is Death, not a priest. The Church is clearly no refuge. Later he encounters a grisly procession of flagellants led by a monk who strikes fear into the townspeople by warning them of the

terror of God's vengeance, the magnitude of His wrath, and the inexor-abilitv of man's fate. The life-size crucifix borne by the p rocess ion pictures Christ's suffering in graphic dot a il : the features are contorted in anguish, the corners of II IS mouth are pulled down in despair. The image is not that of Christ the triumphant Savior but of the suffering Nazarene whose face is a tortured death mask. The knight encounters a young girl sentenced to be burned at the stake for having sexual union with the Devil. Her wrists have been broken and the child is paralyzed with fear and pain. Enraged, the knight's squire demands to know "who watches over that child? Is it the angels, or God, or the Devil, or only the emptiness?" He is helpless to save her and the child dies-in the name of the Church. Running throughout the picture is the idea that if God can be made meaningful one must look away from the Church-at least the Church of the Dark Ages.

A wandering actor, Jof (Joseph) and his wife Mia (Mary) are the only ones in the picture who are able to see beauty or meaning, and their son will some day do the one "impossible trick": he will suspend gravity by making a ball stand still in the air. Jof sees visions of the Virgin and the Christ child romping happily through a field. In the end, it is he who witnesses the dance of death sequence in which Death leads his victims off into the horizon. The simple contentment of the couple lends balance to a theme of suffering, meaninglessness, and death. But in The Seventh Seal it is the darkness, not the light, which shines through. Humanity, with the exception of those ransomed by love, are doomed to endure the single fact of their own mortality without explanation or answer to their prayer. If God may be approached, Bergman seems to say, this is only possible indirectly through love. Jof sees visions, the knight sees only the grinning face of death.

It is a characteristic of Bergman that his films have predominantly non-contemporary settings. Swedish film history provides a precedent for this in that most of the early Swedish films relied heavily upon legends and myths for their themes. This reliance can be partially explained by the fact that the cinema in that country got a late start and there was an absence of qualified screen writers at the time. But Bergman writes his own screenplays and is prolific enough (he averages at least one a year) to abandon historical themes and comment upon his immediate environment. Yet most of his films-and all of his best-take

place in the past. It seems likely that his affection for history relates to the religious nature of his central concern,

The paternalism of historical Christianity has been replaced by the bureaucratic paternalism of the modern welfare state. In the confusion, Christianity has been reconceived as a body of simple moral preachments loosely abstracted from the old orthodoxy. Humanism and the religion of man as deduced from Christ's teachings become mere matters for legislation. The traditional Christian concern for sin, guilt, and redemption-for orthodox theology in general-are moving progessively to the hinterland of man's moral consciousness. In Sweden, a land where church-going has largely been abandoned, Bergman's religious questionings are viewed with some embarrassment as the impulse of an anachronistic sophomore (both The Seventh Seal and The Magician lost money in Sweden while accumulating awards elsewhere). The modern Swedish scene provides neither the atmosphere nor the encouragement for Bergman's basic inquiry. Inevitably he reaches into the past for his environments-to a time when religious questions had greater vitality. Referring to his Seventh Seal, Bergman writes: "My beings laugh, weep, howl, fear, speak, answer, play, suffer, ask, ask. Their terror is the plague, Judgement Day, the star whose name is Wormwood. Our fear is of another kind, but our words are the same."

Bergman has been asked what his intention is in making films. "I try to tell the truth about the human condition," he replies, "the truth as I see it." As he sees it, the human condition is one of isolation: not the alienation of man from society but the belief that he has no real relevance to it. Man's reality is personal not social. His dilemma is indifference to other men. Because of his isolation from the human community man is isolated from God, the source of his own vitality. Love is less of a salvation than an evidence of man's need to escape from himself. Religion has lost its authority to explain man's fundamental moral questions about his relation to the world and to other men. Science, with its implicit determinism, denies him as an agent of moral choice and delivers his fate to a series of impersonal and incomprehensible laws. "I have prayed just one prayer in my life," says Spegel in The Magician: "Use me. Handle me. But God never understood what a strong and devoted slave I had become. So I had to go unused. One walks step by step into the darkness. The motion itself is the only truth."

But Bergman is far from Dostoevski's nihilist. The fact that he cannot find cause for affirmation NORTHWESTERN

of life itself does not lead him to conclude that the human condition is hopeless. Throughout his films, delicately balanced on the periphery of his major themes, is the belief that some fortunate individuals, through no effort on their own part, are granted the "gift" of happiness and love. Life, he seems consistently to say, is designed for the elect few. The meaning to the riddle of life is that one may hope to have the gift, may cling to the faith that he is numbered among the elect. In Smiles of a Summer Night Bergman comes closest to the heart of this theme:

Frid: There are only a very few young lovers on this earth. Yes, one can almost count them. Love has smitten them both as a gift and as a punishment.

Petra: And we others?

Frid: We others Ha!

Petra: Yes, what becomes of us?

Frid: We invoke love, call out for it, beg that we have it, lie about it.

Petra: But we don't have it.

Frid: No, my sugar plum, the love of lovers is denied to us. We don't have the gift.

The others, those without the "gift," are left to pray to "a God somewhere in the darkness." Perhaps Strindberg has anticipated his admirer when the famous playwright offered such a prayerwhich Bergman has quoted-in his last play, The Great Highway:

Bless me, Thy humanity

That suffers, suffers from Thy gift of life!

Me first, who have sufferedSuffered most the pain of not being what I most would be.

The editor is sorry to report that in the Fall issue the misplacing of a page proof resulted in a garbled sequence for a number of paragraphs in Harold M. Grutzmacher's article, "The Teacher as Writer." Paragraph 15, the first full paragraph on page 46, should have been followed by what appeared as the last paragraph on that page, and so to the end, resuming with what is now the second paragraph on page 46. The jumbling of the organization of the article is the fault of the editor, not of the author. Our apologies to Mr. Grutzmacher.

Mr. William T. F'aricy, of Washington, D.C., has presented to the University an award to be called the Faricy Award for Creative Verse, as a memorial to his daughter, Jean Faricy Lord. The sum of $100 is to be awarded annually to an undergraduate who shows promise in the writing of poetry. The award will be made by a committee appointed by the English Department. Plans for the submission of manuscripts will be announced later in The Daily Northwestern. Poems published in The Tri-Quarterly will be eligible, as well as those submitted directly to the committee.

The University Press will publish this Spring a volume to be called Poets in Progress, containing the first ten of The Tri-Quanerly's series of articles on living American poets.

Winter, 1962 19

George E. Spink

George E. Spink is a junior in the CoUege of Liberal Arts, majoring in Political Science. He transferred to Northwestern this year from the University of California at San.ta Barbara. His home is in Berwyn, Illinois.

Haeccity

Today the snow came down and the streets became white, white.

Children rolled little baUs which grew bigger and bigger, and they were white. they placed a small one upon a big one and another small one upon the smaller one: a snowman.

The snowman was attractive and people liked it, for it possessed a universal quality: it looked like all other snowmen that had been built before it.

And it looked like all the snowmen that will be built after it, after it.

But when you look at the snowman, do you see an inner beauty, a beauty that suggests the simpliCity of a little girl or boy? Look!

Do you see an inner beauty? Look!

I awoke at the misty dawn of who knows what day, but in November, and it snowed. I saw the beauty of a snowman, and it snowed.

But soon the snow ceased, and it became warmer. Where did the snowman go?

George D. Dilts

George D. Dilts is a senior in the College of Liberal Arts, majoring in English. He was born in Buffalo, New York, went to school in Madison, New Jersey, and now lives in Alburtis, Pennsylvania. In 1954 he eniisteti in the Navy, trained at Bainbridge, Maryland, and spent the remainder of his three year stretch in sea duty aboard the destroyer U.S.S. Hailey, visiting Cuba, the Mediterranean ports, and, through the Suez Canal, the Arabian port of Aden.

NORRIS'S WAKE

THE EARLY DAWN was cool and slight with a vapor of mist over the water. The sun, distant as the sea itself, stood a few points above the horizon; the low-hanging clouds were scored, blotchy, suspended, spired by the masts of the ships and the taller buildings of the town across the bay.

The destroyer in the harbor dangled lightly at the end of its mooring chain like an ornament. Slow drifts of water pushed under one side of the ship and slid from the other, dull and unbroken. Patches of oil drifted here and there on the surface, gathering and closing and spreading again, undisturbed save by the occasional churning wake of a passing motorboat on its way out from the landing to one of the ships.

A short, stockily-built young seaman dressed in dungarees stood in the extreme bow of the ship, one foot on the chock, the destroyer gradually widening, spreading fan-like at his back. He smoked a cigarette and stared at the naval base that stretched along the shore and almost back to the edge of the town, the buildings a uniform dirty white with large black numbers painted on the sides. Kaczmarek knew that they'd come again today. And that this time they'd want to talk to him.

Later he helped wash down the decks. He and Romano worked together, but neither of them said anything about it. He ate breakfast and was painting over the side when at nine-thirty they called him and told him to go below and change into his whites.

At ten o'clock he was waiting outside the wardroom. The stewards were still busy in the pantry

Winter, 1962

cleaning up after the officers' morning meal and getting ready for the one at noon. He leaned back against the hatch-cover and watched the stewa�ds and waited.

"John Kaczmarek

He stepped into the wardroom and stood, a few steps in front of the long dining table. Behind his back, he nervously shifted his white hat from one hand to the other. He looked at the two officers sitting behind the table.

"Kaczmarek," one of them said, "this a Board of Inquiry. My name's Lieutenant Neuburger. This is Ensign Calucci." He indicated the officer sitting at his right. Kaczmarek shifted his weight to his other foot. The Ensign was drawing circles on a pad of lined yellow paper.

"Kaczmarek," Ensign Calucci said, burying his nose in the pad of paper, "you probably know why we're here. We're investigating the disappearance of Norris, one of the seaman." The Ensign suddenly looked up and stared at him as if he expected Kaczmarek to say something.

"Yes, sir," Kaczmarek said.

The Ensign bent his head again and drew a circle on the pad. "Tell us what happened that night," he said. He sounded bored as hell, Kaczm arek thought.

"Well," he said, "well, I Kaczmarek hesitated and looked at his feet.

"We want to try and clear this thing up today," the Lieutenant said. "As a matter of fact we have to clear it up today because well, because we have some other things to do. We suspect that you were the last man to see him, and we need to know what happened back there before we can

come to some kind of a conclusion." The officers \\'PH' both looking at him.

"Yl'S, sir," Kaczmarek said. He wished he knew what tht'�' wanted.

"Suppose you start with the night in question," Ensign Calucci said again, "and tell us what you know about it."

Kaczmarek made a visible effort to relax. He wished he could sit down. "We were at sea on our way back from the Mediterranean. I had the fantail watch. Norris was my relief. He came back and we talked for a while and then I left and went up forward and went to bed."

"And in the morning he was missing," Ensign Calucci finished for him.

"Yes, sir."

"And that's all you know about it?"

All three of them realized that that wasn't all he knew about it. Why didn't they ask him some questions, Kaczmarek thought. Why did they have to play games?

"All right, Kaczmarek," the Ensign said, "if that's the case. we have just a few questions and then you can go. All right?" The Ensign smiled insincerely at his pad of paper.

"Okay," Kaczmarek said.

The Lieutenant selected a yellow file folder from the stack of papers in front of him and, looking through it, took up the questioning. "Stiles, Boatswain's Mate Second Class, the mustering petty officer," he read, "reported Norris missing at 0130, Monday, 25 August, 1956. Norris was presumably washed overboard. That was the night the storm started."

"Yes, sir, that's right," Kaczmarek said.

"Why did Norris have that particular watch?"

"Sir?"

"I want to know why Norris had that particular watch.

"I don't ."

"Stiles makes up the watch bill, is that right?"

"Yes, sir," Kaczmarek said. How much do they know, he wondered.

"Kaczmarek," Ensign Calucci said, as he completed a perfectly round circle on the pad in front of him, "what kind of a knife does Stiles have?"

"It's just a knife. With some line wrapped around the handle."

"Have you seen that knife around anywhere lately?

"I think Stiles said he lost it."

The Lieutenant wrote something on a piece of paper and put it in a file folder. Ensign Calucci got up and walked to the end of the room. He opened the two glass portholes and came back to

the table and sat down. Nobody said anything for a few seconds. The stewards had finished cleaning up in the pantry and the wardroom was very quiet. Kaczmarek looked through the hatch at a distant gull hanging motionless above the bay. Its head turned slowly from side to side.

"Did you SE't' Stiles on your way forward after you got off watch?" Ensign Calucci asked.

"No, sir," Kaczmarek said, turning his head toward the table again.

"You all sleep in the First Division compartment?"

"Yes, sir."

"Was Stiles in his rack?"

