CONTRIBUTORS IN THIS ISSUE:
Walter A. Netsch, Jr.
Susan McIlvaine
Marion and Ali Bulent Cambel
James R. Johnston
Frederick S. Stimson
Meno H. Spann
Louise Midgley Orcutt
Marcia Masters
JoAnna Sympson
Knox Munson
Felix Pollak
SPRING
Volume 4 Number Three 70c NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY
THE TRI-QUARTERLY is a magazine 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 self-addressed envelope and return postage will not be returned. Except by invitation, contributors are limited to persons who have some connection with the University. Copyright, 1961, by Northwestern University. All rights reserved.
in the
are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the editors.
EDITORIAL BOARD, The editor is EDWARD B. HUNGERFORD. Senior members of the advisory board are Professors RAY A. Bll.LINGTON and MELVllJLE HERSKOVlTS of the College of Liberal Arts, Dean JAMES H. MC BURNEY of the School of Speech, Dr. WILLIAM B. WARTMAN of the School of Medicine, and Mr .JAMES M. BARKER of the Board of Trustees.
UNDERGRADUATE EDITORS, LOUISE M. ORCUTl', SUSAN F. Me lLVAINE, and FORREST G. ROBINSON.
THE TRI-QUARTERLY is distributed by Northwestern University Press, and is under the business management of the Press.
Views expressed
articles published
Walter A. Netsch, Jr. Master-Planning the College or University 3 Susan McIlvaine Loss 12 Marion and Ali Bulent Cambel Magnetoftuidmechanics and The Fourth State of Matter 15 James R. Johnston Something Old 21 Frederick S. Stimson Ariel and Caliban 22 Meno H. Spann The Horned Hero, The Noble Savage The Detached Tooth 26 Louise Midgley Orcutt Young Mapp's Progress 32 Marcia Masters One Evening at Mrs. William Vaughan Moody's 42 JoAnna Sympson Variation of a Theme 43 Knox Munson What Might Is Spring 46 Felix Pollak Communion with a Thief 46 Tri-Quarterly NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY Number Three Volume 4 SPRING
The plan to extend the Evanston campus of Northwestern University by building man-made land in Lake Michigan has begun an exciting adventure in campus planning. Mr. Walter A. Netsch, Jr. is the architect for this project.
Mr. Netsch received his architectural training at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is presently general partner in charge of design for the Chicago Office of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. He has been responsible for such projects as the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California; the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado; the New York Life Insurance Company Lake Meadows Apartments and Club Building in Chicago; the Grinnell Col/ege Library in Grinnell, Iowa; the Chicago Undergraduate Campus for the University of Illinois; and for various plans connected with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Westinghouse Research Laboratories in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
He is a member of the Metropolitan Housing and Planning Council of Chicago, the Advisory Committee for the Graduate School of Architecture at the University of Illinois, the State Board of Architectural Examiners for the State of Illinois, the M.I.T. Jury Thesis Committee, and the Committee for the Advancement of Architectural Education for the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, the University of Michigan. He has lectured at many colleges and universities in this country and in Canada.
The article following was written for THE TRI-QUARTERlY at the invitation of the editors.
MasterPlanning the College or University
By Walter A. Netsch, Jr.
3
Acollege or university today provides in its complexity most of the elements, frustrations, and confusions of an urban society. Many believe that directions in planning for the campus, which is a special segment of that society, can lead to directions applicable to the urban planning problem. While this is abstractly true, no evaluation of this particular problem or the opportunities has been undertaken. The college and university are currently being dissected in social, economic (in relation to society or salaries), or academic areas and these analyses are invaluable documents for testing the environmental fabric and capacity for planning a campus. In this presentation the emphasis will be placed upon the resources, history, contemporary factors, congenital influences, possibilities, and examples of planning the college or university.
The smallest portion will be the historical section, for while extremely important, it is best left to the architectural and social historians. One of the most prevalent assumptions is that planning is an abstract visual process and can occur in a vacuum. Assuming that capability and artistry exist, the resource most required is a Gestalt between planner and the college or university as to the possibilities and aims that reflect an ongoing purpose and vitality for the institution. If the quality of a campus is measured by the aims of the students, the faculty, the academic resources, and the administration, it is also measured and influenced by the community, the alumni, economic capability, and the environment and the physical structures. As in any urban fabric, the incongruity of any factor influencing the aims must be recognized and isolated as it occurs. In the most idealistic generality, a college or university exists to provide the student the cultural, physical and intellectual stimulation for beginning maturity and the desire to continue the search for fulfillment when leaving the campus. To the faculty falls not only the responsibility of fulfilling the students' needs, but that of preserving and extending cultural and intellectual knowledge. With the early academies in Western Civilization, diversity in teachers and methods was already required and the storage of information was a first demand. The resources were not very complex but the environment, whether Sparta or Athens, reflected and influenced the educational process. Mark Hopkins' log never existed. With the increase in knowledge, administration assumed more and more responsibility for the organization of the educational process and the need for physical environment and the physical requirements. Therefore, for many centuries administrative policy was assumed by religious groups or monarchies which influenced and determined not only the rate and growth of knowledge but also its dissemination. Through this time, the most
limiting factor was the dichotomy between past and new beliefs and the relegation of education to the prerogative of the few. With the advent of science and industry and the rebirth of classical knowledge, educational institutions became one of the primary industries of an industrial society and were instrumental in accelerating academic demands for economic capability and structures. Through these beginnings the importance of campus environment prevailed, for the cultural responsibility of environment was accepted by the administration and academic community. Although untrained eyes are not aware, Oxford was built in its time of its time, changing and evolving, maintaining in its college program a mytosis, a repetitive cell process with logical limits, a factor long forgotten by both planners and administrators and culturally unrecognized by faculties themselves. The insistence on selectivity and limited enrollments alone preserved our original colleges and universities as environmental and cultural fabrics. It is interesting that the informal solutions have survived better, and this can be visualized in a comparison of the site plans of Harvard University and the University of Virginia. However, where social mores and "stage set" attitudes attempted to reproduce the success of the earlier institutions in the growth west, failure has been the general rule. This rule is most often interpolated as the failure of the stage set itself, but more consideration should be given to the failure in scale and hierarchy, for the stage set seldom measured the environmental relationships of structures which made a group of buildings a community and was forced to emphasize individual structures outside of their cultural value or out of context with the basic educational needs. (Classical solutions have provided fluidity in changing educational patterns when the scale is monumental. Environmentally scaled plans have provided fluidity for growth in repetitive patterns, and the overscaled environmental patterns have provided opportunities for demolition and new construction.) A detailed site plan growth pattern of three campuses - classical (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), environmental (Harvard), and the monumental environmental (University of Illinois - Urbana) show directly in their several stages of development the success and failures in the periodic assessment of concept, growth and scale.
As an example, the site plan of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology shows the contrast between the effect of temporary and heterogeneously located structures and the current Master Plan extending the formal concept originally established - reestablishing the advantages of formal planning.
The most successful campus in the past has been the one that recognized beyond purely vis-
4
NORTHWESTERN TRI-QUARTERLY
I�I--.:·.:...ii_�II -!j
In considering the educational environment and trends in higher education, four basic ideas predominate.
First, - new teaching techniques. The increasing use of audio-visual aids, closed circuit television, and films affect the design of buildings and their spatial relationships.
Second, - flexibility. Rapid change and growth will require building spaces which permit ready conversion and expansion. Building elements which serve similar functional use should be similar in design.
Third, - variety in the environment. Each university activity should be in the type of structure which can be utilized most efficiently. Classrooms and laboratories generate mass movements of students in short periods between classes. These can best be housed in three or four-story buildings which do not require passenger elevators. Offices and seminary rooms - generating smaller and more evenly distributed traffic - can be housed in high-rise buildings. Lecture rooms, the library and the student union require specialized structures.
Fourth, - inter-disciplinary opportunities. Higher education is moving toward closer interrelationship among the academic fields of study. To meet this development, a building should be designed to serve a function rather than a discipline. Classrooms and laboratories should be interchangeable and usable for various kinds of courses, both for economy and for inter-disciplinary contact.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Site plan.
ual terms the purposeful organization of the great university. Today, the questions revolve about our capacity to see if the scientific revolution has made enough of an imprint on campus life to contribute with the arts to the concept and provide new avenues in campus planning. Further influences upon the campus will be made by the revolution in student attitudes toward education and changing teaching techniques. In this area the future should provide a more sophisticated secondary school product, a re-analysis of research, an emphasis on individual study, a direction toward large lecture halls and smaller seminars, and a direction toward the laboratory in humanities and social science. Teaching techniques cross both boundaries in arts and science, and in the area of campus planning bring about the most radical influences in campus form, for they reflect most directly the Gestalt aims of the college or university.
Spring, 1962
Much has been said of the evils of objectorientation in current society. Colleges and universities have been leading the assault in proposing new approaches to this problem by the recognition of inter-disciplinary doctrines; the secondary schools in team teaching; and the scientific research centers which use primarily the academic inter-disciplinary approach. Campus plans, until recently, have not taken advantage of this environment. It seems as if pre-ordained concepts of the university, maintaining isolated structures devoted to an individual discipline or department, must dot the campus plan. No individual concept can more limit a plan, more violate known problems in future expansion, or more inhibit inter-disciplinary opportunities. As in the past, the building type should develop from the academic community of uses, not from the disparity of an individual discipline.
The concept of planning must recognize the academic process as the special ingredient of campus character and bring to this process the visual elements of environment. To grasp immediately these elements we can visualize the two basic attributes - totality and urbanity - those individual buildings which express a totality, yet
#
I
5
integrate in this environmenta Greek temple, a Gothic cathedral, or cities which have an urban quality, regardless of size - the city that has a series of major and minor important spaces with visually ordered connections such as Florence or Venice, parts of Paris or London, and in academic communities - Oxford or parts of Harvard. Each of these - totality and urbanity - reflect known visual attributes but rely on specific use of the basic planning process. Listed they appear prosaic, but if tested against actual environmental conditions, reveal major failures in campus planning:
1. Are the constant factors in campus planning being utilized to self-generate the campus community - the library, lecture center, cultural areas, social areas, community areas?
2. Is the transposition and movement of students and faculty, as pedestrians, as bicyclists, as autoists, planned to reinforce the campus pattern or as deterrents and energy expenditures?
3. Is the use of the four social areas of space creatively developed - private, semi-private, semi-public, and public?
4. Is the hierarchy of space consonant with the use of the space on the campus?
5. Is each building vying for attention, or is there a capacity to integrate visual environment towards a total concept?
6. Are the problems of flexibility, integration of technical services, and new teaching techniques being reconsidered in new orders of geometry, or new concepts in "surge" spaces?
7. Is the campus considered as a pedestrian community, or even as a community?
8. Are individual structures still related to dream fantasy architecture of bygone eras or business fantasy architecture for "middle majority" acceptance?
9. Are the administration and the faculty willing to attempt a reintegration of the teaching Gestalt and the visual environment?
10. Does the college community accept the responsibility of visual environment?
Master-planning a college or university has basic ground rules but the application of these rules to actual conditions requires an honest evaluation of social and scholastic goals. As much as we may desire an intellectual nirvana, most colleges and universities have not and will not attain one. However, a re-evaluation of the
energizers in terms of cultural and social opportunity, an equally important re-evaluation of the effects of restraint in uncoordinated planning can lead to individual solutions for each scholastic environment.
To relate verbally an essentially visual, statistical and perpetual problem as campus design requires some explanation of the design process. It is axiomatic that the greater the fund of experience, the larger the empathy and capacity to handle any problem, but in the design process the necessity to withhold the act of decision, the design leap, as Professor Bush-Brown of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology calls it, requires patience and fortitude on behalf of both client and architect. When the social, intellectual and scholastic fabric is as diffuse and complex as at present, planning requires many more steps than in the historical past.
The other difficulty in discussion of the design process is the misunderstanding between process and object-including an unwillingness to ascribe theoretical qualities or aims in what is usually an assemblage rather than a concept. In the final resolution, judgments respecting values are imperative-judgments that escape complete annotation. The design process provides the widest scope for these judgments but without them remains a system only. The planning process subdivides into four major areas in campus planning-preparation, concept, resolution and development. Within each of these areas overlapping actions occur. In the preparation period it is essential to synthesize within each category the aims of the institution, the statistical program for the institution, the visual and technical characteristics of the site and the surrounding environment as well as special theoretical and practical research on educational theories, spatial orderings, aesthetics and new materials and techniques. The first three can be charted, diagrammed, and described to provide the basis for the conceptual phase. Included in this area are both the hopes and the hard facts of a campus plan. The second phase of the preparation requires the synthesis of the- elements into two areas-the first, an objective resolution combining the basic program aims and site factors into an analysis through flow diagrams of the hierarchical relationship of the program, the inter-demands of spaces and volumes, and the effectiveness of energizers for campus community life. Here, specific opportunities in teaching techniques, concepts of growth, areas of community life, and regional planning provide not one but a series of different diagrams available for review. Concurrently, with this analysis, certain abstract possibilities in concept will become apparent and these concepts at this stage are abstract compositions explaining the visual potential that social theory, spatial
6
NORTHWESTERN TRI-QUARTERLY
theory, structural theory may inspire from the program diagrams. At this time a program may appear diffuse and unresolvable. To emphasize the realism in programming, an assumption could be made on a campus plan that the automobile be omitted as policy from consideration. At this time, policy or no, the problem should be interjected to make certain what effects would occur. An equally effective challenge in assumptions can be made regarding the size of a library, its relation to undergraduate and graduate programs, the question of central library or separate libraries, or the scope of the materials considered as a library resource. In either of these examples, the physical effects of different decisions eliminate and determine whole areas of the preparation period. However, without broad searches at this time cut and patch results will occur. For in the free inter-relationship of aims and programs, all influences and economics, value judgments, and perceptual goals (or dogmatic decisions) contribute to one most appropriate scheme-the Design Leap.
Later discussion of three specific plans will show separate resolutions of specific programs. Knowledge of structures contemplated becomes increasingly a factor in detail development. The broad spectrum of allocation can be determined without specific details. Rules of thumb are appropriate for general assumptions only. A survey of most liberal arts campuses including junior colleges shows that academic undergraduate facilities average 125 square feet per student enrolled. Where greater scope in programs is offered or better library or lecture programs occur, the individual average would rise. A figure closer to 150 square feet per student is more appropriate. When graduate programs are added, this figure rises above 200 square feet per student, and as advanced research programs develop, especially with special grants, the square footage relationship to enrollment disappears. However, the concept of scale is immediately heightened when living requirement areas are added. This averages approximately 235 square feet per student housed. An automobile requires 300 square feet per parking and maneuver area so that exclusive of the demands for physical education fields recreation or special cultural elements, the spa�e program� per student are competing beyond those required for pure academics. Partial or ignored answers to these "peripheral" areas have destroyed many campus plans. Campuses originally pedestrian in nature now resemble urban parking lots with buildings. Walking distances are often lengthened beyond reasonable limits. Today a campus of 5,000 students or more is an urban unit and requires new and special answers. As the primary aim of an academic community is determinable, a concept utilizing the whole spectrum of the de-
Spring, 1962
United States Air Force Academy, Colorado Springs, Colorado. Site plan.
sign process coupled with perceptive knowledge of teaching environment can lead to new theories and plans. If, for example, the land use of a campus could be totally integrated without relegating living to defined peripheral areas, new uses of teaching spaces, library and study areas could be considered. Concepts analyzing enrollment size in major and minor units or colleges could also be re-evaluated.
In applying the primary aims to campus planning, the examples following relate to three campus plans: one existing, Northwestern University; and two new, University of Illinois-Congress Circle, Chicago, and The Air Force Academy, Colorado Springs, Colorado. Each has an entirely different academic program, site location, student size and relation to the community.
The Academic Campus of the Air Force Academy is situated on a mesa at the base of the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, which rise abruptly 2,000 feet and form the backdrop. The mesa site sloping to the east provides the articulation of levels which not only defines the cadet and public activities but provides a three dimensional terrace enclosed by natural land forms to contrast with the architectural character of the buildings. The Cadet Quarters are the focal point of the cadet activities. From this center the cadet has access at the intermediate or campus level to the formation area, the large paved area south of the
7
University of Illinois, Congress Circle Campus, Chicago. Illinois. Site plan.
Quarters, the Dining Hall, the Academic Building and the Library. From the formation area the cadets can march by ramps to the Parade Ground east of the campus. The pageantry inherent in such activities is dramatized by the ramps, while protecting the privacy of the campus area. The cadets and the public jointly use the Social Hall, Administration Building and the Chapel which are located west of the immediate campus on a large plaza or Court of Honor overlooking the Cadet Campus. The natural land forms intrude into the Court articulating the Chapel. The cadet circulation level joins at the Court of Honor through the Reception Gardens, and this junction provides access to the Auditorium, Ballrooms, and Social Rooms.
The University of Illinois 'at Congress Circle, situated at the city's crossroads, will be composed of five high-rise buildings-staff and administrative offices, engineering and science offices, Union high-rise, and two research, graduate and service buildings; several low-rise buildings, including two laboratory buildings, engineering and science; fine and applied arts building; three groups of classroom buildings; two major parking structures, each with a capacity of 3,000 cars and a 200-car lot on the east -side ; research, graduate and service centers; the Auditorium and Exhibit Gallery; the Hull Mansion, after restoration; and 8
the Campus Center, with the Library, Lecture Center, and Student Union.