"I don't know, sir, I sleep over on the other side.

"Has Stiles spoken to you about this matter?" the Lieutenant asked.

"No, sir," Kaczmarek lied. He had spoken to him that morning in the mess hall. Stiles had come up to the table and said, "They're gonna be talking to you this morning." And Kaczmarek had nodded his head, saying nothing, but knowing exactly what he meant.

"Kaczmarek," the Lieutenant said, "we know a few things you evidently don't think we know." He paused and Kaczmarek watched as Ensign Calucci hesitated in mid-circle to look up at the Lieutenant and then return to his pad. He finished drawing the circle. It wasn't quite as well formed as the others, but it was almost perfectly round. The Ensign moved his whole arm when he drew them. It must have taken a long time, Kaczmarek thought, and a lot of practice to draw circles like that.

"We think," the Lieutenant said, "that there was a feud running between Stiles and Norris. For that reason, we suspect that Norris might not have been lost at sea. That is, lost accidentally. We think he might have been pushed. We also think that Stiles might have done the pushing. However, there were no witnesses. Stiles has been aboard the ship for two years, and so far has a perfect record as a petty officer. We don't want to get the wrong man," he said quietly. "You can understand that."

"Yes, sir," Kaczmarek said, "I can understand that." That's why they wanted to know about the knife, he thought. They think he killed him. The Lieutenant started talking again. They think he killed him, Kaczmarek thought.

"And you can help us, Kaczmarek," the Lieutenant's voice droned on. Kaczmarek was furiously thinking. "I'm afraid there's a difference between a man's being lost at sea, and his being murdered." They've got it all wrong, he thought. Don't

they understand? "You were Norris's best friend ." He didn't have any friends. ". and if you know anything at all about it, and we think you do, at least more than you've told us, because what you've told us this morning we knew about an hour after we started the Investigation." I know plenty you don't know. "It's your duty, Kaczmarek, as Norris's friend.. "To hell with you and your duty. to help us get to the bottom of this thing."

One of the ship's officers stuck his head around the corner of the hatch leading from the passageway. "Oh, sorry," he said, and went out again.

"I think we'd better break this up until this afternoon," the Lieutenant said. "They're getting ready to eat." Kaczmarek noticed for the first time the noise of rattling pans and dishes coming from the adjacent pantry.

"We'll want to see you again as soon as work starts this afternoon," the Lieutenant said to Kaczmarek.

"That's about one-thirty," Ensign Calucci added unnecessarily, his head still bent over his collection of circles.

"Yes, sir," Kaczmarek said, and stepped out through the hatch. He stood outside the door to the wardroom for a while looking at the bay. The sun was higher but seemed to have gotten no brighter than it was when he'd looked at it earlier in the morning. He turned away and walked toward the bow of the ship.

Stiles was waiting in front of the gun mount. "How'd it go?" he said. He was smiling. "Okay," Kaczmarek said. "You didn't tell 'em anything?" "No."

The grin abruptly faded from Stiles' face. For just an instant he looked bewildered before his features hardened again into an expression of confident contempt. As Kaczmarek turned to go, Stiles caught his arm.

He was smiling again. "You've got three more years to do on this ship," he said. "Don't cross me. I have ways of finding out."

Kaczmarek didn't say anything. He turned away and walked forward and went through the hatch on the foc'sle. He went down the ladder and looked to see if Romano was around, but he wasn't and so he went into the First Division compartment and sat down on his locker. Nobody was around. They were probably all eating or waiting in the chow line to get into the mess hall.

Kaczmarek looked at the rack where Norris used to sleep. He knew that Stiles didn't kill him. He knew that. Stiles was too smart. Why the hell

Winter, 1962

should I tell them, he thought? What was Norris to me? Not a damn thing.

Kaczmarek thought about his house on Bedford Street in Pittsburgh. Then he lay down on top of his locker. I'll never tell them, he thought. And all the time he knew that he would.

* * *

The sound of chipping hammers and paint scrapers striking the metal deck of the destroyer drifted faintly back to the wardroom through the heavy September afternoon. From the after part of the ship came the soft, slow chugging of a whaleboat.

"Kaczmarek," Ensign Calucci said, as if he were hailing him from a great distance. Kaczmarek stood directly in front of him.

"Kaczmarek," the Ensign said again. By the tone of his voice, he had evidently gotten him within normal speaking distance. "Why don't you take one of those chairs over there?"

Kaczmarek got a chair and sat down facing the officers. Here we go, he thought.

"Kaczmarek," the Lieutenant said, "it's not too strange an occurrence for a man to be lost at sea. Especially during a storm like the one you people experienced a few days ago on your way back from the Mediterranean. But someone, I can't say who, was suspicious enough to call us over from the base to see if there might have been more to this than a man's simply being lost overboard.

"These things can sometimes get very complicated," the Lieutenant went on. "For example, someone having a grudge against Stiles might have said a few words to one of the officers, said enough to make the officer suspicious. This officer might have gone to the Captain and he might have ordered an investigation. I say, that's what might have happened.

"Someone might have seen a perfect opportunity to get rid of Stiles, by spreading some rumors about him in connection with Norris's death. One of the seaman might have done it. I happen to know that there are some people on the ship here that dislike Stiles. Maybe even hate him.

"But there's usually some bad feeling for boatswain's mates among the seamen. That's natural. The same kind of feeling there is among. say, marine recruits for their drill sergeant. They tend to focus on him as the cause of their problems.

"What I'm driving at, son" Kaczmarek looked up at the Lieutenant - "is that we have to know the whole story before we can take any kind of action. And to condemn an innocent man is just as bad as letting a guilty one go free."

"Lieutenant," Ensign Calucc-i said, "I have something -

"Just a second," the Lieutenant said impatiently, "just a second, Ensign."

Kaczmarek looked at Ensign Calucci, who was frowning over his pad. He had a fn'sh sheet of paper on the top and he seemed to have given up drawing circles. This afternoon it was boxes. Kaczmarek was fascinated. First the Ensign drew a square, then a little above and to the left of the first square he drew another one, then he connected up the sides, added a top, and printed very carefully under each of the completed figures, "This is a Box."

The Lieutenant was still speaking. "You had the watch before Norris, which means you were the last person to see him," he said rather arbitrarily. "As nearly as we can figure out you were his only friend ." Kaczmarek wished he'd stop saying that. Who the hell could have told him that, Romano?

"Kaczmarek," the Lieutenant said, "frankly we're stymied. You're our last hope Oh boy, Kaczmarek thought, listen to this.

"If you're hesitating for fear of reprisals from Stiles, or anybody for that matter, don't worry; what you have to say will get no further than this wardroom." Who are you trying to kid, Kaczmarek thought. Do I look like a dope?

The Lieutenant sighed profoundly. "We're going to depart a little from the normal procedure," he said. "We're not going to ask you any questions except a few that may come up. "We're going to let you talk. We've got all afternoon."

The Lieutenant sat back in his chair.

Ensign Calucci surfaced from his pad after completing three perfect boxes in a row. Both he and the Lieutenant were staring directly at Kaczmarek. He had to do something.

All right, he thought. All right. What difference does it make? In his mind he stood defiantly facing Stiles. And Stiles, for once, wasn't smiling.

"Where do you want me to start?" Kaczmarek asked.

Ensign Calucci retrieved his pad of paper and prepared for a long siege. "Suppose you start by telling us how this feud between Stiles and Norris got started," the Lieutenant said.

Kaczmarek thought for a little while. He looked at the Lieutenant's feet that stuck out from under the table as he slouched in his chair. The Lieutenant was staring at the corner of the room.

"Norris first came aboard ship," Kaczmarek began, "when we were down in Florida. I'd just been on here a little while myself. Anyway, he

came aboard with a bunch of other guys who were just out of boot camp.

"It was on a week-end, I think. I had the watch on the quarterdeck, and I had to sign them all in. I remember doing that. A lot of the guys that had duty were sitting around eating ice cream and stuff and watching these boots come aboard.

"The last one to come over from the pier was this tall, thin guy, who was Norris, and just then Stiles came wandering up from somewhere and he grabbed Norris and

"Grabbed him?" Ensign Calucci interrupted.

"Well, you know what I mean, sir

"No, I don't know what you mean, sailor," the Ensign said, tearing the top sheet off his pad. After carefully wadding it into a tight ball, he threw it neatly into the wastebasket in the corner.

"What do you mean, Kaczmarek?" the Lieutenant said.

"What I mean is, sir, that Stiles came up and asked Norris if he'd like to help carry some garbage cans from the fantail off onto the pier," Kaczmarek said elaborately.

"Go on," said the Lieutenant.

"So we all watched while Norris went back to the fantail and stood there. Stiles was watching him too. And Norris just stood there while these other guys did the work. He looked like he was in kind of a daze.

"Finally· Stiles went back and took Norris by the arm and walked him up to one of the cans and showed him how the handle worked and pointed to the can and then pointed out to the pier. Then he got some other sailor to get on the other side and they started walking up toward the quarterdeck with Stiles following right behind them to make sure they got all the way out to the pier with the stuff.

"But Norris tripped just as he stepped off the ship and the can spilled all over the quarterdeck. Everybody laughed and Stiles looked pretty disgusted. Norris was just standing there looking at the garbage all over the deck. He looked like all this couldn't possibly be happening -to him. So Stiles got some other guys to clean it up and told Norris to just stand somewhere and not to get in the way."

"Why did he get Norris to carry the garbage?" the Lieutenant said.

"I don't know, sir."

"Did Stiles get any of the other new people who'd just come aboard to help with it?"

"No," Kaczmarek said, "he just got Norris." And Norris probably never forgave him, he thought.

"And you think that this incident is what started the feud between them?" the Lieutenant said skeptically.

"I don't know, sir," Kaczmarek said. "I just remembered it."

"Go on, go on," the Lieutenant said.

Kaczmarek looked out at the bay, trying to remember. Different scenes flashed through his mind, things that had happened a few years ago; a man he'd met in a train station, a girl he knew in high school, a ride he'd taken on the Staten Island ferry one afternoon when he'd been visiting a friend in New York. None of them remotely concerned Norris.

"Kaczmarek?" the Lieutenant said.

"Norris was a strange guy. He was the kind of a guy that was just around; you know what I mean. Nobody noticed he was there and if he wasn't, well, nobody noticed that either. Norris was just always around.

"Anybody that reads books around here is thought of as being a little weird, and Norris read quite a bit. He had some book called Being and Nothingness that he read all the time. I asked him once what it was about. 'Great book,' he said, 'you ought to read it,' but I don't go in for that stuff as a rule.

"He had a book about astronomy too. Sometimes when we were at sea, you'd see Norris sitting all by himself at night. He'd be looking at the stars, learning the constellations. If you said anything to him, he'd get up and go somewhere else.

"A lot of times we'd shoot crap in the compartment and we'd talk a lot at night about girls and what we used to do and Norris would usually be over in his rack reading this Being and Nothingness stuff. He had a whole locker full of books. In fact he had two lockers, one for his books and the other for his clothes.

"I never bothered much with him myself, because Norris wasn't the kind of a guy you made friends with. He was nice enough, everybody liked him, but I don't think he had any real friends. And he never talked about anything he'd done before he came in the service. In fact he never talked about anything at all.

"The rest of us were always passing around pictures of our girls and telling lies about them, and telling stories, you know how you do, everybody trying to top the other guy's story, and I don't know if Norris even listened to any of it. So nobody paid any attention to him, after a while. We asked him stuff at first, tried to get him in the crap games and everything, but after a while we let him alone. He was just there.

Winter, 1962

"I think actually," Kaczmarek continued, "that the guy had gone to college or something, which was why he had all these books. But if he had, he never said anything about it. The Guinea used to kid him about-"

"The Guinea?" Ensign Calucci said, "who's that?"

"Romano. His name's Frank Romano," Kaczmarek said.

"Oh, yes, Romano," Ensign Calucci said pointedly, "I remember."

"Go on, Kaczmarek," the Lieutenant said.

"Anyway, the Guinea -" Ensign Calucci looked up -." I mean Romano used to kid Norris sometimes about reading all the time. He used to ask him why he never went over on liberty with the rest of us.

"The Guinea used to tell-

"Romano," Ensign Calucci corrected. He'd stopped drawing boxes long enough to get annoyed. "His name is Romano."

"Yes, sir. Anyhow, sometimes at night he used to try to get Norris to put away his books and come over to town with the rest of us. Norris usually wouldn't go, but one time we talked him into it. We were going over to the 'Y' to see if we could hustle a few of the town boys into a game of pool. Guinea was a -

"Goddammit," Ensign Calucci exploded, "Romano. R-O-M-A-N-O," he shouted, leaning aggressively across the table.