To move through the campus, most students will enter along the two-level express walkway running north and south. The walkway connects directly with major campus buildings, and the lower level provides all-weather protection. Entrance points can be controlled for security.
Northwestern University, situated in a northern suburb of Chicago facing Lake Michigan, found it necessary to consider the problem of expanding its 86-acre campus. Most of the future building sites needed are going to be in the Evanston Campus area. In surveying new land to the west and north of the present campus, the University found the cost might run to $350,000 an acre-if property could be purchased. Then, remembering a campus-expansion plan suggested, toward the end of the last century, for filling in an area of Lake Michigan, we turned our eyes eastward to this vast, open expanse.
An engineering survey determined that building man-made land in the lake would cost only onequarter the amount of purchasing land in Evanston. In addition, this new land would permit (1) the design of a dramatic, inspiring campus, and (2) the expansion of the campus without reo moving land from the Evanston tax rolls. The proposed lake-fill will total 65 acres and will
Gf!n 1 '_I 1====::::::::[0 � ]Il,��
71
Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois. Site plan.
NORTHWESTERN TRI-QUARTERLY
double the land area east of Sheridan Road, permitting an unusual land-space-to-building ratio.
One is first impressed by the grain or scale between the smaller and older buildings on the Northwestern campus and the larger, new buildings on this campus and the other campuses. This change in scale reflects the integration of more than one discipline into the structure and the larger enrollments of current campus programs. The differences between the sizes reflects the grain of the individual campus and its relation to the environment. A different grain, the awesome scale of the broad plains and mountains -the problem of infinity-determined in part the plan of the Air Force Academy. The other determinant was perceptual in explaining to the visitor the activities of the campus. As over one million visitors come to the Academy, watch a parade or tour the grounds, the campus must lead both a public and a private existence. Here the natural environment touches and intrudes at specific points peripherally.
At Northwestern, the expansion program developed along the lake shore reintegrates the lakefront into the campus, preserving a vista of water and varying the character of the water and land forms, reflecting not only the characteristics of the natural environment but their relation to the specific potential needs of the campus.
Spring, 1962
United States Air Force Academy Colorado Springs, Colorado. View of campus.
J v 9
United States Air Force Academy, Colorado Springs, Colorado. Flow diagram.
The University of Illinois at Congress Circle is contrastingly urban, surrounded on two sides by major expressways. Here, also, the initial program of 20,000 undergraduate students, and 6,000 cars is a core of smaller scaled structures. In these three campuses, varying in student size between 2,500, 9,500 (projected) and 23,000 (projected), emphasizing both liberal arts, science and engineering, individual plans have resulted, varying in scale and grain as influenced by the program and by site characteristics.
The illustration adds the human scale in the basic pedestrian pattern. Patterns of access from living units, public transit and parking areas dissolve into problems of the pedestrian alone. Walking becomes a destination pattern establishing focus. At the Air Force Academy, living and study. academics, dining and library facilities revolve about a triangular pattern scaled to the ability of the total student body to assemble and march between elements. The proposed preliminary plan for Northwestern develops from the existing struc-
tures to separate patterns for Liberal Arts and Science and Engineering linked by social and cultural group activities. Again, the natural environment provides a series of foci contrasting the urban character of the Liberal Arts Plaza and the urban and scientific character of Science and Technology with the informal open area of Deering Meadow and the water areas. Here scale, numbers, and circulation patterns form the internal net. The Air Force Academy has two-dimensionally a single net, but the inter-relationships within a single structure (and a smaller enrollment) simplify the order. Lecture rooms occupy the center vertically with laboratories at the lower level, classrooms, staff and library at the upper level, and parking at grade level. Essentially a similar pattern develops at Congress Circle effected by increased enrollment and no restrictions on public access.
The Congress Circle campus develops a single center with intensive uses concentrated in that area, gradually diminishing as the intensity of use diminishes. Here 20,000 or more students will
10
University of Illinois, Congress Circle Campus, Chicago, Illinois. View of center of campus.
NORTHWESTERN TRI-QUARTERLY
University of Illinois, Congress Circle Campus, Chicago, Illinois. Flow diagram.
generate an urban atmosphere about a single focus-a university square or plaza. Lecture units and seminars join with outdoor theatre and plaza surrounded by classrooms, teaching laboratories, library and student center, and then peripherally with heavy laboratories, research and staff offices and administration.
The Northwestern program is not completely formulated but anticipates generation about a greatly enlarged library at Deering, a complex of units incorporating the arts, the theatre, as well as additional programs to enrich the curricula for existing student enrollment. The science and engineering unit will also rotate about the science library as research enrichment occurs in this area. A series of foci will develop, contrasting the academic and cultural elements with recreation and student activities.
Each of these campus plans is obviously different in two dimensional site drawings. As the final determinant is three dimensional, the eventual character is determined by the building design
and the campus plan. Here the differences are revealed in scale and structure, the surrounding environment, and the interpretation by the architect of form and enclosure.
If we are to find solutions for planning in the urban environment, the college campus plan can be the catalyst. In no other segment of the environment exists a grouping with greater capacity to assist in establishing both the problem and the potential. Despite this, most campuses will continue to be an assemblage, without visual purpose or beauty, until the problem of the visual environment is considered worthy of research, theory, process and discrimination.
The philosopher Paul Weiss, in his recent book Nine Basic Arts, re-affirms this need when referring to architects in saying ". not until they take seriously the need to explore the possibilities of bounding spaces in multiple ways will they become alert to architecture as an art, as respectable, revelatory, creative and at least as difficult as any other."
University, Evanston, Illinois. Flow diagram.
Spring, 1962
Northwestern
11
Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois. View of Lakefront Development.
Photograph by Herb Comess
By Susan McIlvaine
Susan Mcilvaine is a senior in the College of liberal Arts, majoring in English. 80rn in Summit, New Jersey, she has spent most of her life in Skaneateles, "a small New England town in Upstate New York." At Northwestern she has been a member of the freshman and sophomore honorary societies, recipient of the J. ScoH Clark Prize for creative writing, a member of the Symposium Speaker's CommiHee, and a student editor of THE TRI-QUARTERlY. After graduation in the fall quarter this year, she intends to do graduate work in the Russian language.
They arrived on the beach in the middle of the afternoon, six of them, all jabbering and laughing in French. There had been one or two Italians lying out in the sun, but after awhile they became annoyed at the students' loudness and left. The warm Riviera beach belonged to them for the moment, so they capered and teased each other kicking sand all over their white tropical pants. �e weather was still cold for swimming, even wading, but the sun warmed the sand until it steamed deceptively, and the atmosphere seemed almost tropical. Then the six students began the game of daring each other, with the obsessive gaiety of friends who are not yet close friends. Finally the blond boy from Bretagne demonstrated with energy that he would be the one to take the first dip in the Mediterranean. The others rushed around him and coaxed, glad that some one of them at last might break the monotony of being gay with no reason. He began to tug at his tight-fitting slacks and they to goad him; now the
teasing became more urgent. They hoped he would not disappoint them.
"AUez-vous-en," they taunted him, and so he tore off his clothes and flung them to either side shutting his eyes and grinning roguishly. H� stepped to the edge of the wash, where the waves left a pile of debris, and watched the waves lapping. With one glance over his shoulder he bounded away into the water, knees high, looking very pale in the bluish reflection of the sea. In a second he had bellied out into a dive and was paddling seaward, his blond head soaked dark. He swam in a circle, only the wet head showing, with his brilliant grin. The others squinted at him in admiration, and the small Parisian started to remove his clothes, casually, careful not to disturb the cigarette in his mouth. They watched for a few minutes, their excitement diminishing. The dark one, who had taken off all except his sweatshirt, sat down to finish his cigarette. The others followed and arranged themselves cross-legged, still watching the watet. The blond head disappeared, leaving a small whirlpool in one of the swells. The five on the beach began halfheartedly to throw sand at each other and to pull off their shirts. After five minutes they looked closely at the place where their friend had ducked under the water. One by one they fell silent and smoked their cigarettes and began to feel sticky from the frantic running around. The air was becoming uneasy.
Then they saw the lighter patch of something floating a little under the surface of the incoming swell.
Leo the Turk sat hunched forward on the pier, staring at the ocean with his usual expression
12
NORTHWESTERN TRI-QUARTERLY
of mild indifference. Beside him the policeman sighed reproachfully and tried again.
"Now, please, will you try to tell me about it? Now?"
Leo the Turk shrugged his shoulders and rested his hands, gently folded, between his knees. He watched his feet dangle over the water. "Yes, yes, in a minute, please."
The policeman sat down beside him and began to slap his notebook against the concrete of the pier. "Sir, you must understand you are the last and I must have your statement, just like the rest. Please?" He was tired; it was the sixth witness he had interviewed. The others had been ashamed and incoherent and not much help, and now this one, the last, did not seem to want to talk, and when he did, his Italian was poor. Exasperating. Sitting around on the hard stone pier 'that shook every time a wave rammed it, waiting for this bland-faced, black-eyed Greek or Turk or whatever he was to speak.
Leo looked up and over the water to where the sky began. "No, it is not there, not at all." The policeman hurriedly fumbled open his book and scratched on the first page.
"Not where? What?" he asked. Leo the Turk turned his face slowly and looked dazedly toward him.
"Nowhere. In me. But first you must understand that I am really not a Turk, and not terrible. Turks are very .passionate."
"Yes. Go on." The policeman wrote down "not Turk, not terrible" in his book.
"That is what they call me, Terrible Turk. But that is not what you want, I suppose. You want what I saw of that." He pointed to the mound covered with a striped blanket on the beach. "But I felt nothing."
"Yes, yes. That makes no difference."
The black eyes of Leo the unterrible non-Turk pored over his face. "Yes, yes what? So you understand?'
"Of course. This happens all the time during the season. I understand." He nodded sympathetically. "Go on, go on."
Leo shook his head.
"No? Oh, come, sir, I haven't
"You don't understand at all, you know. 1 think perhaps because you never had it in the first place. Of course you don't miss it when it is gone if it was never there." The policeman sat abjectly, saying nothing. It was impossible to write down what this Turk was saying. "Feeling, you know. You never know until it is gone, unless of course it was never there, and then it makes no difference." Once again the policeman closed his pad and settled himself to wait. Leo went on, his eyes squinting at the waning sun, so only black crescents of eyelashes showed against his pale face. "1 did not know until today. Shall I tell you
Spring, 1962
how I found out?"
His companion nodded absent-mindedly, then realizing that Leo had begun his story of the drowning, he stabbed at his notebook once more.
"This afternoon earlier the sky was very blue. You probably saw it where you were. Perhaps you did not notice it. But always I notice blue skies. That is what 1 come to the Riviera for, to notice them. So I look out of my hotel window and there is the sky so blue that 1 must squint to see it, and little droplets of water make it hazyyou see there? Look where I am pointing. No horizon, yes? That is what the droplets do. You cannot tell sea from sky.
"It is warm, but I know that it will get colder later, so I put on a sweater, this sweater." He plucked at the black turtle-necked sweater he was wearing and peered over at the policeman's writing. "So I run downstairs and outside. I am going for a walk. Here is this blue sky and this blue Mediterranean and out in the middle are little white wispy clouds that you know must be in the sky but you can't really tell because there is no horizon.
"I walk down to the beach to kick stones and listen. Thud, thud, that is the ocean dropping on the beach. A tense sound. Waves breaking are very tense things, you know. One watches this definite flowing ridge of water, waiting and knowing that in a second it will break into a million bits, but never knowning exactly when. Like people.
"Soon I find myself getting tense too. Or perhaps I have been tense all the time and simply impose my own mood on the waves, but I don't realize the tenseness until I have been sitting on this flat rock watching for some time
"What flat rock a excuse me."
"Over there. A mile, I suppose. But you must understand that I sit there and get more tense and more tense. I imagine the waves are getting bigger and bigger. Swishthumpswish. 1 think of those who come to find peace in the ocean and wonder how, because now all I can hear is the swishthudswish and the throb and the insistent moving in on me and I am tense.
"I have to get up and walk. This sitting is no good for me now. Along that line where the waves stop there are pink rocks with long strands of seaweed growing from them. They wash up and down like sirens' hair. There is a crowd of people at the end of the beach that I am walking on. Something to distract me from myself, I think, so 1 begin to walk toward them with my arms swinging, very relaxed." Leo the Turk stood up on the pier and began to walk back and forth behind the policeman. He pushed his hands into his pockets.
"Well, 1 am not fooling myself. Still arm-swinging I look at the sea and suddenly 1 am underwater swimming.
13
"How did you get underwater? Dive, wade. the policeman interrupted.
" A long silence. The policeman looked up to see Leo the Turk hunched and shivering.
"No, no, listen. I see myself as though I am underwater swimming, swimming as hard and fast as I can, trying to reach a place I must get to. I know I must, but I cannot see where it is because the water is filled with little bits of seaweed and tiny things that color everything the same, and only a little sun filters down. There is no height or depth or distance or weight or sound and I don't know whether I am swimming the right way or not, or whether I am far away or so close I can almost touch. My lungs begin to feel as though they will burst and they burn at the bottoms and my throat burns and I am dizzy, but I must take another stroke and another. I realize that I am feeling despair and then I hear a shout and I am really only walking along the water holding my breath. I let it out, feeling very silly. My fingers are cold, so I rub them.
"Still I walk toward the people who are shouting at something. I intend to walk past them, just looking. I know that I must think this out by myself, just as one swims underwater always alone." Leo stopped and looked down. "You are not writing."
"You are going too fast. Besides, I need facts. How many people?" The policeman drew his head closer to the notepad.
"Six. They are students. I can tell because of the way they all have the same haircuts and talk in French and wear same-looking old clothes; I don't know why I think this except that it is the -way I dressed as a college student. For a second I become interested in them and the feeling of despair at whatever I am despairing of is submerged. I surmise they are from Paris, living on the Italian R-iviera for a vacation because it is cheaper, but still Riviera. They are all active and daring, talking much too fast for me to understand. One begins to pull off his clothes; he is thin and pale, with dry blond hair fallen diagonally across his forehead. His trousers are very tight and his legs slender under them. He tosses himself back and fourth ridding himself of his coat and shirt, his eyes closed as if attending to a tribal rite. A look of rapture-no, that is not so-a look of relish on his face. Another catches his coat before it falls on the sand; they all laugh happily. I stand back from them, only watching, because they seem so young and unconcerned, though only two or three years younger than 1.
"The thin fellow tears all his clothes off, and he stands at the water's edge, looking down at the wash as it sidles up to his toes. He peers over his shoulder at his fellows and I hear a word I understand. It means "go ahead." He answers back "cold." I feel I should tell him the water is very cold this time of year, but the French does not come, and besides it seems not so important."
"Go on, please. You did not tell him the water was cold."
"Yes, because I did not feel the importance. I did not feel that ." Leo passed his hand in front of his eyes to blot out the still-blue sky.
"Yes. So I walk away then, because I am beginning to realize that this is the despair, that nothing is so important any more. Everything is smaller than life-size, and the horror is I am becoming used to it. So while I am walking away I hear splashing sounds and suppose the boy is running into the water, and the others scream and shout at him. I go along the beach over more rocks that are covered with seaweed hair. I begin to run as fast as I can over the rocks. Behind me still in the background is the shout, even the wave-thud cannot shut it out. I reach the end of the beach and start back, very slowly. Everything seems calmer now. The shouting is gone. Did you ever notice that sometimes in the late afternoon the sea becomes quite calm? Of course I had forgotten the time.
"But the waves slip quietly to my feet and I am careful to make footprints that point straight ahead, like some child's game.
"So I am watching my feet carefully, and before I know it I am back at the place where the boys were shouting. All is very quiet now, and calm." Leo's voice went on in a hypnotized whisper. The policeman strained to hear, on the verge of telling him to speak up.
"The boys stand there on the beach and once more they do not see me. They look down too, and I see that there are five of them now; the sixth, the bold blond boy, lies on the beach covered with his coat. I must walk close by them because the tide is making the beach narrower. As I look down I see his face is blue-white, and his hair damp. One of the others is brushing it across diagonally as it should fall on his forehead, but it is stiff and gummy with sand. He is dead, of course. That is all I feel. He is dead, of course. Then I am shaking, and my hands sweat and I think I will be sick. But not for the drowned boy, for myself. Some of the others' pants are wet; they are all slumped over and pale and tired and sick. They say nothing to me and me to them, but I just walk on, out to this pier. I sit down and watch them, the underfed sand birds, aimlessly pecking and casting around for something, if only to look at. Then one goes, I suppose to summon you. And I sit and wait for something to happen. To me, I think. But nothing does."
The policeman sat for awhile, waiting for more. Finally, "Is that all?" There was a touch of sarcasm in his voice. He passed the notebook mechanically to Leo for his signature.
"Of course that is all. It is more than all. I am sorry. I ramble too much."
14
NORTHWESTERN TRI-QUARTERLY
Ali Bulent Cambel, a native 01 Turkey, offended Robert College, Istonbul, where he received his undergraduate degree in the College of Arts and Sciences. He began the study of engineering at the University 01 Istanbul, and continued his study 01 various aspects of engineer. ing at Massachuseffs Institute 01 Technology, California Institute 01 Technology (M.S. 1946), and State University of Iowa (Ph.D. 1950). He came to Northwestern in 1953 and is presently Walter P. Murphy Distinguished Prolessor 01 Mechanical Engineering, Chairman of the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Director of the Gas Dynamic Laboratory at the Technological Institute. He has published extensively on gas dynamics, plasma dynamics, and aerothermochemistry. Books by him on real gases and on magnetolluidmechanics will appear shortly. In 1959 he received the G. Edward Pendray Award Irom the American Rocket Society, and in 1960 the Curtis W. Mcgraw Award from the Society for Engineering Education.
Marion Cambel, his wife, co-author of the article below, was born in New York City, grew up in Pasadena, California, and graduated from the University of California in 1944. Among her activities is a year with the American Friends Service Committee in a remote village in central Mexico, affiliation with the same organizatior. in helping to find employment lor returning Japanese Americans, and work with an international group in the Caltech Athenaeum.
This article on plasma was written for THE TRIQUARTERLY upon the invitation of the editors.
By
MAGNETOFLUIDMECHANICS AND THE FOURTH STATE OF MATTER
ThrOUghout the timeless stretches of space exists a state of matter which lights our sun and all the stars, and accounts for many cosmic phenomena. We Earth dwellers, comfortably familiar with our three states of matter, solid, liquid and gas, are only dimly aware of this fourth state of matter, although we encounter it when we are transfixed by the beauty of the Aurora Borealis or startled by a gaudy display of lightning during a summer rainstorm. We observe it also in the light of a fluorescent tube or the arc of a welding torch.
Because the fourth state of matter is a relatively new revelation and its study is in its infancy, its scientific observers, like many fond parents, are pondering a suitable name for it. There are those who would balk at calling it a fourth state of
Spring, 1962
matter because its properties are found in the other states of matter, yet they remain uneasily satisfied with that description for lack of a better one. Irving Langmuir, in his research on ionized gases, used the term plasma. This nomen, though open to some question, has been used widely and is sometimes found following the term "fourth state of matter" almost in a genus and species relationship.
If a diatomic gas, such as air, is heated to a very high temperature, its molecules, which are neutral electrically, have the bond between their atoms stretched to the breaking point. When this atomic bond is torn, generally around 1800° F, dissociation occurs. As the temperature rises to higher levels, the electrons in orbit around the atomic nuclei become excited. Their excitation
Photograph by Herb Comess
Marion and Ali Bulent Cambel
15
accelerates as the temperature increases until one or more electrons are ripped from their orbits, a condition which causes the atoms to be no longer neutral electrically because of the deficiency of electrons. The resulting mixture of molecules, atoms, positively charged ions and negative electrons is called a plasma.
If, in this process, everyone of the atoms has lost at least one electron, the mixture is termed a fully ionized plasma. However, a plasma state may exist when not all the molecules have their atomic bonds torn. The latter state is called a partially ionized plasma. In space, environmental conditions are conducive to the development of fully ionized plasma, but on our cold and dense planet certain hospitable conditions must be provided artificially for its generation.
The range of plasma temperatures is considerable. Some plasmas are fairly cool, while other plasmas are exceedingly hot. In the case of hot plasmas, there is no known earth substance which can survive their contact. On our sun and other enormous stellar bodies, the gravitational forces are sufficiently strong to hold the hot plasma particles together, but on the earth the gravitational field is too weak to be of practical value. This difficulty can be overcome by the use of magnets. Plasma is a good conductor of electricity due to the presence of electrons, and electricity is subject to magnetism, hence, with the application of a magnet the plasma will tend to stick to invisible lines of magnetic force.
A variety of oscillations is present in a plasma by virtue of its most important characteristic, namely the electrical properties caused by charged particles. Consider an electrically neutral plasma, that is, one consisting of equal numbers of electrons and positive ions, and assume that the charged particles are arranged in a hypothetical equilibrium position. To visualize this, it might be helpful to think of a Chinese checkerboard where one playing space is filled with the round checkers. Every other checker represents an electron, while the checker between two electrons represents a positive ion. By some technique, the nature of which is immaterial, one or more tiny and active electrons having a negative charge are dislodged from the equilibrium position while the more stable and massive ions with positive charges remain firmly in their equilibrium positions. The displacement of the electrons produces a surplus of positive charges which constitute an attractive force in recalling the departing electrons. The electrons rush back with such intent that they overshoot their original equilibrium position, effecting another inequality of charges. As the process repeats itself, the electrons oscillate about their equilibrium position in a state of great agitation. If the Chinese checkerboard idea is still in mind, imagine moving the
board back and forth rapidly so that the round checkers hit each other, and bounce back and forth without finding their proper holes. Though crudely oversimplified, this macroscopic image simulates the process of oscillations.
Some scientists liken plasma oscillations to the trembling of jelly in a bowl when the bowl is shaken. The comparison probably is responsible for the word pLasma, first used in the term protopLasma which was introduced into scientific terminology in 1839 by the Czech biologist J. Purkynie for the jelly-like medium interspersed by numerous particles which constitutes the body of cells.
It may be inferred from the foregoing that the study of the fourth state of matter involves an intertwining of customary disciplines, for its apparent simplicity is really complex, yet a zealous specialist might claim his discipline to constitute a unifying core. This may account for the multitude of names that have been used in attempts to describe it. The astrophysicists, who first observed the natural phenomena, labeled their study cosmical electrodynamics. Experiments with magnets and mercury yielded the name mercury-dynamics. Physicists and electrical engineers have called their study plasma physics or plasma dynamics, although these terms do not necessarily imply the presence of an externally applied magnetic field. Magnetohydrodynamics, or the use of a magnet with conducting fiuids in motion, has been designated by at least one physicist as "the most active, the most widely studied and most important branch of modern physics." Aerodynamicists have highlighted their discipline with magnetoaero-dynamics which, of course, suggests experiments with magnets and air in motion, while mechanical engineers, experimenting with magnets and gases in motion, coined the word magnetogasdynamics.
With the abundance of names describing different facets of this infant study, some clarification was needed. It was provided by Theodore von Karman, the dean of modern engineering, who devoted a major portion of a lecture to the use of magnetofluidmechanics when treating the subject in a general sense. A perusal of current literature still finds most of these descriptive names, with a bow in the direction of von Karman, and a leaning towards magnetohydrodynamics. Nevertheless, because of the American penchant for reducing all affectionately regarded entities to letter abbreviations, magnetohydrodynamics most often is referred to as MHD.
In preceding paragraphs plasma was described as a gas heated to such a high temperature that its particles are charged and agitated to a great degree. Also it was suggested that with the introduction of a magnet the behavior of a plasma can be controlled, or at least modified. Magnetofiuidmechanics, using the general term, comes about
16
NORTHWESTERN TRI-9UARTERLY
when a magnetic field is applied at right angles to an electrically conducting fluid in motion. Due to the interaction of the two fields an electric field is induced at right angles to both. At this point a number of phenomena and forces occur which are explained and utilized by equations from various disciplines of science and engineering.
The net effect is the production of useful thrust.
Why should useful thrust be obtained in this manner? Has not the jet engine, to use one example, furnished man with useful thrust? The answer is provided by the designers of energy conversion devices who invariably refer to the first two laws of thermodynamics and the Carnot cycle efficiency.
The Carnot cycle, a highly idealized hypothetical cycle devised by N. L. Sadi Carnot, who was a contemporary of Napolean Bonaparte, considers no losses whatsoever; yet its efficiency is not 100 per cent because the second law of thermodynamics states that any engine must operate between two reservoirs of thermal energy, one source having a high temperature from which the cycle obtains its input energy, the other a sink at a lower temperature to which an engine must reject or discharge the thermal energy which it cannot use to advantage. Although the Carnot cycle can never be built and may be termed a "dream engine," it serves as a model to emulate. In the case of a fast airplane, the source of energy is at the temperature of the fire in its engines, something around 3000 F. The thermal energy entering the engine is partially converted into the thrust which enables the plane to travel. During this conversion, the gases of combustion lose part of their thermal energy and leave the engine .at around 800 F. They are discharged to the sink, in this case the air, which is possible because the air is at a much lower temperature.
Carnot showed that the efficiency of an engine is improved if the range of operating temperatures is increased; it is ideal to have a high source temperature and a low sink temperature. Chemical kinetics indicate that fossil fuels, even with exotic additives, cannot yield burning temperatures much higher than 3000 F. But because plasmas occur at much higher temperatures the source temperature will be high, and hence a high Carnot cycle efficiency can be achieved. Therefore, plasmas offer the possibility of designing highly efficient energy convertors.
In accordance with the second law of thermodynamics, it is necessary to dispose of the rejected energy to the sink. In outer space there is little if any air, and it seems difficult to find a useful scavenger. Yet it is known from electromagnetic theory that energy may travel through a void. In fact, in a void energy can be transferred by radiation alone, and furthermore the
Spring, 1962
rate with which energy is radiated improves with increasing temperature. The law which governs this action is called the Stefan-Boltzmann law. Indeed, if there were no such action, radiations from the sun which foster life on earth would never reach our planet. Thus, because the sink temperature of a magnetofluidmechanic device will be relatively high, though not so high as its source temperature, rejected energy can be radiated away into the emptiness of space.
Among the numerous applications of magnetofluidmechanics, seven merit special attention:
In the realm of materials science and production techniques, the engineer is vitally interested in determining the properties and in observing the behavior of materials at high temperatures. For this purpose, not even solar furnaces similar to Archimedes' burning mirror, reputed to have destroyed a fleet of Roman ships off the slope of Epipolae, produce sufficiently high temperatures. The high temperatures associated with plasmas make them ideally suitable for such studies. Further, the cutting, formation and coating of materials can be accomplished conveniently and rapidly with plasma torches.
Flow control is another area where magnetofluidmechanics can be of valuable assistance. The flow of liquid metals, for example, molten sodiumpotassium solutions found in nuclear reactors, necessitates unusual pumping, controlling and measurement techniques. Also, flow measurement is promising in medical applications where the flow rate of blood or other saline solutions can be measured.
In the field of communications, there are several directions in which magnetofluidmechanics research should bear fruitful results. The ionosphere consists of the strata of the earth's atmosphere where high intensity radiations from the sun ionize the gases. These layers of plasma have been used for decades as a communications mirror in transmitting radio waves over oceans and across continents. Further information can be added to the fund of knowledge through continued study of the ionospheric layers. In front of hypersonic ballistic missiles there occurs a plasma sheath due to the conversion of high kinetic energies to thermal energy through which the communications engineer must devise means to propagate signals for homing or other modes of communication and guidance. Further, because the jet trail emanating from chemical rockets contains electrically charged particles, guidance and other telemetering devices must take cognizance of the influence which ionized gases have on electromagnetic signals.
Within the realm of the flight sciences, the ever increasing speed of flight vehicles makes necessary a rigorous understanding of boundary layer control and re-entry schemes. For instance, by in-
17
corporating suitable magnetic fields in the nose cone of a vehicle, it is possible to modify the velocity and the temperature gradients in the boundary layer of the conducting gases adjacent to the surfaces. To make the safe re-entry of hypersonic vehicles into the atmosphere possible, various modes of ablation cooling, gliding or drag increasing devices may be applied. More simply, with schemes developed through the study of m agnetofluidmechanics, a braking action can be applied to vehicles entering the atmosphere just as an automobile is braked by the friction of mechanical devices. In research laboratories aerodynarnicists concerned with high speed flight are particularly interested in the plasmas generated by shock waves of missiles. With a plasma arc jet. or an electromagnetic shock tube, which simulates hypersonic effects, the air stream is rippled by a standing shock wave upon meeting a solid body. Because the temperatures encountered approximate actual values, it is possible to study in the laboratory an otherwise inaccessible problem.
One of the most difficult problems encountered in working with extremely hot gases is the containment of fusion processes, often referred to as the "controlled H-Bomb." There was a period when the subject of plasma physics, in the words of an anonymous scientist, was "becoming unfashionable and was regarded by most physicists as a rather charming subject, full of small, colorful experiments, where there was little left to discover and whose only real justification was the amusement of those who bothered to waste their time on it." With the search for a mechanism to control fusion, plasma physics again became a subject of interest to the physicist and engineer. A better understanding of the allembracing discipline of magnetofluidmechanics may bring controlled fusion closer to reality.
The fuel for fusion is found in ordinary water. It is deuterium, a heavy isotope of hydrogen. Although only a small fraction of the hydrogen in natural water is deuterium, the deuterium in one gallon of water has an energy equivalent to 350 gallons of gasoline. When two deuterium nuclei collide at a very high temperature, they fuse to form helium. The temperature of the deuterium nuclei (deuteron) must be about 6,000,000 F for such a process to be self-sustaining. When vast amounts of energy are released in nuclear fusion, the hot plasma particles can be bent into tight helices and "tied" around the lines of force by an externally applied magnetic field. This gives rise to the popular expresson "magnetic bottle." It is essential to use a mechanism that will stabilize the hot plasma in such a manner that it will not escape from the magnetic lines of force to squirt rapidly against -the walls of the container where it would dissipate energy, thereby causing a collapse of the fusion reaction.
Assuming this stability, the plasma particles move across the magnetic field lines. On the other hand, their motion along the magnetic lines is unimpeded. The problem, in this case, is to develop configurations of the magnetic field which will prevent hot plasma particles from escaping out the ends of this route. A number of configurations have been proposed which form the basis for various approaches; among them, experimental efforts have been based upon the pinch concept, the stellerator concept, and the magnetic mirror concept.
The race to tap thermonuclear power by way of the fusion process is not necessarily a race to obtain a more effective and clean weapon of destruction. Contrary to what the anti-science humanist may think, both the scientist and the engineer are very much concerned about continued generation of life. It is a recognized fact that at our present rate of consumption and at the rate of population growth, fossil fuels may be insufficient within a century. Both the nations rich in fossil fuels who see inroads into their reserves and the "have not" nations are seeking methods to augment the supply. In several countries electrical power already flows from nuclear fission plants, but fissionable fuels, too, are an exhaustible supply. Furthermore, fission power presents another problem: disposal of radioactive waste. If the fusion reaction can be tapped and put to work, it will solve the fuel supply problem as long as there is water on our planet, and solve it without appreciable radioactive by-products.
Another application of magnetofluidmechanics is in the field of propulsion. In general, electric space propulsion systems may be classified under three headings, namely, electrostatic, electrothermal and electromagnetic. In electrothermal propulsion engines, electrical energy is used to generate high temperature plasmas which are then accelerated in a suitable nozzle, converting the high level thermal energy into kinetic energy. Because no external magnetic field is applied, the acceleration is quite similar to that encountered in chemical propulsion devices. The difference is that in chemical engines, the stored energy is transformed into thermal energy by virtue of a chemical reaction, whereas in an electrothermal engine the stored energy is converted into thermal energy during a physical reaction. In electromagnetic propulsion engines the plasma is produced as in the electrothermal engine and may be accelerated similarly. However, added thrust or acceleration is produced by applying an external magnetic field. Finally, in electrostatic propulsion engines, charged particles such as ions or colloid droplets are ejected in streams.
In conventional or nuclear steam power plants the chemical energy stored in the fuel is converted into thermal energy, thence into mechanical energy and finally into electrical energy. In
18
NORTHWESTERN TRI-QUARTERLY
the magnetoftuidmechanical power plant one or more of these steps may be obviated. However, the greatest advantage is due to the fact that in the generator, the rotating armature consisting of the copper wire conductor is replaced by a linearly accelerated stream of electrically conducting plasma and thus there are no moving parts which are subject to mechanical stress.
With these sketchy description of applications the story of the fourth state of matter might end. But it would be a poor chronicle which did not include the antecedence of these applications. Who were the curious ones of the past who observed nature minutely and jotted down their findings, or sat in secluded rooms to formulate the great physical laws which now are interlaced within this intricate study?
In tracing the history of magnetofluidmechanics, it would be helpful to know the origin of the Universe for, as indicated earlier, our planet swirls in a veritable ocean of plasma. As yet scientists have not found the key to that secret, and theologians are still wrestling with it; hence this outline of magnetofluidmechanics begins in a later period.
Although history records magnetic effects as early as 50 BC when Thales of Miletus first described the magnetic properties of lodestones, true magnetoftuidmechanic effects, as we now wish to exploit them, were not recognized until the latter part of the 16th century. It was William Gilbert, who, then serving as a court physician to Queen Elizabeth I, recognized our planet to be a giant magnet. Gilbert conducted many experiments on magnetism and published his observations in 1600 in a book entitled De Magnete which still is of classical significance since scientists continue to study the Earth as a magnet.