Kaczmarek was startled. Unconsciously he shoved his chair back a few inches. "I'm sorry," Kaczmarek said. He watched with relief as Ensign Calucci propped his chin on his fist and started drawing a box on the pad. "Christ," the Ensign muttered and, ripping off the top sheet of paper in disgust, started a fresh one.

"He was a pretty good pool player," Kaczmarek continued. "We got a couple of the local boys in a game that night and Norris watched us for, about ten minutes, but I don't think he understood the game or something because he went out and we didn't see him for two or three hours. And when we got ready to go back to the ship we had to scout around for Norris for a half hour or so. We finally found him way off in a corner by himself writing letters or something.

"And until we got to Greece, that was the only time I know about that Norris left the ship, except maybe to go out on the pier for some ice cream or candy or something like that.

"What about Stiles?" the Lieutenant asked. "Let's get back to that."

"I don't think Norris ever got used to Stiles. Ever since the first time he came aboard down in Florida, there was something between them, I don't know what.

"Stiles has always been hard on the new guys. He gives them a lot of trouble at first just to see how they'll take it. If they take it all right, then he let's them alone. But he never got used to Norris. Stiles used to get him for all the toughest jobs. and Norris never complained, not even to us.

"But you could tell he hated Stiles. I think Norris was a fairly sensitive guy, and Stiles, well, you know Kaczmarek's voice trailed off. "Stiles isn't too bright."

"Romano," Kaczmarek said, "stopped kidding Norris. It wasn't much fun really, because he'd never say anything. Everybody kind of forgot about him. You know how it is with these quiet guys. They don't talk and after a while people tend to forget they're around. Even now, it's hard trying to realize that he's dead, because you hardly noticed him when he was living with us down there in the compartment.

"But Stiles, Stiles never let up on Norris. After he found out that all he liked to do was read, he kidded him about that. He took away his other locker, the one with books in it, because he said that you're not supposed to have books and stuff around on the ship. And you're only allowed one locker, he said. A lot of other guys had two lockers and Stiles didn't care, but he only let Norris have one. 1 don't know where Norris put his books after that. But it didn't slow down his reading any, so he must have found someplace.

"Stiles used to get drunk a lot and he'd come back meaner'n hell some nights and then he'd really give Norris some trouble. You know, just trying to provoke Norris into saying something. Trying to make him mad. That was when he started this queer business. He used to say Norris was a queer because he never went over to town with the other guys, and he never talked about girls or anything.

"But old Norris wouldn't pay any attention. He'd lay up there in his rack and go right on reading. Didn't even bother to answer Stiles. Myself, 1 think Norris could have saved himself a lot of trouble if he'd just once gotten mad and said something back. But you see, by ignoring him, all he did was antagonize Stiles all the' more. By trying to get Norris mad, Stiles would get so mad himself you could hardly stand it in the compartment sometimes. It just never let up."

"1 see," said the Lieutenant. "What's this about Greece?"

"Well, we got over to Greece and the ship anchored out in the bay at Piraeus. It's very beautiful there." Kaczmarek paused and looked out at the dirty water of the bay. "The water over there is real blue when the sun's on it, and you could see Athens from the ship. You could see those three hills with the old ruined buildings on them. They stuck way up above the rest of the town. One of them's the Acropolis. I forget the other two. Norris told me once, but I've forgotten.

"You see, Norris had a couple of books that had pictures of these ruins in them. And right after the ship anchored, he dug these things out and started going through them.

"I was down in the compartment shining my shoes the first day we were in Greece and Norris all of a sudden leans out of his rack and says, 'Johnny, come ovah heah a second.' I was the only one around and 1 guess for once Norris wanted somebody to talk to. 1 went over and he said, 'My boy, I'm afraid you've been neglecting youah classics.'

"'Yeah, that's quite possible, Norris,' I said.

"'Well, theah's no time like the present,' he said, and we started looking at these pictures with Norris talking all the time and telling me stories about them. He seemed to know quite a bit about it, and 1 have to admit that a lot of it was over my head, because as a rule, 1 don't go in for that kind of thing.

"1 think 1 was more interested in finding out that Norris could talk than in what he was talking about, but I stayed there and looked at these ruins and listened to him because he seemed to be having a good time, although as I say, it was pretty much wasted on me. 1 mean, these legends and things.

'Listen, Norris,' I finally told him, 'I have to go right now, because I've got the watch, but 1 hear they're going to have a tour over there tomorrow for the guys that don't have the duty. 1 know how you hate to leave the ship and all that, but maybe just this once you could force yourself and go over and look at the real thing instead of those pictures.'

"'Say, that's a good idea,' he said. 'I think I'll do that.' Right then he jumped out of his rack and went over and dug his camera out of his locker and some film and started putting it in the camera. Then he got out his liberty whites and threw them over on the bed and 1 said, 'Hey, hold it Norris, we aren't going till tomorrow,' and he said, 'I know.' He was really excited, 1 could tell.

NORTHWESTERN TRI-QUARTERLY

"The next morning he was up before any of the rest of us were. You'd have thought he was going to call on the King or something. Everything had to be just right. I guess when you stay on the ship for months and months at a time, it's a big deal when ypu do finally decide to go off.

"About nine that morning we were all ready to go. Norris had been ready since eight and had been hanging around the quarterdeck waiting for the boat to come. He had a couple of cameras and light meters slung around his neck and I told him that if I had to carryall that stuff around I wouldn't even bother leaving the ship, but Norris said, 'That's all right John, my boy, don't worry about a thing. We'll take 'em by surprise.'

"We rode the boat over to the pier and then we were supposed to go in a bus with the other guys from the ship, but the Guin - I mean Romano and I had a little deal of our own cooked up. So we got over to the edge of the crowd and got in a cab. We didn't think anybody had seen us, and then Norris opened the door on the other side and jumped right in with us.

"Romano and I looked at each other and I said, 'Norris, I think you'd better go with those other guys on the bus. They're going on a regular tour and Romano and I are going to have a tour of our own, but I don't think we'll be looking at a whole lot of ruins.'

"'I don't want to go with those other guys,' Norris said, and he just sat there, so there wasn't much Romano and I could do.

"I hated to tell Norris that all Romano and I had gone on this thing for was so that we could get out of work for the day. I said, 'Now look, Norris, Romano and I are going to get a few drinks and then we're going to look for a pool hall if they play that game around here, because we figure that we can get some of these local guys in a game and win a few dollars. If you want to come along that's all right with us, but that's what we're going to do.' Then Norris all of a sudden says something to this cab driver in Greek and away we go and I could tell by the look on his face that we were going to look at some ruins after all.

"Nobody said anything during the ride over to Athens, because Romano and I were a little mad at Norris to tell you the truth. I mean, coming along with us when we don't particularly want him, and then taking command of the whole operation.

"We went to the Acropolis first and we all got out and walked around. I guess we got there be-

Winter, 1962

fore the rest of the guys that were riding the bus, because we were the only sailors there, although there were a lot of tourists.

"Everybody was taking pictures and Norris was running around like a big director getting his lens settings or whatever it is they do. Myself, I could never understand why you had to bother taking pictures of something like the Parthenon because you can buy them on any newsstand. But I guess those aren't good enough if you're a camera fan.

"So Norris took a lot of pictures of other people taking pictures, and once in a while I guess got a column or two in the background. Then we got back in the cab. Norris gave some more directions to the driver and Romano and I just sat back and looked at the scenery. We rode out to the Eleusinian fields. I think that's what Norris said it was. There's a theater there, and a museum.

"We got out of the cab and started walking up the hill toward the theater. All of a sudden Norris stopped and started poking around this hole in the ground. 'That's where Persephone, the daughter of Demeter, was carried down to the center of the earth by the King of Darkness.' There were stones set around the mouth of the hole.

'No kidding,' Romano said, 'it looks like an old well to me.' He dropped a stone down into it and we didn't hear anything.

"Romano and I walked on up the hill. Norris was still poking around the well. We went through this open space where the theater used to be, where the Greeks used to hold these mysteries. Nobody ever found out what actually went on there. That's what Norris said anyway.

"We went into this museum and looked around at some of the things they had in there, statues and things in glass cases. There was a house next door to this museum and after a while a girl came out of the house and into the museum where we were. She went over to a glass case in the corner and started taking these little stone figures out of it and putting them on the floor.

"Romano and I stopped looking in the cases and started watching her. She was worth it. She had black hair and she smiled at us once when she found out we were looking at her. She had the most beautiful teeth I've ever seen.

"It was only about ten in the morning and there wasn't anyone in the place besides us three. A little later old Norris wandered in and took one look at the girl and we didn't hear another word of English for five or ten minutes. Finally we got Norris's attention.

'Listen, Norris,' Romano said, 'ask her if there's a bar around here.'

"Norris asked her. 'Theah's one down then' across the road from where we left the cab.' he said.

'We'll see you later,' we said. "Romano and I went back down and got the cab driver and we all went over to this bar and had a few drinks. They had this old-fashioned juke box in there and Romano got the barmaid and started dancing. The cab driver wasn't such a bad dancer himself, although he was a pretty lousy drinker, We had a good time. Finally Romano and 1 got worried about getting back to the pier so that we could ride out to the ship with the rest of the guys that had gone on the tour. We hadn't seen a sign of Norris.

"The cab driver didn't want to leave. He said the only way he'd leave was if we drove back to Piraeus. We finally got him out and put him in the back seat of the cab, and went up the hill to get Norris.

"We couldn't find him in the museum. There were a lot of other people in there by that time, but no sailors. We went up over the hill and down the other side and there was Norris and this girl sitting looking at the water way down below. I've never seen water as blue as it was there.

"Norris saw us coming towards them. We stood and waited while he and the girl talked some more and then he got up and we went back up to the top of the hill and over and started walking down to where the cab was. We left the girl sitting there. with her back to us, looking at the water.

"The old Greek cab driver was still sitting in the back seat. 1 drove all the way back to town. Norris just sat and looked out the window the whole way. Once Romano asked him what he and the Greek girl had been talking about for so long, and Norris said, 'Her name's Anaris. She's a very intelligent girl,' but that's all he'd say.

"Romano kidded him all the way back about his new girl. We got lost a couple of times and had to ask directions, but we made it to the pier just in time to catch the boat going out to the ship. Before we got out of the cab, we stuffed a few bills in the driver's pocket. He was still sleeping in the back seat.

"It was a funny thing. For the rest of the time the ship was in Greece, Norris went over to town every night except the ones he had the duty, and on those nights he'd try to get somebody to stand his watch for him.

"Romano and 1 would usually see him sitting at one of the cafes in Piraeus. They have tables set

out in front all along the harbor where the fishing boats pull in. Norris would be sitting there and he was always with the girl he'd met at the museum.

"Of course Stiles found out about Norris's girl. Every night he went over to town he had to ask Stiles for his liberty card and 1 suppose Stiles began to wonder what Norris all of a sudden found so interesting over in Piraeus.

"One night Romano and I saw Stiles and a bunch of his cronies sitting a few tables down from Norris and his girl. We were pretty far away from them, but it wasn't too hard to tell, even from that distance, that they were making fun of Norris. We could hear them laughing. Norris of course wasn't paying any attention. He didn't even bother to go sit at another table.

"The ship stayed in the harbor at Piraeus for two weeks. The night before we were going to leave, 1 remember seeing Norris in the compartment getting ready to go over to town. 1 asked him if he was going to say goodbye to his girl and he said he was. 1 was sitting in the mess hall when Norris came in, and asked Stiles, who was sitting at the next table, for his liberty card.

"Stiles got a bunch of cards out of his pocket and started going through them like he was looking for Norris's and then he said, 'Don't you want to eat before you go over, Norris?'

"Norris said, 'No, 1 haven't got the time.'

"Stiles went on looking through the pile of cards. Then he said, 'Oh, 1 forgot to tell you, Norris, you've got the watch on the quarterdeck tonight.'

"Norris looked like he'd been hit over the head, the same way he looked when he first came aboard the ship, down in Florida. 'I have somebody standing by for me,' he said. 'Romano's going to take my watch.'

'No, 1 really want you to stay aboard tonight, Norris,' Stiles said, 'because I've been hearing stories about that little girl of yours. 1 hear she's got - Well, you don't want to catch anything like that, do you?'

"Norris just stood there dazed. Then he said in this very quiet voice of his, 'Stiles, 1 never asked you for anything before. 1 have to go ovah tonight.'

'I can't let you, Norris,' Stiles said. 'I want to protect your reputation. 1 don't think a high-class guy like you should be seen around town with a whore like that.' Stiles put the liberty cards back in his pocket. There wasn't a sound in the messhall.

"Stiles sat there grinning down at the table waiting for it to start. But it never did. Norris turned around and went back into the compartment and

NORTH

I could see him from where I was sitting. He was taking off his liberty clothes and getting rvudy to go on watch.

"Stiles was still looking at the table in front of him. He was kind of mumbling to himself. 'You queer sorrofabitch,' he said. Then he said it again. He said it over and over."

Kaczmarek stopped talking and looked around him. Both of the officers were staring at him. Ensign Calucci had long since stopped drawing boxes. The pad of yellow paper lay face down on the table at his elbow. Out of the corner of his eye, Kaczmarek saw someone walk by the open hatch.

"Is that all?" the Lieutenant said at last.

"No, sir."

"Go on," he said.

"We left Greece the next day and steamed straight to Gibraltar where we stopped to fuel before we started back for the States. I didn't talk to Norris or even see much of him until the night we talked about earlier. The night Norris relieved me on the fantail watch.

"He came back there about quarter to twelve and 1 took off the phones and gave them to him. I was pretty tired and I'd just started walking forward to go to bed when Norris grabbed me by the arm and just stood there staring at me.

'Johnny,' he said, 'do you remember the last night in Greece? The night Stiles wouldn't let me go over to town? I'm pretty sure you were in the mess hall when 1 asked him for my liberty card.'

'I remember,' 1 said.

'Stiles came back drunk that night.'

'He always does,' 1 said.

But he came back and woke me up.'

"'So what, Norris?'

'He woke me up to tell me that he saw Anaris with a bunch of sailors at one of the tables by the harbor where we used to sit.'

"'Norris, don't you understand why he does that?'

'He said she goes out with sailors all the time. Lots of sailors.'

"He sounded like he wanted to he reassured so I said, 'She wasn't a whore, Norris, you know that.'

'Yes, 1 know,' he said.

'But if 1 had been down there in the mess hall that night, and Stiles had said something like that about a girl that 1

'You'd have hit him,' Norris said.

'That's right. You're damn right 1 would have.'

"'That's exactly what he wanted me to do, Johnny my boy. And by not doing it, 1 beat him. I've been beating him ever since 1 came aboard the ship.'

Winter, 1962

"'I never thought about it that way before. 1 always thought you were afraid of him.'

"Norris laughed then for a long time and it was the most terrible laugh I've ever heard in my life. 'Johnny,' he said, 'let's go back and sit down for a while. I feel like talking.'

"We walked back near the lifelines. Norris sat on one of the bitts and I leaned up against the depth charge rack. 'I like to sit back here sometimes,' he said, 'don't you?'

'It's okay,' I said.

'She was a nice girl, Anaris. We talked about a lot of things the day you and Romano left us alone on the hill by the museum. I never met anybody before that I could talk to like I could to that girl. When we used to sit in the evenings in front of one of the cafes near the harbor and watch the fishing boats come in, we talked about everything.

"Norris was looking over the back of the ship at the wake. It was one of those very clear, calm, starry nights. The only time you see the ocean as calm as it was that night is just before a storm.

'Did you ever hear of a man named Schopenhauer, Johnny, my boy,' Norris said.

"'No,' 1 said, 'who's he?'

'He's a writer,' Norris said, 'a very disturbing writer.' He sat there for a while without saying anything. I didn't feel tired any more for some reason. 'Johnny,' he said, 'when we sat on that hill together, you know what the waves looked like down below?'

'No.'

'They looked like little pencils. They came up to the beach straight as pencils, one right after the other. It was so quiet there that afternoon that even if we could have heard the waves, we wouldn't have wanted to. It's a good thing Stiles didn't let me go that night. 1 wasn't ever coming back.'

"He was still staring at the wake. 'You know, that wake .' he said. 'Ever since we left Greece, it's all 1 can think about. The wake of the ship. That would be a nice title for something, wouldn't it?'

"I could tell from the way he was talking that he didn't need me there any more. 1 never understood why he talked to me anyway. I started walking away.

'Johnny,' he said. I turned around. 'I'm sorry 1 made you and Romano go sight-seeing the other day.' He put on the phones and turned around, toward the wake. I liked Norris a lot right then." Kaczmarek stopped talking and shifted himself around in his chair.

The two officers looked at one another. "Is there anything else?" the Lieutenant said.

"No, sir," Kaczmarek said.

"What do you think?"

"I think he killed himself. 1 think that sometime between the time I left him and the time they found out he was gone a couple of hours later, he stood up and climbed over the lines and walked off the end of the ship into the wake."

"And what led you to that brilliant conclusion?" Ensign Calucci said.

"I just think that's what he did. I've been thinking about it for a long time."

"You don't think Stiles killed him?"

"No, sir."

"You don't think he was washed overboard in the storm?"

"No, sir."

"If you thought he was going to kill himself that night, why didn't you do something about it?"

"1 guess that's what I'm trying to do now," Kaczmarek said.

"It's a little late," the Lieutenant said. "That'll be all, Kaczmarek.

"Sir?" Kaczmarek said.

"What is it?"

"What are you going to do?"

"I'm afraid that's up to us, Kaczmarek. That'll be all."

Kaczmarek stood up, put the chair back against the wall and stepped out on deck. He stood near the open hatch for a moment, out of sight, the voices trailing out to him from the wardroom.

"That wasn't exactly what I was expecting." That would be the Lieutenant, Kaczmarek thought.

"There's not much to go on. No witnesses. Not a one."

"I'm satisfied that he was lost overboard." The Lieutenant's voice again. "It seems to me that someone was out to hang this on Stiles. Perhaps this kid Kaczmarek. Take a look at Stiles' records." The voices stopped momentarily. "Several letters of commendation from the Captain of the ship. As a person he may leave something to be desired, I don't know, but there doesn't seem to be much question about him otherwise. He's evidently a hell of a good sailor. As for Norris' committing suicide, we have no earthly way of telling whether he did that or not."

"I remember one time," the Ensign was speaking, "about a year ago. The ship 1 was on lost two kids just out of boot camp. That was on the west coast. Wl' hit a storm on the way to Honolulu. It happens all the time."

The Lieutenant's voice drifted out to Kaczmarek through the warm air, "Say, did the Yankees win today?"

* *

Kaczmarek made his way aft to the fantail and sat down, leaning his back against the depth charge rack. The afternoon had gotten suddenly hot. The air was thick and oppressive as if some huge unseen hand were pressing It Close down about the ship.

Kaczmarek felt tired. It had all been for nothing. But he had known that before he started. It didn't make any difference. He wondered what Stiles would do, He would have had one of the stewards spying from the pantry next to the wardroom. He probably knew by now everything that he'd been saying for the last few hours to the officers from the base.

Kaczmarek looked up and saw Romano walking back toward him. "What happened?" Romano said.

"Nothing much."

"Stiles says he wants to see you."

"All right."

"Right now," he says.

"Yeah, okay," Kaczmarek said. He stood up and went over to the lines. He looked down at the wood and garbage and at the drifting gulls floating in the bay in back of the ship. Kaczmarek stared at these things for a long time.

The ship had swung on its mooring, and when he raised his head, instead of facing the town he looked off toward the mouth of' the harbor, toward Gibraltar and Tangier, and toward the hill in Greece where Norris and the girl had sat and watched the waves washing up on the beach far down below them; waves that from that height had looked like pencil-thin lines of white against the incredible blue of the Aegean.

Kaczmarek turned slowly and, after glancing at the sullen rainclouds, walked toward the bow of the ship.

Ralph Mills, Jr.

In our first issue, Fall, 1958, Ratph Mills Jr., then a graduate student and a teaching assistant in the Engtish Department, began THE TRI-QUARTERLY'S series of essays on tiving American poets with his "Towards a Condition of Joy: Patterns in the Poetry of Theodore Roethke." He now contributes a new article, eteventh in that series, upon Denise Levertov - an especially timely one, since Miss Levertov recently read her poetry at the University, and many of our students were able to hear and to meet her.

Mr. Mills is presentty a member of the Committee on Socuii Thought at the University of Chicago, where he also teaches a course - and is preparing a book - on contemporary poetry. He has published reviews and essays on Wallace Stevens, Edwin Muir, Dylan Thomas, Edith· Sitwell, Rene Char, William Faulkner, Samuel Beckett and others.

DENISE LEVERTOV: POETRY OF THE IMMEDIATE

The richness of the propositions contained even in the slightest thing is so great that I have not yet conceived the possibility of giving an account of any but the simplest objects -Francis Ponge

CERTAINLY,

if one were asked to do it, there would be some difficulty in classifying the American poetry of the last decade. We have seen the hardening of the once revolutionary techniques of modern verse into a set or official poetic idiom that prevents many younger poets, whatever their skills and gifts, from developing in their own fashion. The idiom is there - in diction, manner, form, and attitude - and the writer may unwittingly walk into it as he would into a carefully laid net. When a poet remains entangled and is content to sing within his snare, I guess we could call him the prey of a new academicism. The net shuts him off from any further communion with the world. Academicism also, though not necessarily, includes the poet's absorption by the universities, which is frequently a very unhealthy state of affairs yet one that does provide a wage and some free time. And it goes without saying that a number of excellent poets have survived

Winter, 1962

years of the classroom, their writings quite unscathed. Still, academicism is widespread in literture today and many of its practitioners are barricaded behind college walls.

If we have at one extreme the academic poets, at the other we face a violent literary anarchy of the kind exemplified by Corso, Ginsberg, and McClure. The academic writer fails because he takes his material from the history of literature itself and polishes its surfaces; the 'hip' poet because he mistakes the release of hysteria, invective, and exhibitionist leanings for poetry. Whitman and Rimbaud, the masters of the 'hip' writer, had the genius and the literary power to ride the currents of emotion and hallucination in which their self-styled successors drown. Between these extremes lie among many other groups and single figures, several members of the American poetic underground who began to receive attention at about the same time as Ginsberg, Kerouac, and

company - around 1957 - and who were even loosely associated with the 'hip' poets, though they bear no resemblance except in their opposition to an accepted literary idiom. Of those poetsamong whom are Robert Duncan, Brother AI1toninus, Robert Creeley, Gary Snyder - Denise Levertov stands out as one of the few whose art, original and compelling, convinces us of her genuine rapport with the reality she presents as the core of her work. Her poetry is often a tour through the familiar until its unfamiliarity strikes us: an imaginative scrutiny of the smaller realm of objects we usually treat as insignificant appendages to our lives; a persistent investigation of the events of the poet's own life - both inner and outer - in the language of her own time and place, and completed in the forms natural to those events as they seek translation into words. Miss Levertov - in the spirit of Martin Bubel' - always says "Thou" to the persons or occasions or locations of her experience: that is her imagination's essential humanizing gesture towards the very stuff of existence. With the French poet Rene Char, she plumbs the depths of the proximate, charts the possibilities of her individual circumstance.

Along with some of her best associates and contemporaries, Miss Levertov has departed radically from the post-Symbolist literature of Eliot, Joyce, Yeats, and Auden; she has also broken with the tradition of verse which has grown up in this country from the artistic revolution caused by these pioneer modern authors. In other words, her poetry starts out in a direction very different from the established one. Miss Levertov has had to confront, in accomplishing this departure, the job of grappling with the literary heritage bequeathed her by two generations of predecessors. And she has confronted it in order to open up a way for herself, a job which few would envy her. A struggle of this sort normally makes or breaks a writer - that is, if he dares to undertake it, as many do not - and it is a real sign of Miss Levertov's abilities that she has returned victorious. But the struggle for a voice and style of one's own amounts to nothing unless it has been prompted by the conditions of human experience itself, all that is cast into the poet's field of vision in the course of living. Poetry, if it will earn its name, must never begin with experience at second hand but with an unflinching gaze at what surrounds us everywhere and always. As the French philosopher Jacques Maritain says in his Art and Scholasticism, "Our art does not derive from itself alone what it imparts to things; it spreads over them a secret which it first discovered in them, in their invisible substance or in their endless exchanges

and correspondences." Miss Levertov has learned this lesson well, and it is the identical one she teaches us.

Some poets make their poems the battleground for style; and the reader can witness the efforts, their success or failure. In the case of Denise Levertov, there is an unseen conflict which occurred somewhere in the eleven-year span between her first book, The Double Image (1946), published in England before she came to the United States, and her next, Here and Now (1957), issued by Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights Bookshop in San Francisco. Kenneth Rexroth, who anthologized her work some years ago in his New British Poets, placed her as one of the most promising nee-romantics of the war period; but his more recent statements about her writing indicate that he believes - as I do myself - Miss Levertov's full gift burst forth after she had been in America a while and, as Rexroth says, had come "to talk like a mildly internationalized young woman living in New York but alive to all the life of speech in the country" (Poetry, XCI, 2, November 1957).