More than a century and a half later the studies of Andre Marie Ampere in France and Michael Faraday in England culminated in establishing the close relation between electricity and magnetism. In fact, Faraday may be credited as being the first magnetohydrodynamicist. Recalling Gilbert's observation that the Earth is a magnet and knowing the Thames River to be an electrolyte and thus a conductor of electricity, Faraday suspended two electrodes into the Thames and attempted to measure the electricity produced. Although Faraday failed in this one particular experiment, he was supremely successful in others as witnessed by the Faraday generator and the Faraday pump, both of which still bear his name as tribute to his original conception of them. Most theorists of that period who tried to analyze the relationship between electricity and gravitation used the term" action at a distance." They envisioned a charge (or mass) at one point in space influencing a charge (or mass) at another point in space without any linkage between the
Spring, 1962
charges (or masses). Faraday, proposing to explain electricity as a mechanical system, asserted the existence of lines of force running through space: actual physical entities with properties of tension, attraction, repulsion and motion.
Ampere and Faraday had been keen observers of experimental evidence. Now there was need for someone with a command of theory to develop their investigations and, as so often it occurred in that remarkable "age of enlightenment," a brilliant Scotch theoretician, James Clerk Maxwell, was moved by the genius of the empirical laws that Ampere and Faraday had propounded. Maxwell believed in Faraday's concept of lines of force. In developing it, he tried to imagine a physical model embodying the lines whose behavior could be reduced to formulas and numbers. The resulting paper, published when Maxwell was 25, explained many of the observed facts concerning electricity. Faraday was delighted and appreciative. He wrote to Maxwell: "I was at first almost frightened when I saw such mathematical force made to bear upon the subject, and then wondered to see that the subject stood it well." A few years later Maxwell again returned to Faraday's concepts. After questioning, experimenting and theorizing, he wrote the now well known and constantly used field equations which were incorporated in his Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism, published in 1864. It was H. Hertz who found the applications of Maxwell's theories in radio transmission.
In 1901, a clever experimentalist, the Italian Guglielmo Marconi, succeeded in sending a wireless message from Cornwall to Newfoundland, a distance of 2100 miles. From a practical viewpoint, sending messages over such long distances was a great achievement; however, Marconi's experiment also led to a breathtaking scientific conclusion: the signal must have followed the earth's curvature. The probable phenomenon was explained by Oliver Heaviside, an English physicist, and A. E. Kennelly, an American electrical engineer, who suggested that Marconi's signal reached Newfoundland after having been reflected down to the earth by a reflecting zone in space. E. V. Appleton carried this study further, showing the existence of ionized layers surrounding our planet.
As one individual after another on the trail of electromagnetic phenomena added a marker indicating a possible direction to the next curious observer, yet other scientific trails were being marked in similar fashion.
The general fluidmechanic equation of motion bears the name of both Navier, who first derived it in 1822 and Stokes, who discussed its details in 1845. Louis Marie Henri Navier was a French engineer, with the usual academic training of his time and place, who taught mathematics at the
19
Ecole Polytechnique. In the one major scientific paper of his life, which he presented to the Academie des Sciences, he extended the basic Eulerian equations of motion to include molecular forces. During the next twenty-five years there were a number of attempts to make Navier's equation more workable. It was Sir George Gabriel Stokes, a professor of theoretical physics at Cambridge, who replaced Navier's general coefficient with one which stood for dynamic viscosity.
Advances in thermodynamics, too, were contributing to the many laws which would later be brought together in the discipline of magnetofluidmechanics. And here again James Clerk Maxwell applied his patient, able mind. Maxwell examined mathematically the behavior of gas particles as if they were perfectly elastic spheres, such as billiard balls, acting on one another during impact. The German physicist, Ludwig Boltzmann, who recognized the significance of Maxwell's work in this area, refined and generalized Maxwell's proof, showing that Maxwell's distribution was the only possible equilibrium state of a gas. However, both Maxwell and Boltzmann realized that this equilibrium state is the thermodynamic condition of maximum entropy, the most disordered state in which the least amount of energy is available. Working independently and in friendly rivalry, Maxwell in England and Boltzmann in Germany made notable progress in explaining the behavior of gases by statistical mechanics, but after a time they ran into difficulties; for instance, they were unable to write theoretical formulas for the specific heats of certain gases. The result of their work led to the MaxwellBoltzmann distribution function which, though inadequate because of its extreme idealization, served the purpose for over forty years, and still is in use.
Between 1910 and 1920, M. N. Saha, a professor of physics at Calcutta University, was pioneering in research on the progressive breaking of atoms and molecules of matter into their constituent parts at high temperatures. The significance of Saha's work is that ionization of a gas is encouraged with increasing temperature and decreasing pressure.
The appropriate basic theory of an ionized gas was developed by Irving Langmuir, the American chemist, in the early nineteen-twenties. Throughout the next fifteen years a number of investigations continued to add to the subject but in a relatively isolated manner. It was inevitable that the moment in history would come when someone would see that the trails of electromagnetic theory, fluid mechanics, statistical mechanics and thermodynamics must converge.
The Dane, J. Hartmann, broke the new trail from the juncture. In 1937, working towards improved streetcar service in the city of Copen-
hagen, he revived Faraday's experiment in the Thames but this time in reverse. Whereas Faraday had attempted to produce electricity from a conductor flowing in a magnetic field, Hartmann attempted to pump mercury by subjecting it to a magnetic field. Hartmann was no mere gadgeteer. With Lazarus he studied the fluidrnechanic pheonomena associated with the flow of mercury in a magnetic field and gave the subject its first of many names, mercury-dynamics.
A strong impetus surged into the field of magnetofluidmechanics when, in 1942 Hannes Alfven, Professor of Electronics at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, combined the equations of Stokes-Navier with the equations of Maxwell to show analytically that waves must rise in a conducting liquid when the liquid is subject to a magnetic field and when the latter is pulsed. Suggesting that his waves were electromagnetichydrodynamic waves, Alfven reported his findings in a short letter to the editor of Nature Magazine. Today Alfven's waves are to the experimental fluidmechanician as rocks in white water are to the canoist: they are always there; something of which to beware.
A monumental classic called The Mathematical Theory of Non-Uniform Gases was published in 1939. Written by two English mathematicians, Sydney Chapman and T. G. Cowling, it incorporated the solutions of the Maxwell-Boltzmann distributions which Sydney Chapman and David Enskog had analyzed independently and with different details within the year 1916-17. In addition, the book described the mathematical theory of gaseous viscosity, thermal conduction and diffusion including quantum theory. It was also Sydney Chapman who later predicted the existence of the Van Allen belts.
Between 1950 and 1957 magnetofluidmechanics gained considerable momentum. In 1950 de Hoffman and Edward Teller formulated the theory of magnetohydrodynamic shocks and in 1956 Walter Elsasser formulated the magnetohydrodynamic dynamo theory. It was also in 1956 that Lyman Spitzer wrote an elegant, small monograph entitled The Physics of Fully Ionized Gases in which he sought to analyze theoretically the behavior of a gas composed entirely of electrons and bare nuclei, and in so doing incorporated the investigation of all those who had contributed to the field before him. One year later T. G. Cowling published his Magnetohydrodynamics. A significant event occurred in 1957 when the United States Air Force announced its entry into the field of magnetoftuidmechanics on the Evanston campus of Northwestern University.
Since 1957 two trends have become evident in the study of the fourth state of matter: one is the widespread effort to convert the science of rn agnetofluidrr-echanics into technological appliea-
20
NORTHWESTERN TRI-QUARTERLY
tions, some of which have been mentioned here; the other involves the many scholars who continue scientific studies related to the properties of plasma and the motion of conducting fluids under the influence of magnetic fields. Despite the numerous obstacles to be overcome within the twopronged attack, there are individuals who claim that magnetofluidmechanics is est a blished sufficiently so as to pose no further major problems. They are already out on the scientific frontier probing unknown areas of relativistic and quantum magnetofluidmechanics. To them Alfven's waves serve only as a darkened lighthouse serves
SOMETHING OLD
JAMES R. JOHNSTON, who sends us this short shortstory, lives in Michigan City, Indiana. He graduated from the School of Journalism in 1958.
THE NURSE'S HEELS dully sounded down the shiny linoleum hallway and faded behind a swinging door.
Mary Garback uncrossed and recrossed her long nyloned legs, critically studying her ankles, which she always considered too thick.
She looked over at her father, sitting next to her, staring blankly at a bad picture of a meadow scene hanging on the opposite wall of the small waiting room.
"Dad.
The old man neither turned his head nor gave any indication that he had heard her.
"Dad, listen to me." Her voice was taut with close-lipped emotion. The old man shifted his weight in the chair without taking his eyes from the picture on the wall.
"You've got to understand about this, Dad. There's my side too. It's not as if I'm committing some awful crime. Is it, Dad?"
The question hung in the deadened air and the old man's eyes were filled with water but he was not crying.
"It's Harry too, Dad. Harry says he'll leave unless you go." She sat and waited but the old man did not move a muscle.
"Can't you at least understand that part?" Her voice was loud in the hush of the room.
"You know that part about Harry is true. He'd leave me. So help me God he would. Is that what you want? Do you want me to be alone?"
The old man moved his face that was full of lines and care toward her a few inches, but he did not say anything.
"Oh, Dad, don't you see that this is all going to be for the best. It doesn't have to be forever, here. Maybe just for a little while. Until I get
Spring, 1962
the master of a radar-equipped ship, for they are guided by the speed of light.
Thus, through the yea rs, observant scientists and engineers have added to the immense accumulation of known facts which enable us to approach the fourth state of matter with some understanding. Their motivation is expressed best, perhaps, in the words of Michael Faraday: "It is the great beauty of our science that advancement in it, whether in a degree great or small, instead of exhausing the subject of research, opens the doors to further and more abundant knowledge, overflowing with beauty and utility."
straightened around at home better. And you can visit us sometimes, like on Sunday, say. Or I'll send little Mark and Delorous up to see you here.
The old man looked away from her again.
She talked faster.
"You'll have other men to talk to here. To play cards with. And the nurse said that there was a big yard in back with lots of big comfortable chairs in it. When it's warm out you can sit in the sun all day and read the papers. Or you can just sit there, not doing anything if you don't want to. You know how much you like to sit in the sun. It'll be so much better than trying to get the little bit of sun that comes over the fire escape balcony. You'll see, Dad, you'll like it here where you can sit in the sun all day."
She suddenly stopped talking and the quiet came back into the little room again.
She turned an unlighted cigarette end-for-end in her hands and the old man stared at the wall until the nurse came back down the hall through the swinging doors and into the room.
"Who's going to sign the papers?" she asked in a crisp, starched voice.
Mary Garback looked at her father and then slowly got up and took the offered pen and bent over to scratch her name on the document lying on the table.
"If you are ready, Mr. Clark, I can show you to your room now," the nurse said to the old man.
He got up from his chair with a great deal of difficulty.
"Dad, it shouldn't be like this. At least say good-by. Please. You can at least say good-by."
The old man, without a word, turned and shuffled off down the shiny linoleum hallway toward the swinging doors.
"I'll come and see you, Dad," Mary Garback called to him. "This Sunday, I'll come."
The nurse gave a quick look to Mary Garback's face and then turned to follow the old man down the hall.
21
Since the days of the Spanish American War and coverage by Richard Harding Davis and others, comparatively little Latin American news-either accurate, or distorted as he maintained it was during that war-has appeared in the North American press. The flurry of publicity accorded Latin America by the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs was mild and short-lived. Only recently, on the occasion of the trips below the border of Nixon and Kennedy, the revolutions in Cuba, Ecuador, and the Dominican Republicto name but a few headline makers-has such news begun to win front-page space. Apparently coming true at long last is the prophecy, once uttered by an editor of a popular U.S. weekly, that someday Latin American affairs would interest our reading public as vitally as Russian news-incidentally, he failed to foresee that it would be the Russians who would force us to take this interest.
When our press becomes truly pan-American in its coverage, we may become aware of the depth of the bitterness toward us of Mexico, the Spanish West Indies, Central, and South America. Despite occasional friendly gestures or dictators, despite the reputedly warm welcome extended the Kennedys, an innate antipathy exists. It might just as well be admitted that this is not a superficial or sporadic emotion. Deep-seated and permanent, it actually forms as integral a part of the Spanish and Portuguese Americans' cultural heritage and outlook, as, for instance, their devotion to the cult of the individual; it has been indoctrinated in them since childhood much as has their Spanish type of religious faith.
Reasons for this antipathy have been boiled down to two major and many minor ones: first, acts of imperialism by our government; second, exploitation of natural resources by our Big Business; the minor ones include our racial discrimination, the arrogance and snobbery of Yankee tourists, embassy officials, and members of "American Colonies" abroad; the tawdry picture of us painted by Hollywood; careless and sloppy reporting of Latin American affairs by our "lightning journalists," who, after twenty-four hours on the scene, write an article or even a book; and so on. Needless to say, all these complaints have been leveled at us so insistently, not only by Latin Americans, but by other foreigners, that -now that the period of our soul-searching and conscience-strickenness is somewhat waningthey have become faintly irritating cliches.
Perhaps, as Princeton's Americo Castro pointed out in his still popular textbook, lberoameru:a (The Dryden Press, 1941, 1946, and 1954), another cause of the dislike may be the inferiority complex of Latin Americans, or, more properly speaking, Ibero-Americans. Although outwardly they scorn our mechanization and maintain that life
BY FREDERICK S. STIMSON
ARIEL AND CALIBAN
does not revolve around splendid refrigerators and washing machines, but around the artistic and spiritual, inwardly they may covet those handy appliances. Perhaps, to take a ludicrous example, if ice were cheap, clean, and available, Latins of certain countries would stop insisting that iced drinks are bad for their digestion. Whatever the reason for Latin America's traditional resentment toward the United States, at least a basic reason for the maintenance and continuity of this resentment can be singled out. This is one our journalists and government officials seldom refer to-Latin America's literature. Our neighbors are culture-conscious, no doubt of that, and even those unable to finish the bachillerato, much less the doctorate, read avidly, especially their own classics, not only prose, but poetry. And throughout the history of Spanish American literature, including the most aesthetic and ivorytower literary movements, runs a strong current of antagonism toward the "white bear" of the North.
Now that the field of Spanish American (and occasionally Brazilian) literature, for years disdained by style-setting ivy-league universities, has at last been admitted into their curriculums, other institutions of higher learning have followed suit. And our youth is now studying that literature and becoming aware of this major cause of the perpetuation of anti-Yankeeism. Early New England leaders of the teaching of modern languages
22
NORTHWESTERN TRI-QUARTERLY
Frederick S. Stimson has had a varied and colorful career that has brought him into prolonged contact with the peoples of Central and South America and the Ccribbean area. He has held positions in various Latin American countries with the Department of State and the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs. From J944 to J946 he was director 01 the United States Cultural Institute in Medellin, Colombia. Later he was Assistant Public Affairs Officer with our embassy in San Salvador. He has also been a professor at the University 01 Antioquia, Colombia. Research lor a new book has twice taken him to Cuba. A graduate 01 The Ohio State University, he studied also at the Ecole Francaise 01 Middlebury and did graduate work at Harvard, Princeton, and the University of Michigan, where he took his Ph.D. in J952. He has published several books and some fifty articles and reviews having to do with Latin American letters and affairs. Presently ready lor publication are a lile of the Cuban poet Valdes and a history 01 Spanish American culture. He is Assistant Professor of Romance Languages at Northwestern.
and literature, brought up to admire the polish of French and English masterpieces, finally accepted Spanish Peninsular literature of the Golden Age. Then, a relatively few years ago, their successors acknowledged the possibility that content as well as style should be taken into account; and that, since emotion has had much to do with shaping history, emotion-packed literature can help us interpret the past. Thereupon came the reluctant acceptance of the sometimes crude and unpolished, but sincere, spontaneous, and emotional literature of Spanish America, a genre which may tell us more about a time and place than does the objective historical writing.
Among the literary heroes of the past, still studied by the youth of Spanish America and now being studied by our own college young people, perhaps only one stands out as a real friend to the United States, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (1811-88), once president of Argentina. A leader of the romantic school, he became famous with his Eticusuio (1845), a prose work attacking the barbarism of gauchos under the dictatorship of Juan Manuel de Rosas (1793-1877), a caudillo whose atrocities are said to have exceeded those of the more recent Peron. Fighting for educational reform in his native land, Sarmiento came to the United States to study our educational system, visit with the Horace Manns, and receive an honorary doctorate at the University of Michigan. He approved our material progress; he even went
Spring, 1962
so far as to maintain that we had made great strides culturally, at least in the field of public education.
Sarmiento's voice was a lone one, however, even in that early period, before so many of our so-called acts of aggression had taken place. More typical was the voice of a slightly later romantic, the Colombian poet, Rafael Pombo (1833-1912), who also visited the United States. In New York, with a diplomatic post, he mastered English and became a friend of Bryant and Longfellow. Unlike Sarmiento, Pombo returned to his native land to make deprecatory remarks in verse about the country and people he had visited.
In Spanish America, romantic writing continued well into the nineteenth century to culminate in the school of Modernism, a refinement of romanticism and deadly enemy of the parallel current of realism. Spanish Americans are proud of their Modernism, for it was one of the very few literary schools to originate in home territory where often writers simply imitate whatever style is in vogue on the Peninsula. This movement, however, was so popular that it influenced the mother country, traditionally somewhat indifferent toward her colonial authors. Angry slurs about the Yankee abound even in this literature, which is as strictly art for art's sake and as disdainful of political and sociological matters as were its models, French Parnassianism and Symbolism.
Ruben Dario (1867-1916), who, incredibly enough, was somehow able to rise above his obscure Nicaraguan background to become the most celebrated of the Modernist poets, late in his career left his ivory tower to attack Theodore Roosevelt's imperialism in Latin America, though afterwards the poet laughed at having waxed indignant over political affairs. In "To Roosevelt" (1905), for instance, he boasted that though we had energy and awe-inspiring military strength, Spanish America had poets, the indigenous culture of the Aztec and Incan civilizations, and, perhaps most important of all, a religion: "And though you may have everything, you lack one thingGod!
The Peruvian Jose Santos Chocana (1875-1934), not only a popular poet of this same literary school, but also a forceful propagandist, was equally indignant. In harsh, strident verse, the kind he accused Yankees of writing (probably he was referring in particular to Walt Whitman), he cried that the United States was torturing his America; he advised his people to distrust the blue-eyed, blond men of the North. In "Epic of the Pacific," his prophecy that in the end it would be the dark-haired West Indians, not these Northerners, who would punch a canal through the Isthmus, now seems somewhat inaccurate.
The Modernist, in prose rather than poetry, who wielded the greatest political influence was Jose Enrique Rodo (1871-1917) of Uruguay. His best
23
seller Ariel (1900) quickly became and perhaps remained the ethical Bible for Spanish American youth; it was the voice of the southern continent protesting against another culture, that of North America. Herein is set forth in beautiful, if somewhat repetitious and declamatory prose, the contrast between Anglo-Saxon and Latin America which has become fixed in the minds of foreigners: Shakespeare's character Ariel symbolizes the cultural and intellectual aristocracy of the South, an aristocracy that tries to withstand the materialism of another character from The Tempest, Caliban, symbolizing the North.
It has been pointed out that Rode's classic was not intended as a deliberate attack on the United States; rather, Redo, like other turn-of-the-century critics such as Santayana, Wilde, and Ruskin, was attacking positivism. a philosophy of life that had been spreading in this hemisphere during the nineteenth century. It just happened that the United States served as a perfect example of the crass results of such an attitude. But many Spanish American readers, especially young ones, failing to perceive this fine distinction, learn from Ariel only that our country is materialistic, godless, and uncultured, while Latin America stands for the better things of life, the spiritual.
Rodos criticism in the first decade of this century was gentler than that of the group of essayists whose influence was felt in the second decade. While he attacked us from a philosophical standpoint, his successors did so from a more specific, political one. Prompting their indignation were two closely related Yankee policies, the Monroe Doctrine and what has been variously called "Manifest Destiny," "Elder Sister policy," "Big Stick policy," and "Dollar Diplomacy." These and restatements of them were put into practice with acts of aggression, beginning with the Mexican War and lasting through the Spanish American one, which angered all Latin America. Found especially irritating were the Platt Amendment in Cuba of 1901, the affair of the Panama Canal in 1903, Henry Cabot Lodge's Magdalena Bay resolution of 1912, and at various times the landing of U.S. troops in Nicaragua, Mexico, Haiti, and Honduras.
Proof of the anger provoked by these and similar incidents is the fact that the essayists, in the main dedicated exclusively to philosophy and literature, were so incensed as to turn to political writing. This contingent, comprismg Spanish America's outstanding writers of all times in this genre, called upon the Spanish New World to unite in combat against further aggression from the North.
The earliest of these impassioned disciples of distrust was Venezuela's novelist and essayist, Rufino Blanco-Fombona (1874-1944). His hatred of Yankees began in New York City when he was
insulted by a mob and fined $2000 for breaking a policeman's arm; it extended, amusingly enough, even to Yankee women. In Aladdin's Lamp (1915), he spoke of poor ones who "get on a barrel in the center of the street and harangue a multitude no less imbecile than they; exalted with mysticism, they swell the ranks of the Salvation Army and vote on election day for the president of one of those anti-alcoholic societies whose members, with Lutheran hypocrisy, get drunk only at home." Of the rich ones, he said that their scandalous reputation for vulgarity and bad taste had spread over the world; he referred to the "sausage and bacon queens" of Chicago and gave fits to Anna Gould in Paris. In novels and collections of essays, such as The Political and Social Evolution of Hispanic America (1911), is evidenced his fear of U.S. economic imperialism. To his credit, however, it should be pointed out that he did not put all the blame on us and external elements; he realized that internal factors were at work, too, namely Spanish American inertia and political corruption.
Carrying on the torch of anti-imperialism was Argentina's Manuel Ugarte (1878-1951), coiner of the derogatory phrase, the "colossus of the North." Although he always claimed that he was not anti-Yankee, his Destiny of a Continent (1923) is perhaps the most vicious of all the books here mentioned. In this he inveighed against specific political moves, such as the Platt Amendment, which he considered imperialistic. Ugarte's crusade for liberation from the menace of the colossus took him to almost every country in America (although several Central American ones, reputedly fearful of U.S. reprisals, refused him entry) and even to Columbia University (despite protests of our State Department, so it was said) where, in 1912, he lectured on "The Future of Latin America." Later he was to remark, ironically enough, that it was there where he was given the most freedom to speak openly.
Less vindictive were essayists such as the very distinguished Mexicans, Jose Vasconcelos (18821959) and Alfonso Reyes (1889-1959). The former, not only a prolific writer, but an educator and a revoluntionary hero, once exiled to the United States and once almost president of Mexico, was one of the many to criticize our racial discrimination. In The Cosmic Race (1925) he boasted that while four races, red, black, yellow, and white, were assimilating in his land where the best elements of each would combine to form a fifth, the cosmic race, whites had purged Yankeeland of Indian and other colored blood. San Francisco's young ladies, he cried, refused to dance with officials of the Japanese Navy. He warned that our purification of blood would lead to degeneracy.
Reyes was not only one of Mexico's greatest prose stylists, creative writers, and scholars of
24
NORTHWESTERN TRI-QUARTERLY
Golden Age literature, but a distinguished diplomat. (In Spanish America, the diplomatic posts go to the country's great authors and intellectuals.) In "Panorama of America" (1918), included in the series AnaLogies and Differences, he presented political analysts' sharp criticisms of the Monroe Doctrine. For which America was the Doctrine designed? It would save North America from European aggression, but would it save Latin America from a North American one? Would it protect Peru from Chile, or Mexico and Colombia from the United States? The goal of pan-Americanism was artificial and impossible, because North and South America share nothing in common, not their race, not their language, not even their religion, philosophy of life, traditions, or customs.
Dishearteningly enough for us, practically all these distinguished essayists-including two others of about the same period, born in the eighties, Peru's Francisco Garcia Calderon and Argentina's Ricardo Rojas-believed that Latin America's salvation lay in looking toward Europe, not the United States, in importing European, not Yankee, culture. They all advocated not the fusion of North and South America, pan-Americanism, but the fusion of Europe and the Spanish New World, the Indies, into "Eurindia," as Rojas called it.
The anti-Yankee literary attacks continue today, of course. In poetry these are being written by supporters of. Fidel Castro and by one of the most famous living poets in the Spanish language, Pablo Neruda (1904-). We might smile wryly upon reading the following, for instance, from a new collection of excellent translations of this Chilean's work:
When the trumpets had sounded and all was in readiness on the face of the earth, Jehovah divided his universe: Anaconda, Ford Motors, Coca-Cola Inc., and similar entities: the most succulent item of all, The United Fruit Company Incorporated reserved for itself: the heartland and coasts of my country, the delectable waist of America. They rechristened their properties: the "Banana Republics"-l
In general, however, the vociferous among the contemporary critics are authors of very minor stature. The really great masters of artistic invective are gone, though their influence is still being exercised on the youth of Spanish America. Most of these present-day second-raters are so devoid of originality and vigor that the sound is
ISeZected Poems of Pablo Neriuia, tr. Ben Belitt (New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1961), p. 149. Reproduced with permission of Grove Press, Copyright c 1961.
Spring, 1962
that produced by a needle stuck in a broken record. To try another metaphor, the old chestnuts are simply being reheated.
Recently reprinted in Spanish, for instance, at Castro's orders and also published in an English edition is the slanderous The Shark and the Sardines (1956), by Guatemala's president from 1945 to 1951, Juan Jose Arevalo, perhaps an effective writer of propaganda, but never a distinguished literary figure (see Time [January 5, 1962], p. 27). Here he attacks not only U.S. imperialism, but, like Neruda, our Big Business, in particular, of course, the United Fruit Company.
The prolific writer, Eugen Relgis (1895-), a Rumanian refugee living in Uruguay, often calls attention to our materialism and bad taste. In his 'TweLve Capitals (1961), he seems to imply that these characteristics of ours account for West Berlin's present gaudiness and corruption, which he describes in great detail. But his far more gifted predecessor in Uruguay, Rodo, belittled us with such superior artistry that by comparison Relgis ranks as a weak imitation of the master.
Almost unending is the list of Spanish American authors who have contributed to destroying any friendship and love that might have been extended us, and their criticism would fill volumes. Mentioned here have been mainly the most celebrated figures, not only from the standpoint of widespread political influence, but from that of the artistic and literary one, authors of firmly established Spanish American classics. But by no means are all of them included; omitted, for instance, are the many novelists, such as Romulo Gallegos (1884-), once elected to the presidency of Venezuela, who have included an "Ugly American" in their casts of characters.
Since these writers span two centuries and. ranging geographically from Argentina to Mexico, a great deal of territory, their influence has been long and wide. It seems especially awesome when we consider that their works are the ones being read today by the school children of Spanish America. This literary influence has thus helped to turn antipathy toward the United States into not just an occasional flare-up, but a part of the Latin Americans' cultural heritage.
Now that our universities are teaching courses in this literature, our youth is learning about this traditional source of resentment. Perhaps bureaucrats and journalists, as well as college students, should learn Spanish (although some of these works appear in English translation) and take such courses, for a better understanding not only of literature, but of the reasons why much of Latin America is going-or, has gone-Communist. And these and similar books contain excellent background material for members of the Peace Corps stationed below the border.
25
THE HORNED HEROTHE NOBLE SAVAGETHE DETACHED TOOTH
Meno Spann was born in Koblenz, Germany. He studied German literature and philology at the Universities of Gottingen, Berlin, and Marburg. As a student he won several championships as a gymnast and ;avelin thrower, but a Bremen stevedore, he says, prevented him from becoming a prize fighter. After receiving his doctorate in Marburg in 1928 he came to the United States, where he taught in the German departments of Cornell, the Universities of Oregon, Iowa, and North Carolina and, since 1943, at Northwestern. Mr. Spann has traveled widely in Europe, Africa, and Mexico and is a passionate bull fighting fan (afficionado) who has partaken in what he calls rustic freefor-ails with young horned heroes.
He has published articles and textbooks in his field, in this country; and in Germany contributed to various newspapers and magazines. Mr. Spann's essay was wriHen in response to an invitation from the editors.
ANOLD CHRONICLE of Thuringia reports a strange event that supposedly happened at the University of Erfurt in 1520. With a little reading between the lines the following scene can be reconstructed: One evening the students rushed out of a lecture room, trampling over each other and screaming as if flames or the fiend were searing their heels. In the abandoned room remained only one person, a small, pale man in a black gown, smiling contemptuously. It was Dr. Johann Faustus, who had just lectured on Homer-not as the regular professors used to lecture, but in a way only he, the first among the necromancers could do it, conjuring up before the eyes of the students the heroes and monsters of the Odyssey. But the giant Polyphemus with a Grecian leg dangling from his gory lips! By Astoreth, he had been too much for these weak-minded bursars.
There are good reasons to believe that this dramatic lecture really took place and that the apparitions were products of the pedagogical necro-
mancer's hypnotic powers, the students' faith in black magic, and a primitive forerunner of the magic lantern. Looking at the sable sorcerer as the legend sees him we might say he taught literature with the help of magic. That must sound wonderful to anyone who has ever tried to explain the changing visions of man, his life, his history, his orders, values, and quests, his uplifts and downfalls, his heavens and hells while having to rely on conceptual language which too often is obscure where light is needed. Granted, Dr. Faustus cast his questionable lights about where quotations would have sufficed, but that does not make this scene less fascinating or weaken the wish to have magic at their disposal of all those who realize that words fail them where more than intellectual understanding is needed, where a way is sought into a new realm of feeling. But at such points the "widely-noised conjuror" may help us if we learn from him how he conducted that unforgettable class on Homer. Of course some changes will be necessary. Instead of his lanterna
�r Meno Spann
26
NORTHWESTERN TRI-QUARTERLY
magica we shall have to use a motion picture projector, and instead of his hypnotic sorcery some art-magic. Then we shall be ready for that embarrassing moment when we feel the waning power of our words; we'll shift to a different language, a language of images and scenes such as our short motion pictures will provide - illustrative motion pictures like the three described in this article.
"Described," that disappointing word, has to be used since what follows are not real scripts but descriptions of motion pictures reeled off so far only before the mental eye. But one aspect of these "movies of the mind" should be pointed out. They were "shot on location": they are based on actual experiences in the lands of the fighting bull and the lion, separated only by a small body of water, and in abattoirs and tea rooms, separated only by a little lapse of memory. Having explained the nature of the three "scripts" we must ask the reader to try to see them rather than merely to read them
Spring, 1962
Let us assume that a professor of literature, a heretic in his field, is discussing the nature of tragedy. He speaks about "gameness" as the chief quality of the tragic hero. The tragic hero sees or feels doom approaching but he does not yield, he does not use any subterfuge or smart evasion. He meets it head on. "Incidentally," says the professor, "that is why the Spaniards call the brave bull 'tOTO tonto,' the 'stupid bull,' but the word 'stupid' has in this case only the laudatory meaning of heroically stubborn, heroically unable and unwilling to think his way out. Socrates disliked the tragic hero because he was not rational, but the descendants of Dionysus must go fateintoxicated to the 'moment of truth.' Here you can see the relationship between the stage of the flesh, the arena, and the stage of the spirit, the theater." At this point the lecturer sees in the eyes of his students the signal to switch on the electric mechanism which will in seconds produce a rolled-down screen, semidarkness, and the beginning of the paraphrastic film:
Photograph by Herb Comess
27
The Horllt'd Hero
A blue circle above, a yellow circle below, they hold all the faces, gestures, dots of black hair, dots of white shirts, curved rows of knees and piercing shouts: Ga seosa ! Cc rI't';:(1 ! - Old, Rafael! - Que te quite 1a Macarena, ladron! 1 The shouts and the wavering roar turn into the music of the pasodob1e torero. � The pasodoble prances like the horse of the medieval man who rides into the arena dressed in the old Spaniard's black. The pasodoble swaggers like the glittering golden men who walk on the sand below, as those onlv can walk who are above the roar, the belly fear, and the pesetas. The pasodoble is hollow and faroff like the heavv trampling in the dark passageway t and the pasodoble is strong as the huffing gallop with which the bull breaks into the sun. And now his weight comes and goes past the glittering golden man, hidden in the yielding folds, and gleaming horns slide out into the deathless air. Youth and strength and sleek blackness hit with fury and drive into goading steel and into the great pain. But the joy of feeling the struggling horse's weight in the lifting jerk is greater. New goading, and the emptiness mocks anew, but greater than the hunger for air and the hunger for stillness and the green and cool far away from the yellow circle is the hunger to drive the pointed horn into the glittering thing and to drive with straining sinews and spreading hoofs and to throw the glitter into the air and drive into it again, and to throw and drive.
Sword point against horn point, the bull moves like a rising black wave, but the flash is in him: he struggles and sways on death-heavy legs, and stumbling falls. Three flower-bedecked mules are hitched to the heavy head, which lolls on the massive neck as chains are pulled and ropes are tightened for a glorious arrastre.:l High up into the blue rises the shout and the noise of the hands. The mules jump, the big black body is moved through the roar that honors him, while the muzzle, open in death, fills with sand.
Another end is available: - A sharp toss, a blurred sand, spectators, muleta whirl through the air, a stunning fall, closed eyes opening when the heavy trampling moves away, eyes showing an awareness growing over the pain in the pierced and ripped groin that the shadows spreading over
lCarbonated drinks, beer-Hi, Raphael-May the Macarena (Virgin of Hope) abandon thee, scoundrel!
2Musical piece composed to be played at bullfights, with a tragic undertone which puts it decidedly out of the class of circus music.
"The process of dragging the bull from the arena, which can be turned into a last honor for a fighting bull of outstanding courage.
the sand and the motionless starers are the coming of night and that the patter of running feet and the whispers receding farther and farther away are the coming of silence. High on the shoulders of stunned men the doud matador is carried from the arena. His fighting cape covers his face and his wounds and trails over the sand.
Now comes the most difficult part of the film, a Hamlet ballet which throughout reminds the audience of the bull fight they just saw. Furious Hamlet in black breaks into the circle of his death fight. The golden glittering king appears, but Hamlet is wounded and goaded by the picas and banderillas of outrageous fortune while he strikes the mocking air. Now old Polonius approaches with the tired gait of a picador horse. He hides behind the red arras but Hamlet sees the movement and at the height of his rage and pain pierces the cloth. The bony nag is covered with the torn arras behind which it was killed and Hamlet charges through the death circle after the glittering golden man. The last tercio has begun: now he is ready for death and cleverly he is tricked to receive the estocada. - Habet!" But he is still on his legs and with his last strength he runs his enemy through, the evasive glitter. He has deserved his arrastre. Four captains carry him away and for his passage
The soldiers' music and the rites of war
Speak loudly for him.