The poems gathered in The Double Image exhibit readily enough a true poetic talent in the author, though they are not marked with those characteristics of thought and rhythm and speech which would insure them as her handiwork, and hers alone. I don't mean by this remark that the poems are imitations; rather, they seem to partake of a general mood in English poetry of the time, due, no doubt, to the war. Here is worldweariness, disenchantment, a flirtatiousness towards death and the twilight regions of the spirit. Somehow a vein of uncertainty runs through the poet's voice in these pieces, as if she almost suspected herself in what she was doing. I am sure, on the other hand, that I could never gain such an impression if Miss Levertov had published only that one volume or if she had continued in her initial style. She served her poetic apprenticeship in dim countries of emotion filled with whispers of mortality and unrest, the damp vegetation of England, and murmurs of perishable love. I will quote just a few lines from one of these early poems, "Five Aspects of Fear," so that we can proceed to her more central productions:

In fear of floods long quenched, waves fallen, shattered mirrors darken with old cries; where no shot sounds the frightened birds go flying over heights of autumn soft as honey: each country left is full of our own ghosts in fear of floods quenched, waves fallen.

Rags of childhood flutter in the woods and each deserted post has sentinels; bright eyes in wells watch for the sun's assassin: the regions bereft of our desires are haunted, rags of childhood flutter in the woods.

NORTHWESTERN TRI-QUARTERLY

Something of the Georgians clings on in this pnssage with its rural withdrawal from contemporary affairs, but the strongest and most obvious pull is towards Surrealism, which had, after all, crossed the channel in the nineteen-thirties and was still a strong influence during the war. Miss Levertov tries, by means of dream-like associations and indefiniteness of imagery, to render as nearly as possible the purity of her emotions, unsoiled by the concrete or the particular. And that vagueness is far removed from what we have come to know as the essential poet in her, the poet we really love whose sleeves are rolled and who wrestles up to her elbows in the dust of a common world. Here the effects are atmospheric: the words, as I guess, are supposed to bear a cumulative weight of feeling apart from any denotation. How different from our present Denise Levertov, who senses her materials as a Giacometti or a David Hare senses the materials of his sculpture. Her "Pleasures," as she calls them in the title of a recent poem, are now quite altered:

I like to find what's not found at once, but lies within something of another nature, in repose, distinct. Gull feathers of glass, hidden in white pulp: the bones of squid which I pull out and lay blade by blade on the draining board -

tapered as if for swiftness, to pierce the heart, but fragile, substance belying design. Or a fruit, marney,

cased in rough brown peel, the flesh rose-amber, and the seed: the seed a stone of wood, carved and

polished, walnut-colored, formed like a brazilnut, but large, large enough to fill the hungry palm of a hand.

The reader will not be wrong if he sees in this poem, behind its fascination with the beauties of small objects and concealed things, an allegorical statement of the poet's own concern WIth material reality. In forcing tangible things to disclose their truth, she makes the human situation yield some of its secrets and covert analogies and predilections.

The change which takes place between her first and second books - in a decade that saw Miss Levertov leave England, travel in Europe, meet the American novelist Mitchell Goodman, marry him and settle in this country - is remarkable and

Winter, 1962

must have demanded no less than a complete renovation of her poetic values. But this revolution of the heart, the head, the senses, how worth while it all was! She was compelled to start from scr atch and that meant for Miss Levertov the happenings of her own life. What she noticed so shrewdly was that the ordinary is extraordinarily mysterious:

What a sweet smell rises when you lay the dustbucket after bucket of water thrown on the yellow grass. The water flashes each time you make it leaparching its glittering back. The sound of more water pouring into the pail almost quenches my thirst. Surely when flowers grow here, they'll not smell sweeter than this wet ground, suddenly black. ("Laying the Dust")

Of course, as Kenneth Rexroth further remarked in his essay, Miss Levertov came under novel influences in America that were completely unlike any English ones. He names the poet who occurs to us at once as the real example, the writer from whom she must have learned a good deal, without, however, sacrificing her own capacities. That poet is, obviously, William Carlos Williams; though it is likely she learned something from Rexroth's manner and preoccupations as well. Let us look at a brief but fairly .rep'resentative poem of Williams to remind ourselves of his qualities; it is called "Between Walls":

the back wings of the

hospital where nothing will grow lie cinders in which shine the broken pieces of a green bottle

Clearly, this poem has little relation to the kind of poetry in the ascendency during the first half of the twentieth century: the influence of French Symbolism has not much to do with what we see in these lines. Again, if we try to apply the sort of exegesis to Williams' poetry - or to Miss Lever-

tov's for that matter - which we do readily to Eliot's or Rilke's or Valery's, we shall miss the point and look like tools. Ingenious explication will bury the meaning of the poem; we should do better to contemplate it as we would a painting. Williams' attraction to the disjecta membra of the physical world, particularly that of the modern urban setting, gave a firm precedent to Miss Levertovs own poetic venture. We should not forget, either, Williams' insistence that the moral responsibility of the American poet lies in the task of using his native tongue "to represent what his mind perceives directly about him" (Spectrum, III, 3, Fall 1959), because this endeavor is also Miss Levertov's.

Williams has been for years a champion of younger writers in the United States, sometimes a bit indiscriminately, and, further, a hardy opponent of the post-Symbolist literature of Yeats and Eliot, as well as of what he thinks is an outworn tradition of English verse forms and meters. It is not by accident, then, that such poets as Miss Levertov, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and Paul Carroll, in search of a way past the official poetic idiom we have already mentioned, turned sympathetically to Williams' writings and his viewpoint. The rejection of conventional for organic form; the refusal of set metrical patterns in favor of what Williams calls "the variable foot"; the return to the spoken language - these are some of the most notable results. Again, few of the poets I have named, and certainly not Miss Levertov, are what Karl Shapiro has so scornfully tagged "culture" poets: their poetry is not, in general, a repository of intellectual history, learning, and fragments of the European cultural heritage. I am not trying to disparage that poetry as Mr. Shapiro does so unsuccessfully and by so much false argument. "Culture" poetry was a heroic attempt to preserve some of the values of a dying civilization, values for which Mr. Shapiro has, I gather, nothing but contempt, preferring instead "ignorance" or the theories of Reich. We can be glad, however, that though Miss Levertov does not belong to Shapiro's culturepoets, she has none of this animus. In contrast to the poetry of the earlier half of the century with its heavy freight of symbolism and external knowledge, I should like to call the work of Miss Levertov, and most of the others I have mentioned, a poetry of the immediate.

This term requires some explanation. I do not mean by "the immediate" an art without craftsmanship, an art which fixes on the disorder of sheer impulse or emotional notation. Miss Levertov has never allowed her poetry to become

vulnerable to that kind of charge-and the poems prove it. But, in addition, we need only cite the comment she supplies for Donald Allen's The New American Poetry 1945·1960, where there is no mistaking her distaste for sloppy verse: "I long for poems," she writes, "of an inner harmony in utter contrast to the chaos in which they exist." Poetry must not be a shapeless replica of exterior things but an organically-formed transfiguration of them in which the transfiguration, rather than poetic convention, determines the form. What I call "the immediate," then, signifies the complex of relationships between the poet and what is close at hand in her personal experience. The things, the happenings, the thoughts which are personal events in themselves -everything that constitutes the circumference of the poet's life as an individual-turn into the center of poetry. The author's intimate circumstance is explored, its potentialities drawn out; but no matter how far her speculations lead her, Miss Levertov never oversteps that circumference. Instead, she is more likely to assimilate outside elements:

To sit and sit like the cat and think my thoughts throughthat might be a deep pleasure:

to learn what news persistence might discover, and like a woman knitting

make something from the skein unwinding, unwinding, something I could wear

or something you could wear when at length I rose to meet you outside the quiet sitting-room

(the room of thinking and knitting the room of cats and women) among the clamor of cars and people, the stars drumming and poems leaping from shattered windows.

("Something to Wear")

In this instance, a poem grows around the mind's self-reflexive activity. While poems about poetry, the act of composition, or about the mind contemplating its own powers and processes are rather usual in the literary history of the last hundred years - Mallarrne and Wallace Stevens expended much of their artistic energy on these themes - Denise Levertov does treat such subjects in a more personal way than most poets do. Mallarrne, in his famous sonnet "La vierge, le vivace and le bel aujourd'hui," offers a depiction of the poet's failure of imagination through the

NORTHWESTERN TRI-QUARTERLY

remote but lovely symbolic image of a swan trapped in ice and earthbound:

Un cygne d'autrefois se souvient que cest lui Magnifique mais qui sans espoir se delivre Pour n'avoir pas chante le region ou vivre Quand du sterile hiver a resplendi I'ennui,

(A swan of former times remembers it is he Magnificent but who without hope gives himself up For not having sung of the region where he should have been When the boredom of sterile winter was resplendent.

- translated by Wallace Fowlie)

But however sharply the poet has felt the anguish of impotence in his art, he has removed the latter from the sphere of his own life and embodied it in the symbolic universe of his poetry, Stevens is less private; indeed, he wished to make his theory of the imagination into a cosmic view that could be shared by all men. Nonetheless, Stevens' poetry is impersonal and almost totally divorced from the important details of his existence as a man. Miss Levertov does not recognize these barriers and refuses to hide her life from her imagination. What she may have learned from Stevens - as well as from her own thoughts - is that poetry can be involved in the activity of the mind as it goes after its daily business of registering and interpreting and responding to the reality that surrounds it. The poem "Something to Wear" describes the preparation of the mind or the self to encounter this reality (" the clamor of/cars and people ") and to perceive in it the substance of art and of beauty ("the stars drumming and poems/leaping from shattered windows"). The contemplating self of the beginning of the poem does not keep to solitude but goes out to encounter the world and come upon the material of its poetic art there.

Thus for Denise Levertov, as for certain of her contemporaries, it is sufficient, even imperative, that the literary enterprise should concentrate on assigning judgment and worth to the particularities of their lives within the limited range of individual observation and knowledge. If such writing lacks ambitious scope, it compensates by a penetrating and scrupulous honesty. Younger writers today, of almost every allegiance or group, have withdrawn their efforts from the elaboration of symbolic systems and mythologies; the Cantos, The Waste Land, and The Duino Elegies, while they are still greatly admired, apparently are looked upon as remote accomplishments. Now the poet feels he must use his art to define the space he inhabitsif I may be permitted the figure - the space in

Winter, 1962

which he exists, chooses and asserts value. So it is with Miss Levertov, for whom the poem becomes an instrument of personal measure, of tests and balances, estimating and preserving the valuable in the teeth of a public actuality that grows day by day more hallucinatory and unreal. A poem like "The Instant" exhibits just such an individual experience and the depth of genuine emotion attached to it by the author. As Miss Levertov's own testament, the poem cannot be refuted or denied because it stands well inside the aura or space her poetry creates around her life as she has lived it. I reproduce the poem, which is taken from her third book, Overland to the lsuuuis (1958), in its entirety; to cut it would be to destroy the form of experience as she has realized it:

"We'Il go out before breakfast, and get some mushrooms," says my mother.

Early, early: the sun risen, but hidden in mist

the square house left behind sleeping, filled with sleepers;

up the dewy hill, quietly with baskets. Mushrooms firm, cold; tussocks of dark grass, gleam of webs, turf soft and cropped. Quiet and early. And no valley, no hills: clouds about our knees, tendrils of cloud in our hair. Wet scrags of wool caught in barbed wire, gorse looming, without scent.

Then ah! suddenly

the lifting of it, the mist rolls quickly away, and far, far -

"Look!" she grips me, "It is Eryri! It's Snowdon, fifty miles away!" - the voice a wave rising to Eryri, falling.

Snowdon, home of eagles, resting-place of Merlin, core of Wales.

Light graces the mountainhead for a lifetime's look, before the mist draws in again.

This poem is both an abbreviated narrative, dramatic in character, and a .spiritual revelation of a. nearly ineffable sort. Within the tradition of post-Symbolist literature such a private illumination would be objectified into the order of a larger metaphorical universe - which is not to say that its value would be sacrificed but that the value would be transmuted. Here the experience stands alone, is viewed in its own terms. Miss Levertov molds the event into art and yet never abandons

the quality of direct utterance 01' the domain of her existence. The instant to which the poem's title refers is the moment of enlightenment that occurs when mist and clouds part to expose the distant mountain peak resplendent in till' ea rly light of day. Still, the poem remains a poem of fact, rising out of ordinary circumstance and immediate life, and returning there. We are acquainted with this kind of illumination in Blake or Rilke, though with them it gives foundation to a whole mythological scheme: the world of things ablaze with the eternal Being they mirror. But to have this revelation in Miss Levertov's art we must enter the precincts of the poet's life, for she justifies her art in terms of that life as well as her life in terms of artistic perception.

In fact, it would be no exaggeration to say that Miss Levertov's primary concern is not to proffer visionary experiences, which she does only on occasion, but to probe doggedly all the normal business of life in search of what she calls "the authentic" in its rhythms and its details-her marriage, for instance:

I want to speak to you.

To whom else should I speak?

It is you who make a world to speak of.

In your warmth the fruits ripen - all the apples and pears that grow on the south wall of my head. If you listen it rains for them, then they drink. If you speak in response the seeds jump into the ground. Speak or be silent: your silence will speak to me.

("The Marriage, II")

or the city's winter streets and the fragments of talk overheard in them:

As the stores close, a winter light opens air to iris blue, glint of frost through the smoke, grains of mica, salt of the sidewalk.

As the buildings closed, released autonomous feet pattern the streets in hurry and stroll; balloon heads drift and dive above them; the bodies aren't really there.

As the lights brighten, as the sky darkens, a woman with crooked heels says to another woman while they step along at a fair pace,

"You know, I'm telling you, what I love best is life. I love life! Even if I ever get to be old and wheezy - or limp! You know?

Limping along? - I'd stiH. ." Out of hearing.

To the multiple disordered tones of gCilrH changing, a dance to the compass points, out, four-way river.

Prospect of sky wedged into avenues, ll'ft at the ends of streets, wr-xt sky, east sky: more life tonight! A range of open time at winter's outskirts.

("February Evening in New York")

This attention to what the rest of us pass by every day as trivia or noise, and the ability to achieve, as Marianne Moore does, a poetic victory amidst the prosaic are the instincts and talents Miss Levertov has at her disposal without thinking of them. She is totally alive to each fluctuation, each breath and vibration of the atmosphere through which she habitually moves. Poetry speaks to her with the innocent tongues of her children:

Martha, 5, scrawling a drawing, murmurs "These are two angels. These are two bombs. They are in the sunshine. Magic is dropping from the angels' wings."

Nik, at 4, called over the stubble field, "Look, the flowers are dancing underneath the tree, and the tree is looking down with all its apple-eyes."

Without hesitation or debate, words used and at once forgotten.

("The Lesson")

While I find it impossible to imagine Miss Levertov as an aesthetic theorist musing abstractly upon the rightful function of poetry in a hyperindustrialized society, I am sure that in practice poetry is, for her, an integral part of living. In her poems, we cross into a world very like our own, with the same ornaments and refuse, commonplaces and instants of grace, but it is, too, a world made rich and different by this poet's wise and clear apprehension of it, her abundance of imagination. Poems do more than leap from windows; they emerge from the humblest, most mundane things. The quotidian reality we ignore or try to escape Denise Levertov revels in, carves and hammers into tight, precise lyrics. As celebrations and rituals lifted from the midst of life in its true concreteness, her art opens new dimensions of object and situation that but for it we should never have known. And that is no mean achievement for any poet. I cannot think of a better way to conclude than by quoting the lovely title poem of her recent book With Eyes at the Back of OUT Heads (1959) in which Miss Levertov takes for a theme the ability to bring to focus two dimensions of realty which appear distant but somehow participate in one another.

NORTHWESTERN TRI-QUARTERLY

She gives us here, as she does increasingly in her latest work, a parable of the inner life, a metaphorical representation of spiritual process in the individual. The heart of the poem seems paradoxical, but important truths, we know, can spring from such incompatabilities: the way forward and the way back, in this case, are the same. Movement into the realm of appearances demands alteration of them and transformation of self which ends, finally, in regeneration and unity, the path to an interior state of blessedness corresponding to the paradisaical image of the mountain. Like Rilke's dictum, "You must change your life," Miss Levertov's poem suggests the inward and outward routes we need to travel in order to see:

With eyes at the back of our heads we see a mountain not obstructed with woods but laced here and there with feathery groves.

The doors before us in a facade that perhaps has no house in back of it

are too narrow, and one is set high with no doorsill. The architect sees

the imperfect proposition and turns eagerly to the knitter. Set it to rights! The knitter begins to knit.

For we want to enter the house, if there is a house, to pass through the doors at least into whatever lies beyond them,

we want to enter the arms of the knitted garment. As one is re-formed, so the other, in proportion.

When the doors widen when the sleeves admit us the way to the mountain will clear, the mountain we see with eyes at the back of our heads, mountain green, mountain cut of limestone, echoing with hidden rivers, mountain of short grass and subtle shadows.

The Tri-Quarterty gratefully acknowledges the courtesy of Miss Levertov and her publishers for permission to quote, in whole or in part, the following copyrighted poems: "Laying the Dust," "Something to Wear," and :'The Marriage," from Here and Now, 1957, with the permission of City Lights Pocket Book Shop, San Francisco; "The Instant" and "The Lesson," from Overland to the Island, 1958, with the permission of Jonathan Williams, Publisher, Highlands, North Carolina; "Pleasures," "February Evening in New York," and the title poem, from With Eyes at the Back of Our Heads, with the permission of New Directions Press, New York.

"Between Walls," by Carlos Williams, from Selected Poems of Carlos Williams, 1949 is reprinted with the permission of New Direction Press, New York.

Ingeborg Hough

Both the style and insights by means oj which Ingeborg Hough could create the persons of this story were possible because, like the exiles who are portrayed (and betrayed) in Artists, she knows both pre-Hitler Germany and the United States of today. Born ill Hamburg, she came with her family to the United States in 1939, whc1I they left their home because of Hitler. She attended Western College, Oxford. Ohio, and received her M.A. in French at Northwestern. Since 1945 she has lived intermittently in Evanston and in Cambridge, England. She has held several teaching posts in the Middle West, and is at present working toward her doctorate in German Literature at Northwestern.

ARTISTS

CRYING

IS NOT THE ANSWER, Lulukind. It never is, is it? Think of what Father used to say. Tears are water, and not enough of it to do any good."

But in spite of her efforts to regain her composure, the younger sister could not stop sobbing. The convulsions in her throat seemed to have a volition of their own, a hectic rhythm their own. It did seem just too cruel that after her long and tiring day at the hospital the new radio should be broken, just when Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony had been planned as this evening's recreation.

"But how can it be broken?" Lulu sobbed. "German fabrication and practically new, even if we did buy it second-hand!"

"Dearest, dearest baby, you must dry your tears. I'm afraid your nerves are giving way. And it's really my fault, my fault for lying here day in day out, forcing you to do all the work just to keep alive an old wreck like me!"

And now something happened that made Lulu stop crying in a matter of seconds. She saw her sister, for weeks prostrated by a pain around the heart, rise like a ghost from the large white bed.

"Gerda, what are you doing?" she said, suddenly completely calm. "Please go back to bed! You must go back to bed this instant!"

And she was at the foot of the bed in no time, gently urging, then frankly pushing, her sister

back into the large, lace-edged bolster. An observer would have been amazed by the strength that the frail-looking middle-aged woman exhibited in laying her sister back to rest. The latter looked frail, even brittle, but the will radiating out from her was visible, obtrusive even, in the tension of the muscles. But Lulu's muscles had been strengthened, as she had spent half her life as hospital nurse; this had included moving patients around in their beds, even lifting them in and out in case of emergency.

At first Gerda just gasped; her sister held her hand. Then she said breathlessly:

"I have a surprise for you. A nice surprise for you, Lulu. When Mrs. Schmidt came this morning and we found that the radio didn't work, I felt so sorry for me, and for you, and for all the world! And then I thought that we deserved a little something. I was going to get it, but I supposed you cruel jailer wouldn't let me get up. 0, a sister is a cruel jailer, but it's really me who is your jailer, I know! Go to the wardrobe, dearest. Look under the black skirt, by the overshoes.

Lulu went to the brown wardrobe, a mahogany edifice of the heaviest German manufacture, and she opened the gleaming door, as always a bit fearful lest the whole thing topple over on her. Then she bent down and extracted a bottle from the musty insides.

NORTHWESTERN TRI-QUARTERLY

"Pussy, you angel! Sherry! And the very best, too! Tio Pepe! Tio Pepe! How it sounds l How grand! How grand!"

And the frail, tall woman danced around the room with a bottle, clutching it like a baby. The tracks of her tears were still gleaming on her cheeks.

The older sister raised her head from the bolster. A serene smile spread over the fine features; her dark eyes were aglow in circles of infinitesimal wrinkles.

"Let's have a glass and forget our worries, what do you say? Father always wanted us to be Lebenskunstler, artists of life, as he was, and we are, you know. Look at our white African violet; Mrs. Schmidt says she's never seen anyone else's bloom like that. So we have green fingers with flowers and with life, don't we, Lulukind?"

After a substantial glass of Tio Pepe each, both sisters claimed that they were tipsy, quite tipsy.

Girded by silent chasms

There is a place so fair

Wrapped round by airs and perfumes, We all, we all played there.

Since then we've all been straying

And in the world must roam, The growths of weeds enmeshed us, None ever got back home.

Tonight the sisters were entertaining; three tenants in the big, slightly dilapidated building (which was in a formerly distinguished section of town, however) were being treated to a German meal. In spite of their modest circumstances they often entertained, mostly to keep their spirits up, for their new country, the United States, had not enough Kultur, as they called it, to suit either one of the sisters and it required all their Lebenskunst, all their life artistry, to make existence tolerable. One of the guests, the helpful Mrs. Schmidt, a nurse long retired who had come with her parents from Germany at the age of two, had kept up a nodding acquaintance with a few words of German. Even though she could not understand every word of the verses Gerda had declaimed, in German, at the beginning of the party, she smiled with appreciation, Lulu thought. What she did understand and enjoy most, however, were the pictures on the walls of forests and lakes, delicate water-colors and silhouette-cuttings executed by the sisters themselves. Yes, she too had heard of Miirchen forest in Germany, and it was one of her oft-proclaimed sorrows that she had never found the time in her busy life to go over to the old country, to connect with her roots. Dana Sweet, the second guest, had a more tangible apprecia-

Winter, 1962

bon of the recitation, for he had done some military service in Germany where he had made friends with girls who had taught him the language.

Gerda was afraid that Ruth Roscoe, the third guest, usually so full of life, was bored. She was a young wife who had accepted the sisters' invitation with enthusiasm; it seemed that her husband had had to stay at the office tonight. But Gerda must have been wrong, for Ruth suddenly roused herself and admired Lulu's new grey dress. Gerda also was proud of it as she had sewn it for her sister.

"I made it out of 47 pieces-completely out of scraps," she said proudly.

"That reminds me of Joseph somehow," Ruth mused. "But otherwise you don't strike me as Biblical. You know, when I see you in the street, I never think you are part of the twentieth century-your clothes, I mean. And yet they're not old-fashioned, Victorian or twenty-ish or so, either. You know, when I see you two coming, in your fitted coats, your veiled hats-you know what I think of? Country gentlewomen from my old storybooks, like the mother of the Little Colonel, country gentlewomen who live on big estates where time somehow stands still."

The sisters smiled and each gave a little curtsey. What a nice compliment this was, and how penetrating the young woman had been! More admiration was to come.

"Look, Ruth," the nurse said, "aren't those pictures stunning? Look at the way those leaves are drawn! You could actually touch everyone of them. They look so real!"

Ruth got up to look at the watercolors and exclaimed that she could never have produced anything like that. Dana Sweet also rose to admire the pictures, commenting on their German, romantic atmosphere.

"I guess you two aren't Prussians," he chuckled. "You're more the medieval, lady-bountiful type, both of you. But then I guess that's what you were, over there on those big estates in the east."

Just then Lulu, who had been flitting in and out of the cooking niche on noiseless nurse's shoes, announced that dinner was ready. All sat down at the round mahogany table, which was covered with a very white and heavy linen cloth, and Gerda, using the large silver ladle with delicacy and precision, filled the gold-rimmed soup plates with a rich brown broth.

"What marvelous plates," Dana Sweet exclaimed. "I guess they're from your heirlooms in Europe?"

Both sisters smiled with a certain slyness, nodding and winking at each other.

"May I tell? May I tell?" Lulu said. suddenly becoming a mock little girl.

"All right," Gerda said quietly, her hand delicately pointing the soup-spoon in the air.

"Well, when we were working as maids, you know - when we first came to this country? When we had lost our property to the Poles and western Germany wouldn't recognize our diplomas? Well, we did work as maids when we came to this country - wonderful about this country that one can do that without breaking off a tiny particle from one's reputation - the family we worked for gave us this set of china in gratitude. We were so touched. Then we found out later, as we went shopping one day, that it's a Japanese set and can or, rather, could, be bought at Woolworth's. It's not there any more. At first we felt frightfully cheated and let down. And then one fine day we discovered that the plates had remained just as beautiful, in spite of all that. Funny, isn't it?

The guests were silent, no doubt in awe at the profundity that had been uttered.

"Where did you two learn to draw like that?"

Dana Sweet asked suddenly. The sisters replied that they had had, from earliest childhood, a penchant for drawing, ever since they could remember, it seemed.

"But you know, it was strange," Gerda said in a whisper. "You know how children always draw houses, and the sun, and a tree, and invariably the house has a chimney, and the sun has rays, and the tree is the umbrella kind - an elm, I suppose? Well, we never did that. I always drew a castle, a very big castle with lots of battlements and little towers all over. Lulu at first drew houses and sun-rays and umbrella-trees, too, but she soon learned to imitate me. I practically brought her up, you know, since our mother died so young. And then she also drew castles, except that she always put people into her pictures, such as fowlers and hawkers and a beautiful princess looking out of the garden gate."