The ball-points rush to write down the story of the noble savage whom Jean Jack Rousseau did not invent. "Yes, ladies and gentlemen, this product of the wide open spaces in nature and Rousseau's experience was to serve as a paragon for the product of the wide, open city; but city dwellers have always yearned for him. They called him by different names. He was the man of the golden age and the dweller of the lost paradise. His antagonist lived in opulent Samaria and Babylon anathematized by the prophets. Bernardino de Sahagun, Franciscan missionary in newly conquered Mexico, made the important discovery that the new flocks of docile Indians would make up for the losses in souls which the church had suffered through the heretic wolves of the Reformation. There was, more important perhaps than all the factors mentioned thus far, the desire of all highly developed civilizations to take off their elaborate costumes and walk naked.
Of course, coral necklaces, feathered headgear and tattooed tribal designs are not the only characteristics of the noble savage. He has tended sheep in Arcadia, he has spurned the luxurious
4"He got it. Shout in Roman arenas when a gladiator was severely hit.
28
it
NORTHWESTERN TRI-QUARTERLY
life of Rome in the territory beyond Rhine and Danube. He was a cottager in Wakefield and the much-suffering virtuous proletarian when capitalism was in its infancy. He was a negro plantntion worker who got religion and later rhythm. He lives on as a financial help to underdeveloped and overdeveloped countries because all who live under thatched roofs or big hats who yodel or sing only in a minor key help their countries' tourist industry. But back to Rousseau. Of course we could say to him: Were you there, Jean Jaques? but that won't do. There is a certain truth in the concept of the noble savage, but only if we establish one complementary concept, namely the noble man of culture. Voltaire in Cirey, in the salon of the Marquise du Chatelet, hurling brilliant bans mots at quickly moving subjects of conversation, is to the sensitive eye of moralist, cultural critic, or aesthete just as pleasing as a Masai warrior hurling his heavy spear into five hundred pounds of galloping simba.
Both the primitive man and the trained man of a high culture are authentic. They speak their "dialect" and their "French" flawlessly in the literal and metaphorical sense. The true contrast-figure to the noble savage is the man who has lost his authenticity. Unauthentic existence is "ignoble." At this remark the ball-points slow down and the professor pushes the button. A shield appears over two crossed spears and on the shield appears the title:
The Noble Savage
A strong African sun makes the black skin of Masai spearmen glisten. The restfulness and relaxation of their deep squat betrays muscles and ligaments of another world. At the fire pieces of Kudu meat are acquiring a superficial crust and the calabash with a mixture of ox blood and milk goes from hand to hand. Interspersed fleeting contrast-scenes of supping white men collapsed in chairs, grouped around a table covered with food and medicine bottles with a close-up of slightly dislocated vests over gently undulating swellings, causing tiny mother-of-pearl buttons to scrape the edge of the table. Cigar smoke rises and changes into a lone smoke column standing over the dying fire of the African's with a close-up of hard black flanks sucked in and pushed out in slightly faster rhythm than that of the scraping buttons.
Clatter of typewriter keys, slapping sound of a conveyor belt, chorus chant of a commercial before a microphone all in the same rhythm. The slapping and clatter cease, but the chorus chant goes on, climaxing every stanza with the word "eaties," shouted with considerable force. In the same rhythm and simultaneously, the Masai spearmen sing, climaxing each stanza a moment later with "simba." They dance around the fire
Spring, 1962
and at the word "simba" they make hurling movements with their arms. The chant dies down but is heard in the background as the warriors run in scattered formation, with sinewy stalking strides, through the high grass at the foot of the Usambara Mountains. They carry spears in their hands, formidable with four-foot blades, but neat and well-balanced. Their ox-hide shields would look Homeric if it were not for the designs painted on them, which are as old as the Homeric world. Short swords and clubs rub against thighs lithe as all the wild things which are stirred up and scurry away as the hunters advance. Close-up of faces. Hard, strong lines around aquiline noses. Metal pieces dangle from the ears and strike the tense slender necks. The eyes are deep-set and fear only that which moves through darkness and dreams, but nothing that moves through grass and sun.
The leader of the hunters has a large coneshaped cap made of the mane of a full-grown lion, which he had killed single-handed. Behind the hunters, a close-up of white faces under fedoras and above steering-wheels, racing behind a firetruck. The tension of the chase makes fat and sunken cheeks rosy. A donga appears, and in the deep grass on the other side, visible only for a moment, a scrubby, short mane on a thickmuscled neck and, like a striking snake, the infuriated, lashing tail. A hollow, questioning roar is answered with silence. The deep grass on the other side moves, and the tawny back rises above and falls below as the lion trots away from the donga. The speedy hunters diving into the ravine and emerging on the other bank resemble black otters crossing a small body of water. From underneath a thorn tree, rises again, wilder and louder, the voice of the lion. The patches of sun and the zigzag shadows under the thorn trees move. Wild, piercing cries fly out, and with them, curving and flashing through the sunlight, the first spear. It sticks in the mane. The shaft whips wildly in the galloping, charging beast. Flash after flash the spears strike and trail along, hanging from the bleeding fur. Suddenly, in the midst of shrill shouts and raised shields, the lion is stretched out before the grouped spearmen. The scene does not look gruesome, but as the dancing hunters chant their deeply-felt, deeply-earned music, relieving the strain of their courage in rhythms which belong to these plains like the undulating high grass and the bizarre thorn trees, they appear functioning, congruous, satisfying deep moral and aesthetic demands. But for a moment, wedged into the triumphant dance around the spear-felled simba, there must appear another scene: the fedora-bedecked fire-truck chasers are closing in on two stretcher-bearers who struggle through the satisfied crowd carrying a screaming living thing, hurt by a building raging with fire, suffering agonies deeper and fiercer than anything
29
the well-muscled killer of cattle felt when steel blades sliced into his lungs.
The hunters draw their spears out of the dead lion and point with praising nods at the first blade that flew and sank deep into the chest on that matted point in the mane at which the hunter's eye must stare when hip and shoulder hurl the weapon. The spear belongs to the leader with the cone-shaped fur cap. His face appears, a certain fierceness around the mouth; the eyes begin to soften, and now he gazes at a shield which a black man holds up before him, a black man from the white man's world. And on the partitions of that shield he sees the strange things the visitor tells about - a herd of monsters, each bigger than an elephant, running faster than wild beast, locked to each other on an iron spoor; black men fighting stony walls far below the steppes with heavy spears that thrust without being pushed; black men holding in their hands strange leaves and golden discs, which they receive for fighting the stone wall. Tribes farther south, he knows, take such leaves and give women and cattle for them.
The keen hunter's eyes are facing the stone wall. Coal dust sparkles in the hair which was once covered by the lion cap. The hard shoulders and the deep chest tremble behind the heavy drill. The eaties-simba rhythm is heard, but the simba cry is weak and indistinct and "Eaties" sounds lound and triumphant as the drill bites deep into the stone wall.
The hunter's eyes have lost all fierceness as they look from beneath a fedora at the skyscrapers of Johannesburg. The spearman has yellow shoes, blue trousers and a striped jacket. No longer is he a pleasing sight to artist, moralist, or humanist. A radio sings out into the street the rhythmic chant that swells into the eatie cry, and the stalking hunger-legs in cheap, blue trousers, and the nimble feet, hardened against thorn and stone, but not against shoes and concrete, break clumsily into the lion dance. The busy people in the stone kraal look at him and giggle and a policeman comes and gives the unpaid clown a shove and says to him, "Voruit!":i
There might be a concluding part to this film: "Authenticity Regained," but that script has to wait until Clio has written a fresh chapter on her new scroll, entitled "Africa."
and looking at the tiger's 'fearful symmetry' Blake asks the old question which occurs in every theodicy in one form or the other: 'Did he who made the lamb make thee?' The poet had a simple answer. He attributed the creation of such an un-Words-worthian animal as the tiger to the cruel demon Urizon, while Los in precos-
mic times created the lamb. But that is a fancy which can't satisfy us. Blake's refusal to accept the tiger in the same world in which the lamb lives dodges the tragic aspect of existence, for which Schopenhauer and Nietzsche are better interpreters than the English mystic. They - oh, I see it is time. ."
Prologue
William Blake sits at the desk of his study in his newly rented cottage at Felpham, near Chichester, Sussex, writing a letter to his patron Thomas Butts. We follow the pen's way over the paper and read: "The villagers of Felpham are not mere rustics; they are polite and modest. Meat is cheaper than in London; but the sweet air _If Blake puts his pen down and gets up. In this moment the sentence "Meat is cheaper than in London" detaches itself from the letter and becomes blurred, finally dissolving into a vapor cloud which follows Blake into the kitchen where a leg of lamb on the stove is spreading its own vapors. The two vapors blend and in its appears, big as a horse, a lamb which speaks in bleating tones to the startled poet:
Did heee who maaaade the laaaamb maaaake theeeee?
For a moment there is no motion and the scene looks like a Blake engraving v with this title: The Lamb feareth Tigers and Leg of Lamb eating Mystics. The vapors become thicker and as they clear away a new title becomes visible on the screen:
The Detached Tooth
Strains from Schubert's string quartette, Op. 125, No.1, merge with spring warmth flooding from the blueness above over a Botticelli orange grove which slowly changes into the yellowgreen-blue tapestry pattern of a cozy tea room. Metal rattles gently against chinaware, and there is the fluctuating hum of human voices with occasional little outbursts of vowels and sibilants. A thin haze of cigarette smoke and consomme vapors is not wafted away by the ventilators fast enough to prevent the guests' noses from becoming aroused. The hum of conversation becomes more intense and connects itself with
'-'Afrikaans for: Get moving!
"The scene should be inspired by Blake's engraving "The Horse" in Letters of W. Blake, edited by A. G. B. Russell, p. 184.
30
NORTHWESTERN TRI-QUARTERLY
twenty matrons seated around a long table. Smiles and gentle communicative half twists of shoulder and little puffs of exhaled smoke whirling past neat coiffures expand into a spring sky over 11 Miltonian meadow of "pansies, violets, and asphodels." Watteau shepherdesses flutter and giggle behind thick woolly sheep, displaying a literary whiteness. The shepherdesses are soon joined by pastoral ephebes, who drive gently knockkneed steers with round movements of their arms, emitting melodious exclamations. The two groups mingle and break up into harmonious couples whose sweet laughter melts into that of the matrons, who have again become visible. Youthful waitresses, their graceful curves half-hidden by the stiff linen of their uniforms, are circling the matrons, inserting their maiden slenderness where the heavy line of sitters shows openings. They put down brown, crusty steaks, fluffy mashed potatoes and asparagus in pleasing heaps. Now the forearm of the leading matron reaches for the instruments of civilized eating. It is a bare forearm with pendulous, ladylike fat, and as she reaches, the arm grows in circumference and becomes hard-muscled and black. Truck motors rattle outside, drowning out the noises of lowing, trampling cattle. The black forearm goes up with a sledge hammer and crashes down on the curly, dusty, board-like forehead of the steer, and the steer's eyes look dead, and all his bulk strikes the tiles. with bony knees, shaggy cattle knees, and one splits open, and blood begins to snake over the tiles. The steer lies heavy and unfeeling on his opened knee, he stretches his dazed big head, and his dewlap goes taut. His slimy muzzle touches the tiles below, and the dewlap wrinkles and shrinks and becomes small and human, and it is the leading matron's tiny dewlap. She swings it to the left and to the right and then she holds it straight as she lifts the first lump of squeezed-off, cut-off roasted muscle fibers to her mouth, and as her teeth and lips close over it they are a tiger's jaws closing around the steer's throat. The sparkling fangs
disappear in the fur and come out again reddened but still sparkling, the sunlight plays on them and they blend into one long gleaming butcher's knife. The steer lies motionless and the long blade in a dark hand slits through fur splitting white, hand and knife disappear in a gaping hole, and suddenly the red gusher spurts up in heart rhythm. The rhythm becomes slower, the gusher begins to sink, and finally there is only a trickle; but now the steer lies with buckled legs on a mountainous pile of mashed potatoes overrun with the rivulets of blood from the hole above his chest.
It is night but in the light of huge candles the steer rests on his white hill and shepherds and shepherdesses joining hands with the matrons circle it slowly to the sad piping of a shepherd's flute.
The sun rises, and as the light grows there appear twelve hunters in leather-encased, morallooking legs. They listen to the tale of the matrons. They take their caps off and look up at the steer with horror first and then with deep compassion. The whiteness of the hill changes into a gray bullet-scarred wall; a key-chain rattles, an iron door squeaks, and a tiger steps slowly before the wall. The matrons scream furiously and the hunters with pinched lips do not let him out of their sight while slowly taking the position of a firing squad. The tiger walks to the center of the wall, his head hanging, his shoulder-blades jogging through bristling fur. He faces the hunters and growls while they take aim with military precision. In this moment William Blake appears and stops the executioners with outstretched arms. Hunters, matrons, shepherds and shepherdesses crowd around him as he speaks eagerly to them. One by one the different characters walk over to the tiger. The last one is Blake. He calls and a little lamb appears and stands fearlessly next to the tiger. Blake ties a sign around its neck with an inscription growing larger and larger: I kill young blades of grass and verdant landscapes become deserts under my teeth.
An amateur and spare-time editor, so it appears, makes a good many mistakes. Mine in the last issue of The Tri-QuarterZy were not to notice that an e had been dropped from the title of George E. Spink's poem, which should properly have been printed "Haecceity," and to misname the author of "Norris's Wake." who is James D. Dilts (not George). I'm sorry for these slips.
E.B.H.
Spring, 1962
Since this issue of The Tri-QuarterZy contains stories by two of our undergraduate editors, I should like to make clear that the decision to print the work of student editors is wholly mine, not theirs. The undergraduates whom I invite to serve as editors are students who are known to me as able writers, and the invitation is made with some expectation that they will be contributors to the magazine.
E.B.H.
31
by Herb Comess
YOUNG MAPP'S PROGRESS:
BY LOUISE MIDGLEY ORCUTT
THE TRI-QUARTERlY proposes to print, Irom time to time, a lew pieces 01 fiction that are longer than the usual magazine short story. This is the second story that we have printed by Louise Orcutt, presently a senior in the College 01 liberal Arts and a maior in English.
Miss Orcutt reports that she began writing during her freshman year in high school when she was living on a farm in Accomac, Virginia, and that her returns so for have been a dictionary, two certificates, a hammocle, an American Legion medal, two novels, a gold leey, and, last year, the winning of the very substantial Shuman Award at Northwestern. She has served as secretory for Alpha Lambda Delta (freshman women's honorary society), business manager of Syllabus, house president for Kappa Delta Sorority, council member for the West· minster Fellowship, residence counselor at Willard Hall ("life with forty freshmen is full of surprises"), and for two y�ars as an undergraduate editor of THE TRI· QUARTERLY. 80th her parents are teachers and she plans to enter graduate school, after her graduation in the coming fall quarter, to prepare herself for col· lege teaching. Her home is in River Forest, II/inois.
Photograph
a
journey of Jour miles or so
32
NORTHWESTERN TRI-QUARTERLY
Hecongratulated himself on the fact that his Aunt Hope would never forgive him for stopping at the motel. He would not suffer himself to be confined in her flowered wallpaper, her cat-haircovered lace bedspreads, her oppressing Victorian bedroom pictures. "I will walk with you, talk with you, eat with you, drink tea with you," he thought with Uncle Enoch's words, "but only when invited twice."
The sun was still high when he pulled into the drive of the Midpoint Pines Motel. Here no one knew him, here no one knew even Enoch Mapp. The trade was tourist, the place itself laid in the tallest clump of pines its owner could find in Virginia on the highway south to Florida, the atmosphere comfortably artificial like the world to which Justin would return when he came to leave the Peninsula. Midpoint Pines was a soothing, waning reminder of that other world which made its way blindly through the county, unnoticing and unnoticed, on southern pilgrimages.
"Welcome to Midpoint Pines," drawled a modest voice, "finest in southern hospitality." The owner of the voice sat behind the desk holding a poised fly swatter and eyeing the buzzing speck that had come in with Justin. "Expect you're on a vacation?" Justin nodded. "Escape from the city routine, that's a right smart move. You'll be having dinner, Suh?"
Not an escape, more a return; no, that was foolish=-something apart from either. "I think I'll rest." He accepted the key that was handed him and left the office. Only by forcing his attention to the planting of one foot before the other, he crossed the gravel drive. wondering with the curiosity of a spectator whether he would fall.
A bright-eyed colored boy, dressed in a white coat to please the northern clientele, left his bag on the chair. The boy grinned and flashed white teeth, reminding Justin of another boy
When the boy was gone. he drew the thin curtains to close out as much sun as possible and threw himself across the bed.
"My foolish young Justin," he had reminded himself in the patronizing tone of the elder brother he had never had, "people are disappointed by returns because they concoct colorful memories of what is in reality drab." And so Justin Mapp, who had learned to avoid such painful emotions, had gone about retouching his memories of the farm. He used only black and white film for his mental photographs, labeling them and sorting them onto pages of his Album, putting some far in the back. He did all this with the detached interest in a correct view of reality which he had applied to butterfly collections in the academy and pickled embryonic animals in his work at the university, the objectivity which soberly nodding fellowship committees agreed would make of him a thoroughly capable if uninspired research biologist.