Lulu smiled as she silently collected the soup plates, the tureen. Then she brought the main dish.

The conversation drifted to the sisters' jobs. How did they find working conditions in this country?

Gerda spoke enthusiastically of her great responsibility in having charge of the filing department in the small but distinguished publishing house in which she worked. The fact that she was often consulted where a knowledge of foreign languages was required was a source of particular gratification for her. Lulu, the angel of St. Giles, according

to her sister, was less sentimental about her profession, but she was resigned to it and the hard work was gratifying, there was no doubt about it. Both seemed grateful that they had got anything at all, even though for Gerda, who had been an elementary school teacher in Germany, the step downward socially from professional to clerical help had demanded courage and dedication from one day to the next. But it was their hobby, drawing, which kept their souls alive and connected them with the great world of art, and as long as one had a connection with some higher world, one was safe.

"If only Gerda were stronger!" Lulu sighed. "I often go out sketching; one of my favorite places is the zoo. To capture on paper an animal that is constantly pacing and moving, never still for a moment - that is a real challenge. Look at my cheetah! I finally succeeded in capturing his grace; what do you think of my big pussycat?"

And she drew a sheet of paper out of a large black portfolio lying on the window sill.

There were "oh's" and "ah's" all around, then Dana Sweet's voice saying:

"Portrait of a lady, done by a lady artist."

Lulu thought that he sounded annoyed, oddly enough; she wondered why. He was a person she could always count on to be pleasant; she often thought that he must be marvelous in his capacity as public relations director, which was undoubtedly a very responsible position requiring the highest education and finest character. But perhaps it had been her imagination that he had seemed cross; far from sounding annoyed now, he was praising the fine detail of the hair and teeth of the animal. Suddenly he pointed his finger at both of the sisters.

"Ladies," he said, "I'm going to make artists out of both of you. How about going back to school and becoming art students?"

Both sisters laughed and protested. At their age, students, and with their meagre funds!

But Dana was not to be dissuaded. His mood seemed to get gayer and gayer, his desire to persuade more and more earnest. He told the sisters about a correspondence art school which would not be very expensive, he was sure, and which had as directors several famous commercial artists. He would not bother mentioning their names, he told them, thinking that the sisters would be unfamiliar with them.

The party ended on a note of affectionate banter. The sisters were to become artiststheir new life in the United States would even exceed their old one in Germany in beauty and

NORTHWESTERN TRI-QUARTERLY

dignity. Dana guaranteed it. How m arvelous that life should hold surprises still at their age!

The next several months the sisters spent in saving their money at every opportunity. They saved as only they could save, for since they had lost their possessions in Germany they had become artists in the field of saving, too. Their little indulgences, such as having coffee on Saturday morning, making a pleasant break in their shopping, the little inexpensive but carefully chosen gifts they had a habit of surprising each other with periodically, the occasional bottle of Tio Pepe, all disappeared from their life. Only the radio, long ago restored, remained with its great music.

When a small sum of money had accumulated, they sent for a talent test from the school Dana Sweet had recommended. They could not hide from each other the disappointment they felt when they were confronted with a small stock of pictures (banal according to Lulu, plain vulgar according to Gerda) to be copied and analyzed. However, giving each other courage, saying that all beginnings are difficult, they drew and analyzed, hot with effort, forgetting at the end that at first they had taken comfort in the fact that. they were not yet committed.

A week after they had sent the tests off in the mail, a representative from the art school came to see them personally. He explained that this was usually not done, but that he was just passing through the area and that he wanted to tell them that they had both done exceptionally well in the test. A great future in commercial art lay before them, he felt sure.

The sisters could not hide their delight and in spite of the considerable increase in fees of which the representative informed them, they became enrolled in the Perma Art School then and there. After the representative had left them, they were in very high spirits, dancing around the room and singing, like young girls. Now that they were true and legitimate art students they could take in their stride the mediocre roles they played in the world.

In a short while the first assignment from the art school came in the mail. It required the pupil to draw action sketches in outline only, without taking mass or dimension into consideration. The examples which were sent in the envelope were again something of a shock to the sisters - cheap, facile, yet undeniably competent - but why worry, this was technique only and their own style could and would develop according to their own choosing: their nobler conception of life was bound to show later in the more difficult assignments. The

Winter, 1962

letter with the directions pointed out to them the desirability, in fact, necessity, of having a live model for their sketches in all instances where the human figure was to be attempted, in any style or medium. The sisters of course were lucky in having each other; the one would model for the other, feeling through the boredom of holding the pose the thrill of anticipation as she waited for her allotted drawing-time.

Figure drawing and a complete course in anatomy requiring the additional purchase of an expensive book delighted and sustained the sisters for many months. They were looking, looking, increasing their "visual vocabulary," as it was called, from day to day, and their enthusiasm for the human anatomy knew no bounds.

"Lulu, I saw the most marvelous musculature today; I was watching the garbage man through the window. He's a new one, a splendid Negro almost violet and glistening in the heat - I grabbed my sketch-pad and captured, I think, those shining shoulders and the way they're joined to the back."

Gerda showed her charcoal attempt, later to be meticulously copied in pencil with the dark areas stippled in various degrees of black.

"You know, Pussy, every day I deplore that I can't draw the patients - they would make such perfect models. But I am trying to develop what Mr. Raffa calls 'visual memory' - so when I see a particularly enticing physique or paintable pose, I make a thorough mental note and draw it during my lunch hours - when we're not too busy and I can take one, that is."

Animal anatomy followed, and it was here that the younger sister, able to go for walks outside, found great satisfaction. She renewed her trips to the zoo with zeal freshly kindled; her favorite models in the animal kingdom were still the magnificent and ferocious big cats. The Latin names delighted her and she would, after labeling her drawing with the English name, add, in neat italics, the Latin alternate. It was sad for Gerda that she could not also go to the zoo. Her heart condition, according to her doctor, had improved quite a lot and she had long ago gone back to her job, but now her stomach and digestive system had been declared very sensitive, requiring a diet consisting of the gentlest and choicest items. The little salaries dwindled even further under this additional strain. And yet there was a certain satisfaction in this queen-bee diet.

"Pussy," said Lulu, "you are just finer, more delicate, than other people. Sweets to the sweet, and fine to the fine. It somehow suits you to eat scraped pigeon - sometimes I think you were al-

ways meant to eat scraped pigeon. Do you remember your old admirer at the McCarthys, old Mr. Rex? Well, he said to me one evening: I r-unnot imagine your sister in any but the finest rooms, wearing any but the finest silks, tasting any but the finest foods - in fact, I think he said viands, a word I had to look up in the dictiona ry ."

Gerda smiled.

"Oh yes, Mr. Rex. If I had married him, what would you have done? Then you would have had no one to take care of you. Well, of course you would have lived with us. Mr. Rex died so horribly, didn't he? All my beaux seem to die, don't they? Of course most of them were soldiers."

Gerda seemed to thrive on her new diet, and when it was discovered that the zoo disposed of commodious bright orange wheelchairs, Lulu would wheel her sister, armed with a sketch-pad, to the animals she loved, and the two got more and more adept at putting on paper the attitudes of the lordly cats.

But their drawings were found too detailed and not lively enough by the invisible mentor at the art school. In fact, the grades of the sisters were a constant challenge for improvement. They had been told by the representative that if their final grade were a B, they would be guaranteed a jobreferral in the field of commercial art at the end of the course. Neither one of the sisters could quite understand why their first drawings, the outline sketches, should have merited an A- each when subsequent drawings done with much more care should have fluctuated between C- and B- at best. Were they not progressing? In their own eyes they were, building up their visual vocabulary as their mentor admonished them to do, increasing their knowledge of anatomy and composition both.

Dana Sweet had moved to another town, but not before paying a call on the sisters. He inspected their portfolios and they had a heart-to-heart talk about the drawings as they, still taking the laws of hospitality seriously even though they were now really poor, treated him to a repast of lobster meat and white wine. They often quoted him later, repeating and interpreting bits of their conversation with him.

"What did he mean by 'life' exactly, Lulu, as he looked at Mr. Raffa's corrections and sketches?" Gerda asked, not for the first time.

"Well, I think he meant that Raffa's figures seem to move and I suppose he thinks ours don't, Gerda. Being a man, and an American, he doesn't notice the superficiality of these hasty sketches that look like advertisements and nothing else. But maybe he does! These people are sometimes

very deep. Of course he did pay us a great compliment.

"About England, you mean? When he said that maybe magazines for the English aristocracy, like the T'atier or the London Illustrated News might like our drawings? Yes, I know. What he means, of course, is that we would feel at home with an aristocratic, refined audience and they with us."

"But maybe I should cut down detail and imitate Raffa just a little, just to learn something," said Lulu. "After all, Toulouse-Lautrec was an aristocrat, and he painted the demi-monde! And loathsome though his subjects are, his pictures have life, haven't they, Gerda?"

Almost every evening ended with a discussion about art, and the sisters would concentrate on ways and means to meet the challenge, to work for a final B.

The three years required to finish the course at first. passed with the slowness of an eternity, but then speeded up, in fact accelerated to an uncanny degree as each day was filled with sketching, seeing and thinking, thinking visually. The remains of their tiny savings had long ago gone into paints, sable brushes and postage. And the sisters learned, learned, learned. Even though they fell into bed dead tired every evening, their life had a center and a goal and they were happy.

"Lulukind, do you rem em bel'," Gerda said in bed one night, "on cousin Harald's estate, when the plough-horses of the Polish laborers slowly drew the carts, their enormous legs - oh, I can still see the hair on those legs - stepping so patiently, plodding and plodding along? When there would be a stone in the road, or the load would be so heavy? How the horses would pull, pull, even when the laborers stopped to bow as we came by? And how the horses never gave up, were never allowed to give up? Well, I feel we are those good old enduring horses, and we will get the harvest into the barn. Think of the triumph in the end! We will be self-employed artists, living the way we should, in the company of esthetic and literary people, the leaders of society, as Father would want us to be."

The use of color, allowed after one and a half years, was a source of great delight to both sisters. And then came specific projects directly anticipating future assignments in the field of commercial art. Here Lulu had occasion to admire her sister's wit and ingenuity.

"Draw an ad for a handbag firm in brown, black and white or any mixture thereof, using WinsorNewton's Designer's Colors - unit size 5" x 61,2" the assignment had specified. And Lulu had marvelled at her sister's cleverness, the latter having

NORTHWESTERN TRI-QUARTERLY

produced a dinosaur holding an alligator bag in its ineffectual, pathetic little hands. Every scale, ('Very epidermal effect on monster and bag had been scrupulously filled in. A ruler was not allowed, and Gerda would not cheat - no one in their family, which had been traced back to the Middle Ages, had ever knowingly cheated - but Lulu feared that Mr. Raffa might think that Gerda had used a ruler in her rendering of the little handbag, so straight were its edges.

On this project, Mr. Raffa's grade was a C+. The drawing came back slightly stained, and enclosed was a sketch of a plastic bag, very large, with a bamboo handle; all this was indicated in a few very large charcoal strokes. "Stay big!" the red note in Mr. Raffa's very large handwriting, by now so familiar to the sisters, at the bottom of Gerda's design said. "Don't outline, and don't fill in! That's why no B this time. Think big, draw big!" And not a word about the reptilian wit and whimsey, the delightful anachronism, of her conception. Gerda cried and stuck the drawing into a cardboard box at the back of the brown wardrobe which contained similar casualties. She could not bring herself to destroy it.

The endless drawing took time, oh so much time. But the intense pleasure of studying, learning, learning to see, compensated for the toil and deprivation. For a time Lulu reduced her work schedule at the hospital in order to devote every precious spare minute not spent in cooking and cleaning to drawing, but when they could no longer afford Gerda's special foods, in fact, began to feel hungry, she worked full time again. The rage, the intensity which was the other side of this life of deprivation began to show in her drawings and the straight B's became more frequent. There was even an A-for a sketch of her sister, excessively ugly, she thought, showing the bone-structure of face and torso. And Gerda, now that they were not always restricted to specific subjects, found that her old way with flower drawing was coming back. The white African violet was a patient model which could be counted upon to pose for hours, and later its furry leaves would stand out with botanical exactitude on Gerda's white pages. And then the corn-flowers and poppies, bought at the corner stand by the train station, corn-flowers and poppies calling back childhood in the wheatfields of East Prussia! But in the bouquets drawn then, there had been grain. Something else seemed disturbing, though Gerda wondered whether she might only be imagining it: the American corn-flower or bachelor button, Centaurea montana, seemed wishy-washy in compar-

ison to her European sister. And Papaveraceae, the poppies, were pink here rather than blood red.

Winter, 1962

When the three years were almost up, there came from the Perma Art School the final big project on which much was said to depend. An odd project it was, one that filled Gerda with apprehension because figure-drawing, she had always known, was not her strength. They were to draw "Mr. and Mrs. America on the beach in bathing costume," the instructions had indicated. "Unit size: of your own choice. Colors: any number of your own choice."

Drawing a man's figure had always been a problem to the sisters as a male model was not readily available to them. But this had to be good - it was to be the grand, grand finale of all their previous efforts, a great delta into which all rivers merged. So in view of the gravity of the situation, Lulu mustered her courage and asked the new tenant, a restaurant owner called Mr. Anadopoulos, to come up and pose for them in return for a German meal- the young man had testified to his love of what he called "Munich cooking" earlier in their acquaintance. Bill Roscoe, who earlier on had once in a while supplied a willing male shoulder blade or upper arm, had moved away long ago with his wife and two children. But Johnny Anadopoulos came, laughing and charming, not at all embarrassed at posing in very abbreviated bathing trunks on this winter night, bringing Greek pastry to boot, to cheer everyone up. His torso was magnificent, his hips narrow and steely, and his excessive hirsuteness the sisters, as though by tacit agreement, simply withheld from their sketches. For a female model they used a magazine photograph of a bathing beauty, a girl of anonymous features. For a background they used an old favorite photo of a vacation scene at the Baltic Sea where they had gone as children. which showed them collecting amber. Each sister then worked out her own composition which, as always, turned out completely different one from the other. Lulu had exaggerated the width of Mr. America's shoulders and the bronzed healthy glow of his skin. She had altered the bathing beauty's rather boyish figure to give it more contrasting curves, filling out and rounding the brittle breasts and widening the hip line. The legs she shortened slightly and widened considerably, wanting her conception to embody grandeur, monumentality, that great roundness so much admired in the best of the sculpture of the ages. Her sea had foaming waves, her beach-growths odd fairytale shapes.

Gerda had tried at all costs to inform her figures with life but she was happy, really happy, only with her meticulous beach vegetation. She had always admired DUrer's touching patches of weeds and flowers, and this sea vegetation approached his loving care in rendering the delightful little forms. Her vegetation rose against a calm, sun-reflecting sea. But her figures of Mr. and Mrs. America, after all the most important areas of this project, remained ugly, got uglier and uglier, no matter how hard she tried to improve them at each attempt. Her days were spent in misery and frustration; finally, on the day before the assignment was due to go, she spent all night feverishly spreading the uncooperative paint over and over again as she tried to render her last sketch. When nothing pleased her, she made a wild and angry new sketch. This one seemed freer than any she'd ever done, so she rendered it in color and sent it off along with Lulu's project. She thought it was ugly and vulgar. But maybe Mr. Raffa would like it because it was so big and so free? You could never quite predict his reactions; after all, things she'd liked he hadn't, and vice versa.

The next week was spent by the sisters in waiting feverishly for the mail. So they were finally to receive the grade on the last project and, more important, the final grade for the course. When nothing had come by the end of the second week, Lulu sent a postcard telling a little of their understandable anxiety - just a little, not too much. Three days later a letter came, saying that the school had just. lost some clerical help, that Mr. Raffa had gone to Europe and that the grades hadn't been tabulated yet. But they could be assured that the grades would be automatically mailed to their homes in the near future. So there was nothing for it now but to wait. The sisters made a pact prohibiting them from talking about their anxiety, to make art taboo, until the day the letter would come.

A week and a half later a letter came bearing the letterhead of the Perma Art School on the envelope. Lulu, wordless, having flitted down to the mailbox when the mailman was out of sight, handed her sister the envelope; the latter, who had turned pale, cut it open with the pearl-handled fruit-knife. But they found inside not the expected grade-card but a personal letter written by Mr. Raffa, dictated to a secretary. She had made two spelling mistakes in their names, Gerda perceived somewhere at the bottom of consciousness.

"Dear Misses Steingreve:" the letter began. "First, let me take this opportunity to extend to you, on behalf of the Perm a Art School staff, my

sincere congratulations on the work you have done in the course. Your conscientiousness, your unflinching honesty and your punctuality in sending in assignments has made you absolutely marvellous to work with. I feel that both of you have profited a great deal by the course; it's been a pleasure to have you as students. Now I will be as honest with you as you have been with me. While there are some firms who might hire you now, with the training you've had, they wouldn't be the type firm you ladies would be interested in. Take my word for it. The reason I can give neither of you a final grade yet is because I want you to, do something for me first. Miss Greta Steingreve, I'd like you to take our special botanical drawing course for illustration in the scientific publications field. You have great talent in this area, but it needs to be developed. You may also find the greeting-card industry a good field, but I feel it's only fair to warn you that it's a vastly overcrowded field, of course. But we want to make sure that our students go into the fields where their real talents lie. Miss Lou Steingreve - before I can recommend you for placement, I strongly recommend that you take our course in lettering. Potentially your lettering is excellent, but you need to learn more about the subject. When you've got a firm grounding in that, you'd be surprised how many things will open up to you in the whole field of advertising.

Swamped with work, I haven't even had a chance to look at the latest project yet. Apologies. Please let me hear from you regarding my advice for the future. By the time I have, as I hope, signed you up in the courses indicated I'll be able to give you my evaluation of the last project, as well as a final grade.

Our district manager will drop by shortly to tell you more about the courses I've indicated, as he happens to be in your area right now. My best wishes for a happy holiday season. Very sincerely yours, Bronislav H. Raffa, Director of Studies, Perma Art School."

For several minutes the sisters were too horrified to speak or to cry. They sat motionless, feeling as though the floor had dissolved away from under them. Then Gerda said, blushing del]ply:

"I feel as though I'd been slapped. Oh, my poor Lulu!" And she took her sister's hand.

But Lulu withdrew her hand and sobbed.

"Three years!" she exclaimed through her tears. "Three years! Oh, Gerda, I can't go on. The humiliation is simply too much for me."

NORTHWESTERN TRI-QUARTERLY

By evening, the sisters had regained some of their composure. They had decided to have a ("01)1plete break with deprivation tonight before an increased dose of it would be necessary as they'd continue their studies. After they had made their plans, which included Lulu's working on Saturdays as well and their moving to a smaller room so that they could pay for the new courses, they cleared away portfolio, letter, paints - they got out of sight everything to do with art. They ordered a bottle of Tio Pepe to be sent and their saturnalia began when it came. At the end of it they felt their cheerfulness returning - after all, wasn't the real-

ization of their dreams only postponed, not shelved?

"It was good of Raffa to be so honest," Gerda said. "Now we will be steered into the right field. And you know, I'm already looking forward to the first assignment!"

Lulu confessed that she felt like a child whose tears had dried, a peculiar happiness. After a substantial glass of Tio Pepe each, both sisters claimed that they were tipsy, quite tipsy. And at eleven o'clock they went to bed; a heavy work-day was ahead of them tomorrow.

Patricia A. Rabby

Patricia A. Rabby is a sophomore in the College of Liberal Arts who plans to major in English composition. She was born in Mobile, Alabama, and now lives in Houston, Texas. She has done some free lance writing for a local newspaper in Houston, and this summer will be working at the city desk of the Houston Post. She is a member of Zeta Tau Alpha sorority.

For the Benefit of Her Biographers: My Roommate at Eighteen

Wildly, passionately indifferent.

In favor of everything-once carefully thought out and impulsively decided upon.

A little in love, a little bit lovely, and always building little minutes into Great Moments in time.

Wanting to be a junior, sophomore, and freshman at the same time.

Wanting to be much and wanting to work periodically, say, once a day, week, quarter. Undefinable energy when an Idea carried her downstairs to the typing room.

Gonna wash that man right out of her hair, Then she'd let him run his fingers through it.

She was medium height, too tall for the decidedly short boys, level with the thinkers, and tiny to the jocks.

Hair about the length of a Biblical prophet's and the color of Revlon Color-up "Gold" with natural highlights

Winter, 1962

Still wondering if blondes really do have more fun. Recently converted to tennis shoes (fortunately had an old pair of her mother's around with enough holes and frayed laces) and started polishing her loafers.

A sign that the Texas is taken out.

A Game: to the Limit

Squeezing taut the sides of a paper cup until the thin malt crescents and almost drips Releasing it.

Putting four fingers on the paper pattern and thumb on the pattern, tracing the rim, and Tightening the grip together to draw malt to the top and Turning loose quickly, tipping One drop.

Nineteen Is a Lady

Dewey-fresh or dubiously frank, a nineteen-pronged attack on adulthood, ironicalLy the world of nineteen already.

Great pride, great faith, great problems, greett plans, and Great ScottOnly twenty-four hours a day.

Nineteen has learned the art of calm and order in appearances:

Can mend socks and patch emotions, both rent by stress.

Dry sobs

Dry humor-

And high Jinks on the dampest day of the season.

Friend Be/ore

I want to sit here and draw a box and carefully black it in with the pencil stub, Then draw another box and another box until the page is covered with seven dark and angry boxes, Then label them in furiously neat printing.

Words that say FRIEND BEFORE, AND ALL THAT, NOW AFTER

To think of FRIEND as a dark box and a melancholy blotch on a white and open page, BEFORE, a wince of reflection on the ladder we built and helped each to climb, AND-the progressive dinners with soup at Alfred's, salad on the Ship Ahoy, juice at the Health. Bar, catsup at Price's, potatoes at the Cellar Door,

ALL this and more:

THAT conditions were such and weather and days, that we swam in the Gulf, watched stars and sang with the summer symphony, waded in strange rocky waterfalls, NOW is the dawn and the Dance of the Bathrobes on Woodwind Street: "we greet the world with a smile, Good morning world, at first I thought you were against me.

(In a dank, musty box with shrinking sides) "but I was wrong.

(Boxes have hds. As do I.) "then I thought you were for me, (Come into my box and play with me) "but I was wrong again.

(Am I not always wrong, my friend?) "now I've researched and read up and spoken to intelligent friends, (Was there anything we could not talk about?) "I know exactly where you stand, uiorui. you don't even know I exist.

As long as you stay neutral, perhaps I stand a chance."

After all, friend before.

Anne

She swoops along the ground like a kingfisher who skims up his minnows. She sits majestic, pathetic, sexy, sincere. The prism of appearances-but not quite sweet.

Polyglot of personalities become her friends. Self-contained, group oriented. Tlwughts that scramble over one another around the margins of Cosmos and History,

Singing songs that slide along a blues tune: basic songs of men, passion, and regret.

Physical, but careful; psychic at bridge; certain that her perceptions are clear. A casual vigor capped by golden energy. Anne.

On the Long Way Home

Between two buildings, in a cold and empty lot, I stopped.

And even though I continued cold, cloudy breathing, and dug my hands deeper into my pockets, It was no longer my world.

Sadly detached-and more than removed, I stood drawing shivering cold draughts of air and stared at a street walked before by steady feet, many feet, But mine upheld me and had never walked before.

A leaf marked in its crisp descent the passing of wind and time,

But I stood between two buildings shiveringNeither mine.

And This Could Be the Start

0/ Somethin' Big

And this could be the start of somethin' BIG

Causes that I can't explain:

Sweltering heat preceding a rain, splat on your feet; stepping into a gutter puddle of snow, and wet and wetter and now the socks are cold, the tennies cling, and you wish you had new dry boots or at least those partially-dry loafers from yesterday's walk.

Pepsi-Cola, Teem, bottled by the same companytake a candle, light it, and stick in the tip of an empty bottle so that the wax can drip like the Light of Knowledge and drip like Bohemian cafe candles and Stick the candle, bottle, flame, and drips in the window,

And all the interrupters that come into your room while the QUIET Is Requested For The BeneiitOi Those Who Have Retired sign is up, All these wiLl walk over to the window and stand and wonder what you are up to.

Some will stand and say 0 great goddess and will make obeisance, and bow a deep turkish-from-the-toes bow.

And the candle burns, not granting any petitions, not hearing any prayers, not doing a thing

except burning and letting the wax run in erratic rivulets down the side of the bottle, following the curves of the bottle, crossing, colliding, and Crash-

The white hits a part of the metal cross-tie on the window, and some of the snow manages to reach the candle it sputters like a professor of European history whose guest lecturer was better than he expected. It sputters and dries the cold water thrown on the Light of Knowledge and Knowledge wins and the wax runs down with a shush to spread the word:

Knowledge won, won, again And the candle burns and flaunts its wick longer longer and black with a flame halo a warped halo Parfait

She needed only a cherry tassle to top off her sundae image: White fur beret, creamy blonde hair and skin; smooth dark furry collar; light coat; black gloves: warm, dark sauce on her handsA luscious coed parfait.

Winter, 1962