His special technical interest was in the maturation process. He had an ambition-if that was too impassioned a word, then a fancy-to freeze finally the growth of a chicken embryo in a photograph, perhaps a series of photographs, to make the life of the chick stand still-captured, observable, like all nakedness a little absurd.
And then there was the absurd letter from his aunt, full of mysterious words such as "misfortune" and "Enoch's condition" and "Stroke" with a capital, as though it were the Stroke of Fate. Her absurd letter had prompted his journey, her letter and that strange old photograph in his wallet.
The photograph of Enoch Mapp was frayed at the edges and creased through the middle, underlining the eyes. The man's head filled the center of the picture and behind the head were a barn and a strip of tomato field, slightly out of focus. Enoch's eyes were squinting fiercely into the sun; and the right side of his face, turned slightly toward the camera, glistened with perspiration just as it probably had done on the day of his stroke. The picture was the only surviving remembrance from Justin's last summer on the farm in Virginia with his Uncle Enoch. After that year the photograph had traveled in Justin's Bible to the military academy and to such summer camps and ranches as his parents' Connecticut friends approved. Sometime during college, about the second year, the Bible had gone home in a box of useless but unmarketable textbooks to be stored in the attic. The photograph had been creased then and put in a hidden corner of Justin's wallet.
The wall clock mounted above the gaping picture window seemed to have a single luminous hand, creasing it through the middle. The room was black now, except for a few rays of neon from the sign, MIDPOINT. Justin rolled toward the wall, but the blinking light made Enoch Mapp's face seem to grow from the pine knots. He rolled back. On off on off on it had the rhythm of the cracks between the sections of the road and it carried him to questions that he wanted not to ask.
Of course, when he finished his degree his family would take pleasure in it. Pleasure is no decent word, let it be X. X then equalled the sun on his back, picking tomatoes with Henry William, and wouldn't his mother have howled if she'd known he'd picked tomatoes with Henry William, no she would have been very calm but she would have Taken Steps perhaps that was why he was never able to arrange coming back, though there had been no screaming, just silent quarrels with her and with himself, looks with which no one could argue and he had bent to the parental Will and had not come back before it was too late. Tomorrow night he would drive back to the university. On off on He wondered if this were the road to the place where one no longer
Spring, 1962
33
watched the picture but stepped into it. (Impossible impossible where was his sense tonight, had he left it in Connecticut?)
He waved his hand over the blanket. There, everything was in order again, the Album closed. Next event on that schedule he called living, to to sleep, to sleep.
He slept as one grown unable to dream.
II
The farm lay almost four miles from the highway, within sight of the ocean. Perhaps it was the morning sun on the water that he wanted to see as much as the farm, or perhaps, as another part of himself cynically pretended was the whole truth, he could not face his Aunt Hope nor what would remain of his uncle after his stroke. They must have taken Uncle Enoch into town to his sister's house, to be nursed. And so with a shake of his shoulders, behind the wheel of the car, Justin tried to make all of his quarreling selves move in one direction.
The road was teasing him, turning first into a narrow black ribbon that led away from the highway and between the loblolly pines, until it became a dirt strip rutted from the rains, patched with oyster shells and disguised under pine needles. He watched for the old house to appear around every bend, and when at last he turned a curve and saw it there in front of him, he held his breath. Twice as large as his mind had photographed it. Such a bright yellow paint would have looked so tasteless in Connecticut that he'd forgotten it was just that shade, but here with the green trees crowding up to the lawn, with the gray barn behind and the green fields full of blossoming soybeans, a white house would have stuck out like clean fingers on a bean picker. Or it would have been fl�cked with dust before the paint had dried.
He was more annoyed than he wished to be that the place looked so trim. When his aunt had written him of Uncle Enoch's stroke, he had imagined himself charging in to the rescue, arranging to have the grass mowed and the fields harvested, paying stoic calls on what was left of the man he had known and then departing, duty done, and perhaps writing a brief note to his father to tell him how his neglected elder brother was getting on. That had seemed a sensible role, a useful one, that could not be attacked by the side of him which attacked him with every complex of the psychologists, every sin of the theologians, every uncertainty which he could concoct himself-at least it was more sensible than thinking this could be an escape.
His feet followed his eyes around the house, over the fields. The abandoned postal route
stretched through the middle of the field, down to the water. Although no postal rider had taken the route for eighty years, the oyster shell surface lay just below a film of topsoil, waiting to gnaw the plowshare, and so the old road lay unmolested in the middle of the field. His eyes now took this path that he and Henry William, the two of them so like a pair of eyes, had often taken. Many summers met him on the way.
The ocean water at the mouth of Onanick Channel was bewitched, Henry William had told him. It buoyed them up and carried them out a hundred yards into the protected cove behind the sandbar and then they would come ashore, every time a ways up from the mouth. It wasn't work like swimming, it was like being carried in your mother's arms.
A rattle of the porch screen drew his breath in. When he turned he saw the old man, resting one shoulder heavily against the rusting screen and watching him like an animal grown contented with its cage.
Justin hurried to the porch door and stepped in. "Uncle Enoch. Uncle, it's Justy. Remember me?" Hearing the name, the old man stared through him at the postal road, then the eyes followed something up the road and rested with curiosity on Justin. "Uncle, it's Justy. Your nephew. I've come to-to see you, Uncle Enoch."
The old man held out a hand, weakly as though it were a paw. Justy shook it, and when the hand came out again uncertainly, he shook it once more. "Let's sit down, Uncle." Justin waited awkwardly for the old man to let himself into a wicker chair and than sat in the swinging couch across from him. "Well," he said. "It sure has been a long time. How are you, Uncle?" And he answered for the old man, "You look just fine, real well. Well ." he smiled as vigorously as he could, and finally saw an echo of his smile on the old man's face. Justin wished he could feel only a concern or pity or something he could approve of in himself-instead he felt fascinated by the thin-veined hands and the relaxed expression in the staring blue eyes of the face. The eyes drifted from Justin to the trees or to an imaginary person behind him, coming up the postal road. Justin hardly realized that the photograph was of the same face. The old man's soft hair was brushed back, cut short and unevenly like a small boy's. His eyes were opened wide, and where a bone had worked the cheek in and out when his uncle was angry, now there was only the curious, lips-parted expression of a child.
"Who's keeping house, Uncle? Is someone taking care of, well, things? Is Aunt He stopped as the old man waved his left hand and thrust the other angrily into his trouser pocket, in a gesture Justin remembered.
"Hell, naw." The old man seemed looking for other words. "It's he nodded toward the
34
NORTHWESTERN TRI-QUARTERLY
kitchen, inside the porch doorway. "It's her," he said at last, pleased with himself.
Justin pretended to be satisfied with the answer. "That's nice," he said. "I'm glad to hear it." He saw that the old man leaned back in his chair and looked out over the treetops once more. Justin got up, thinking he would look inside, but the old man turned his chair toward him and frowned, so he sat down again.
For a few moments he watched the trees with his uncle. Then he looked again at the postal road, and finally at the fields of soybeans. He scolded himself for not speaking to the old man and he began again. "There aren't any tomatoes or sweet potatoes or he watched the old man's face darken. "But then, the soybeans look good growing, don't they? Nice even rows, hardly a weed. Nobody ever had cleaner fields than you did. Uncle." He broke off, feeling he had addressed a corpse, using the past tense as he so often did of himself. (Justin Mapp, said the elder brother in himself, just what did you expect? Coward. Elder brother was drowning out the little voice that cried duty duty duty and four selves quarrelled with the foolish one that wandered up the postal road. This man had been his uncle or he had been this man's nephew had been had been, this sense of having been at twenty-four was not even tragic, only ludicrous.)
"Mnephew used to," the old man began thickly to this stranger on the couch, "mnephew used to drive the the I
"Tractor?
The old man nodded his head forward intently, "Drive 'er up and down never missed a weed clean fields, drove her up and down ." his eyes counted the trees and watched the postal road again. Justin hoped he would doze off. "He used to drive her clean atoes clean tomatoes
Now they both looked out over the rows of soybeans and saw instead the rows of prize tomato plants, struggling up in the sun, bearing heavy fruit.
"Uncle," he said again. "You remember me, I'm Justy."
"Helloson," mumbled the old man and then looked at him without seeing him. "Did j'no Jus'y ?"
Justin Mapp straightened himself in his chair, angry that his eyes were growing hot for the second time in two days. He was angrier yet when he saw a blur in the doorway.
"Young Mistah Mapp, we been waitin' on ya."
A huge woman held into a faded cotton dress was already leaving the doorway. He followed her into the kitchen, watching the large blue flowers of her dress bloom and close as she walked. Her legs were sunk into her shoes like stout telegraph
Spring, 1962
poles. When he reached the kitchen door, he thought he would ask if he could help.
Instead he reached out and accepted three fish which she handed him. She leaned her head to one side and a broad smile worked its way through a tanned face that could have been cut straight from the soil. "My nephew's son caught 'em up to the channel."
He realized now that he was on trial. In the sink he found a scraper and set to work on the fish.
"Mind you leave the heads," she said. "It flavors 'em."
Gutting the fish, he remembered he hadn't eaten since noon the day before. The smell went to his head and the look of their glassy eyes made him lean against the sink slightly. "I sure do appreciate your taking care of him," he said as he glared at the staring fish. "I was afraid he'd have to be in town, you know, at my aunt's. It's good for him to be here on his own place."
"Mind you leave the heads on," she said again.
"My aunt only wrote two weeks ago. How long ago did, well, when exactly was his stroke?" He cut deliberately, wondering what good reason there was for his shaking, he who had dissected so many specimens.
"Oh, don't expect as how she wrote till she hear'd about the will." She took the fish from his hands and plopped them into the crackling pan. "Ain't that something, now, a stove you just turn the handle and watch. Sizzle, sizzle, jump lil' fish!"
"How long
"It were a hot one, 'last August. Sizzle, sizzle. Ooh, I most melted away, I did. Right warm and damp, we had a lot of damp rot in the potatoes and my nephew come up to help dig out the bad plants. You could have served the sun on a plate for a fried egg, if you could have found it in all that mess of haze."
Justin began rinsing his hands. "How long ago
"Running water, too, now ain't that somethin'. Running water and a real stove to heat it on. Hee, I do enjoy myself!"
"How long ago Justin began again.
"Why, last August, boy. Just dropped over in the field, he did, and the tractor running up the rows, wrecking everything. My nephew come up to help me clean out the damp rot, don't you know; and there he was. Oh me. Just like Mr. Betsey two years ago. Work harder than the devil. An' oh he missed you, he did. Used to talk about you all the time, he did."
He saw her watching him closely. "I've been at the university for quite a while, and I can't leave my work very well. In fact I've only got two days off as it is." And then the whole of its struck him. "Last August, last August. Why didn't some-
35
body tell me?" He realized when he'd said it, there was nothing to tell then. "Isn't there anything I can do?" he heard himself whisper. "Isn't there anything I can do, Mrs
"Mrs. Betsey. Child, don't you listen to nothing?" She grinned again
"Isn't there anything He was nearly shouting.
"Go wash up your face and take off that pretty jacket 'fore you spill on it," she said. "Young Mistah Mapp, a woman'd think you was going to church." He turned to leave the room. "And talk to your uncle," she called. She watched him search the bottom of his pockets for something to say. Her smile faded and came again, softer, like a fresh plowed furrow. "Tell him what you done since he saw you last, and if you get through 'fore things is fixed, tell him over. It won't make him no never mind."
He walked out to the porch.
"Uncle Enoch," he began, "I thought you might like to hear about what I've been doing." He waited for a nod and then went on without it. "Anyway, I finished college-you remember that beautiful book you sent me when I graduated, I sure did like that, and I started work at the university. Research. You'll never guess what I'm doing research on, Uncle." He hoped for a look of interest, and finally decided to watch the trees that his uncle was watching. "I'm working with emb with chickens, Uncle. Only they aren't beautiful Reds like the ones you had in the barn coop. You remember how we chased them the afternoon they got loose, how we finally found the old hen way back up the telegraph cut?" He thought there was a flicker of smile.
Mrs. Betsey came then with a round metal tray that looked like a painted metal barrel top. It had poinsettias on it, and green trim. She placed the plates around the small table and pushed the old man's chair up to it. "There you is," she announced. "You gotta try this mess of fish. Your nephew Justy caught 'em for you this morning," she said, winking at Justin. The old man smiled and picked up his fork.
They got through the meal by Mrs. Betsey's grace. She guided the old man's fork and asked Justin questions, which the old man began to take an interest in. Justin was willing to talk, it kept him from seeing the glassy eye of the fish on his plate and from thinking about the way his stomach felt.
"What you doing for a living now, Mistah Mapp?"
"Well, I'm a graduate assistant at the university. I'm in the biology department."
"Biology. That ain't what our potatoes got, but pretty near it. Oh, it was terrible damp weather and they got all moulded on the leaves. Is it awful
damp where you is? You don't look terrible healthy youself."
"No, not so damp. You see, biology is a subject like geometry or well
"Had a brother onc't got all through high school. He was right good at geometry. Drew me little pictures on my cake frosting."
"I study plants and animals, chickens for instance.
"Now I got a hen," she said lifting another bite into the old man's mouth, "goes moping about the yard like a girl wants to be took dancing."
"I'm afraid I don't know much about that," he said. The fish eye looked accusingly out of the plate. His head wanted something to rest on. "I just study little chicks."
"Just hatched?"
"Well, just before they're hatched."
She had the good grace to change the subject. "They pay you good?"
"Not so very good."
"Got a gal yet?" She winked at him.
"No, not yet. Not much time for that."
"What you doing if you ain't got a gal?"
"Well, I take pictures sometimes. The university pays for pictures of the lab to use in the alumni magazine."
Her nod was most polite.
When the meal was finally over, she took the old man for his nap. The motionless warm air and the swaying of the couch had nearly put him to sleep while she was gone. He was in the middle of the tomato field, bending over the row across from Henry William, when he saw her feet across from him. He straightened up. "I can't stay but a day," he started. "1 just came to see if I could help, to be sure well, 1 thought Aunt Hope would be taking care of him. 1 thought it had only just happened, you see." What he was saying sounded miserable to one of himselves, but the others said, so you've finally been honest enough to admit you've had enough of this nonsense. He saw her nodding and felt she wasn't grinning, even inside, now.
"It would be right nice if you could stay a while," she said. "It won't be such a long while, you know, and then you can get back to whatever you want to get back to. She pulled her sagging body up suddenly and tugged at her dress. "Lord, boy. Don't be so glum about it, we don't anybody live for ever. But if you could stay a spell."
He wanted to speak, he began to say that he had to get back to his experiments and that there was nothing he could do-but that sounded like his parents-that with all his talking to himself and his Album he hadn't been ready for this because he'd forgotten about leaving himself here ten years ago, that what he was looking for, yes, he had come here looking for something, stupid as it was, and what it was was gone in his uncle's
36
NORTHWESTERN TRI-QUARTERLY
face and he didn't know where else, good God, there wasn't any place to look for it, and that if all this sounded like selfish talk when you'd bC(,11 told the uncle who was most of the parents in your life was going to die, he couldn't help it, because that was how he was-selfish and protected with riflery and biology and all the other things he'd learned to protect himself, from well, maybe from this but he said none of this, and only bit his lip hard, like a child, and put his head between his knees to keep from falling over. When he felt her arm around him, huge and soft, he did not move, but stared silently at the floor, tasting salt in his mouth and feeling ashamed of his tears.
He spent the afternoon silently on the porch, thinking not of himselves, as he usually did, but of pine trees and plowing. "Wear an old hat when you go aplowing," Henry William had warned him with round, earnest eyes. "Oh, you'll see why, Mista'h Mapp, you'll see." And that serious laugh that showed his white teeth. How those gulls gathered, when the two of them ran the tractor up the field. Before they could get once around with the plow, he learning to drive and Henry William standing on the hitching bar of the tractor, hanging onto the back of his jacket, they saw two hundred gulls beating their wings and squawking over their heads, some soft gray, some masked with black. When they had come full circle around the huge field and begun plowing the next furrow, laying it softly beside the first one, Justin watched these ermine kings collect grubs in the fresh earth. He was afraid the tractor tires would catch them, but as he reached them they flew up from under the tractor, circling about the human heads, squawking and leaving white droppings on his hat. "Eat hearty, Mistah Gull, Suh! See, I told you you'd see why you wear a hat, Mistah Mapp." It was awful, but with Henry William he could laugh.
They ate supper quietly, too, with the old man asking him in half belief, "Did you know mnephew?" After supper he noticed without protesting that Mrs. Betsey was carrying his suitcase upstairs. He sat on the couch until she came down and said, "Your bed's all tucked up, young Mistah Mapp."
He went then up the creaking stairs, telling himself there was no reason to stay. The paint of the stairbacks was peeling and one of the steps was cracked, the old wood worn. He caught himself estimating the cost of enamel and knew he was staying until something broken and worn away had been made new.
The room was exactly the same: the quilt on the bed was his; the two old bookcases, one of glass and one of oak, were waiting. He sat on the window sill for a few moments, looking at the black line of the tree tops and then up at the sky, where fragile clouds were blowing, covering
Spring, 1962
the moon in thin haze. (It will rain, Uncle. Best damn weather man in the county, son. And we can use it, Uncle. We can use it, Justy.) He turned slowly from the window and got ready for bed, putting on his uncle's pajamas, which Mrs. Betsey had left on the opened bed covers.
He was afraid that tonight he might be able to dream, but his mind poured into the dark, through an invisible crack, into an empty night. Slowly, in the lightening morning, he listened while a mocking bird poured notes into the cup which Justin held in the sleep-stiffened fingers of his mind. When the notes ceased, he dumped them like coffee grounds and went back to sleep.
III
Since it was now mid-morning of the second day, and Mrs. Betsey had already answered two early phone calls from Aunt Hope-the first to know if he had arrived, the second to inquire if he were up yet, he resolved to pay his respects (the financial expression seemed appropriate) before his aunt "Took Steps." Above all, he did not want her to come out to the farm to fetch him. So he set out with Mrs. Betsey's careful directions"up the neck and left a piece, by the drygoods store and past the corner, you can't miss such a big white 'house"-and thus he arrived in his aunt's parlor by eleven, but only when invited twice.
Paintings of pale, manly children gathered familially about a brave sad-eyed dog, or a grave sad-eyed mother, scarred the living room walls. The threadbare rugs suited the black horsehaircovered sofa and the heavy drapes were successful in barring the sunlight. Aunt Hope, in a starched green blouse buttoned at the throat, looking cold even late this July morning, came silently from the edge of the rug onto the polished floor and kissed him on the cheek with a smile that merely straightened her lips. As the tea was not yet warm, she led him to the sun porch, which was filled with a smell of earth unlike the rich smell of the fields. Justin saw that she expected him to t-ake a warm biological interest in her collection of cacti.
"Opuntia Chihuhuensis," she remarked with casual pride.
Justin saw a blue-gray bit of rubber with long brown spines. "Ah yes, the glochids are handsome," he said, sifting through mental pages of forgotten and ignored biology.
"Thankyou, dear."
He wondered how soon he could politely leave the steaming porch.
"Sclerocactus Polyancistrus," she said. He saw a mass of spines with nothing but a tiny sugges-
37
tion of green core suggesting it was alive. He imagined it briefly as the corpse of a self-protecting old maid.
"The beauty of the species," said his aunt, "lies in the arrangement of the spines. The patterns are numerous, as I'm sure you know, dear. Here is another variety." She waved to a narrow trough farther back on the porch.
"They bloom so seldom," he said, looking for a plant near the doorway to study. He felt himself prickling with the heat. "I imagine it's a great thrill to you when they bloom."
And then his eye was caught by a pink flower that seemed delicately out of place. The fragile flower was only partially opened, brilliant, fresh, touched with sticky dew. She saw his interest and came to it, standing proudly, coldly, possessively near it as she might have with her children. Justin stared again at the blossom, as though afraid to believe. "Echinocereus Reichenbachi. They do flower so seldom, you know."
He would have touched it as a friend, but she reminded him that their tea was waiting.
Back in the parlor, on the prickly horsehair couch cover, sipping lukewarm tea, Aunt Hope thought good to ask him a few questions.
"Enoch is about the same, I imagine?"
"Mrs. Betsey has taken good care of him, you needn't worry." He calculated. "It was really very wise of you to leave him on his own place." The calculation was successful; she nodded in trapped agreement.
"Well, young man," she said at last, "it certainly has been a long time since I've seen you." Her eyes, with the glitter of maiden aunts, passed judgment on him. Now hers was the winning calculation, but the wheel would turn' again He set down his cup and took a breath with which to explain himself. "Do be careful where you put that, Justin. It leaves such marks on the furniture." He took the cup from the small varnished table and looked for a saucer. There was none.
"I've been so busy the last few years "Nonsense."
that I couldn't really leave. I'm only here for a short time as it is. I thought I'd see if I could do anything ."
"It seems," she said with the unkindest of smiles, "he is happier with the Betsey woman than he would be with either of us.
Justin stared across the room at a pitcher of milk glass, painted with soft pink blossoms, which was too beautiful to fit the room.
"I don't suppose she has mentioned the will to you."
The disinterested tone of her words startled him from his admiration of the pitcher. He waited for her to go on, watching a glow behind her rouged cheeks which was not the pink of the blossoms.
"Don't let her get you into a corner, dear! You don't owe her '8 thing."
"Owe he said and waited for more.
"I haven't seen the will, you understand. But Enoch saw fit to have Mr. Betsey witness it, and if his wife didn't tell you about it, well, you're the only one that hasn't been told."
The words sounded emptier than his tea cup. Broken pieces of something drifted apart and he tried to bring them together until he saw his tea cup sitting on his knee and the room going slowly around it. "Told what?"
"That was three years ago," said his aunt. "I suppose we have to admit he was as much in his right mind as he ever was."
"He left me something," said Justin uncomfortably.
"Something? Everything."
He looked at his aunt now. Her ankles were twisted tightly against each other, and the leather in the toes of her shoes worked in and out, in a way he had seen the way he had seen the jaw bone of his uncle working the cheek in and out, in and out. He was profoundly amused, sadly amused.
"That time is a long way off," he lied.
"We are intelligent people," said his aunt. "We know that isn't so. We must face up to the tragic truths of life. We must prepare
"Auntie," he said to hurry things. "I can't be running a farm at long distance from Connecticut. Uncle Enoch must have known that. But I wouldn't want to sell his farm," and now that he thought of it perhaps that was why his uncle had chosen him for his heir, "so what do you advise?" He hoped he sounded collected, though he felt his eyes resting on the painted blossoms. They were carefully detailed at the tips, blooming confidently into rich color at the fullest part of the pitcher.
"I do know a man who'd rent it, if you're not quarrelsome with him about the amount. Or if you wish to just turn things over to me, when you're away, of course, dear, I'd work something out for you.
"I'm sure it will work out." He got up, forgetting the empty tea cup. It dropped onto the rug, rolled sideways but did not break. He replaced it on the table. This time his aunt did not correct him.
He remembered the pitcher now. There was an old tea set which had belonged in Justin's greatgrandfather's home, a tea set of softly painted milkglass cups and this pitcher, which Uncle Enoch, as the eldest of the three children in his generation, had owned.
"Company china," he said. "That's what Uncle Enoch used to call it, isn't it?"
The twisted ankles of Aunt Hope untwisted and she stood. "I use it to water the cacti, dear."
38
NORTH WESTERN TRI-QUARTERLY
He hated her violently, feeling his hand rismg, But then he looked at her again as she watched him with a cold, suspicious detachment. Now he hated her with the chilling exasperation in which one hates a mirror.
"The tea was refreshing," he said. "But I think I ought to get back now. Thank you so much."
"But you haven't said a word to me about your embryo experiments. And I'm so interested."
"Another day," he said and then heard his words. So he had already decided to stay another day
He found the old man asleep in the afternoon sun on the porch, mouth round and empty, head nodding. And so he found his camera in the trunk of the car and started walking on the road between the field and the woods, amusing himself at first by setting up the tripod to take close-ups of the fragile white soy bean blossoms. The breeze would disappear until he had them focused and then they would begin to bend and quiver, making him wait for their pleasure. A squirrel had stopped his nut hunting to watch, reminding Justin of a long tramp through the brush which he and Henry William made one day. They were hunting for a squirrel then, to prove themselves with Henry William's .22, but the word had gotten around and the squirrels were gone. Now, when Justin raised his camera, the squirrel posed and eyed him, waited for the click. Then he ran behind a log at the edge of the woods. When Justin reached the log, there was nothing but the flash of a red tail on a nearby tree.
Justin hunted in earnest now, snapping here where the pattern of light on the floor of the woods attracted him, there where a lizard sat calmly on a branch 'and trusted his spotted coat to blend into the orange patches on the pine bark. Under a stone he found four beetles and a sluggish worm. He had reached for the largest of the beetles as a specimen, when realizing what he was doing he pulled back his hand and rolled the stone back into place.
In the August sun of ten years ago, when the jelly fish took over the cove, he and Henry William had taken long walks up the beach into the marsh. How they laughed at the thousands of tiny sand crabs that suddenly came out from between their toes. "They won't bite, Henry William. See, I'm not scared! The gritty mud at the marsh edge was alive with them, scampering sideways down to the water. Down each other's backs they stuck them, and Justin had kept the one he found in his pocket when he undressed that night. He had pickled it in a small bottIe, to show his parents when he went home, only to discover it did not even remind him of the silly little crabs on the marsh edge. But somehow that lack of resemblance turned into a "desirable factor" and he found that many specimens of life, like
Spring, 1962
ARTHROPODA
Decapoda Emirita (Hippa)
common name: Sand Crab were best known in bottles, pickled and labeled. His parents had sent him to camp the next year. The sun was high, the birds were silent. He sat on the stone awhile, smelling the warm pine, and then brushed the ants from his shoes and walked.
In a field beyond his uncle's farm he watched potato pickers. A big Negro was lording it on the seat of the tractor, watching the pickers and turning over the hills with a deep-set plow. Ten pickers followed slowly behind the tractor, dropping farther from it all the time. They hunted in the mounds of earth and pulled out the potatoes, throwing them into burlap sacks. Bending low, then straightening into a half-way bend, they made a rhythmic pattern of red bandannas and blue or khaki work shirts. Nearby, three pickers leaned against the trunk, where empty sacks were piled. They smoked and laughed at each other, tossing phrases he could catch no word of. He felt a deeply ridiculous envy of potato pickers, who knew without question that it was theirs to sack potatoes.
Mrs. Betsey was leaning over the sink, cutting up beans and laughing to herself, when he came in. "Hee, hee," she said, shaking her blue cotton flowers, "now most folks go for a walk when they go walking, but you carry a hunting bag."
"That's my camera case. I use it for specimens too."
"Looks like a hunting bag to me." She sliced more beans and didn't look at the camera he was holding out to show her. "What you hunting?"
He showed her the picture. "It doesn't look much like him now, does it?" he said.
"He were a handsome one, weren't he?" He felt she was being polite.
I've remembered him like this for so long that now I'm not sure whether it's he or the picture I remember.
"Well, it's a fair likeness." She read his frown. "Course, young Mistah Mapp, who ever heard of a man looking one way for a whole day, let alone all those years."
And so he put the camera and the photograph away and stuffed his hunting bag in the closet.
He spent an evening of evenings in his old room. There had been too many books on anatomy and physiological chemistry and maturation in embryonic cells since those soft summer nights, like this one, when the land breeze blew back the yellowed, papery old curtains and cooled the perspiration on his neck as he sat before the glass doors of the book case, greedily reading the titles. The sun of the day and the warm air of the evening had so far turned his head that he could re-
39
read The Talisman that evening without the slightest embarrassment at himself. He thanked Sir Walter, best knight of them all, for the glory of Saladin and of the great-hearted Crusader Richard in this world of unabashed coincidences. It was nearly midnight when he finished, but he could not end his reading there. He moved his brown leather cushion across the floor to the smooth oak cabinet of his uncle's books. The glass one had been his own, filled by his uncle with the great romances, from Sinbad to Arthur. But the oak cabinet he had never opened, it had always been "not yet" when he asked. And so he opened it now with the same excitement he had felt opening the glass years ago. He could not help wondering of the photograph and of the defiant eyes.
The shelf was trim as the fields had been when Enoch Mapp had been there. The books were old: many of the leather bindings were cracked and powdering with age. They were ordered, backs forming a perfect line across the shelves of the book case. A whole shelf of agricultural books, then a forbidding row of theology texts. That surprised Justin. The third shelf held a full set of Dickens and most of Scott, with spaces the precise size of the volumes of Scott which had been moved to Justin's case. The fourth shelf was the most motley-paper pamphlets yellowed with age and then an assorted line of books, short and tall. Some were old student editions, of cheap hard black bindings on which the titles could no longer be seen. The visible ones were alphabetical-Darwin, Hardy, Hausman, Huxley, Renan. It was on this shelf that one book sat deeper than its neighbors, turned backwards so that its pages showed instead of the binding.
Justin pulled the book delicately from the shelf. Its red leather binding dropped crumbs on the floor and left a stain on his hands. He turned the stiff pages, starched and scorched with time, until he found the title page. Pilgrim's Progress. He laughed at his expectations, but he did not put it back-instead he moved his lamp to the open window and placed his cushion there. He sat there in the breeze, reading farther and farther into the night, drawn along by the moralistic capitals that marched across the pages, laughing at Old Bunyan in his dank prison and too at Young Mapp, sitting in a damp draft
Then Prudence thought good to ask him a few questions, and desired his answer to them. Prudence. Do you not think sometimes of the country from whence you came? Christian. Yea, but with much shame and detestation. Truly, if I had been mindful of that country from whence I came out, I might have had the opportunity to have returned; but now I desire a better country Prudence. Do you not yet bear away with you some of the things that you were conversant withal? Christian. Yes, but greatly against my will; especially my inward and carnal cogitations
The pages were blurring, but he continued to wave his hand and rant in a whisper for the audience of his five selves:
Hope. I do believe, as you say, that fear tends much to men's Good, to make them right at their beginning to go on pilgrimage
He saw a face then, of old John Bunyan or of Enoch Mapp, bending fiercely the pages, lighting the night with a small candle, a small bulb, by which to read, to wonder in all these books, was there one man fit to laugh at the others?
Hope. Well said; I believe you have said the truth. Are we now almost got past the Enchanted Ground? Christian. Why? are you weary of this discourse? Hope. No, verily, but that I would know where we are.
Christian. We have not now above two miles further to go thereon. But let us return to our matter
Justin was a waterfall of print, sliding before the eyes. Here he was on the desert, seeking Saladin, driving the camel on on off on off on His strong hands gripped leather reins with the courage of one who knows whom he seeks and what general he serves. Excelsior! There lay the oasis just ahead, with its blinking neon sign. There waved the loblolly pines in the cool damp evening air of the desert. There lay the contented camels that stared at him like wise squirrels. Saladin was shaking his lance, a great brown thorn of a weapon, a glochid that might impale you. And Suh Justin, with all the dignity and the drooping-shouldered superiority of the bearer of the white man's burden, slid with care from his hiccoughing camel. He noticed that the Saladin wore a great blue flowered sash, cut of the most fine spun cotton feed bags. Now Justin saw himself walking toward the Saladin, sword in hand. "I am charged by Richard Coeur de Lion," he began, wondering dimly what speech he was about to utter. Saladin saluted him with a tea cup and muttered bitterly, "Do you not think sometimes of the country from whence you came?" Justin, unmoved by the seductive land breeze, raised his weapon and continued, "To challenge you to single combat to the death." "Nonsense," said Saladin. "And be careful where you put that thing, it does scratch the furniture so." Now Saladin moved closer, and Justin could see that he was dressed in green from beard to sandal, his starched shirt buttoned at the throat, tightly. Justin raised the sword which the desert air was melting, set it for fS and 1/50, and with the deadly click the sword and the dread enemy melted away.
Henry William's untroubled laugh echoed in the desert, sweeping away the studious camels. Justin woke himself with his laughing.
There was the face in front of him, with stubborn eyes, shaking him. It was a woman's face, he finally realized, Mrs. Betsey's face.
40
NORTHWESTERN TRI-QUARTERLY
He's gone, Justin heard. Then he was awake.
"He just went in his sleep," she was saying. He looked at her closely-she wasn't crying, but her voice was dry and low. "I thought I heard crying, but when I went in the room it was just too quiet. He's gone and left."
Justin did not answer. He put aside the book in his lap and got up.
The bare bulb of the wall light by the door made shadows in the covers and on the face. The old man's skin matched the yellowed wallpaper, with its fine rose flowers almost faded away and its branching cracks and peelings. The head faced the window with staring eyes.
Justin was terrified of himself, hoping he would not see only a cadaver. He cursed himself for wondering only about himself, and then cursed his curse. He tried to think, the poor old fellow, who was so good to me years ago, has his rest. He tried to think it, but he was suddenly glad that he didn't really think any such thing. He stopped thinking for at least two minutes and looked at the old man and then the window, from which the postal road was barely visible in the before dawn shadows. He suddenly wondered how long it had been since he had not thought about himself and himselves, how long since he had just thought about nothing, which was the next best thing to something other than yourself, just nothing. Or about death, that was almost like thinking about nothing. It rested him more than the early morning breeze. All quarrels were quiet, even the birds outside were unready to peep the first note.
The magic was short. Growing light made the starchy face repulsive. Custom took its place in Justin's mind, and some unworded peace with the old man gave way to worded pity. He looked again at Mrs. Betsey and began wondering again what she had wanted from the old man. He looked again at himself, knowing there was something he had wanted from Uncle Enoch, something for himself. If hers was money or a place to live or something useful to do and if his was something he hunted for himself, an inheritance that wasn't an inheritance in a paper will, then who was to judge Again the magic passed and he blamed her fretfully for not crying, just a little. He felt warm tears in his eyes and had congratulated himself before he realized they were selfish, showy tears. He blamed her anyway, and walked to the corpse.
The eyes were still staring out the window. Justin reached down, righteously and dutifully, to close them and to cover them with the sheet. His hand was nearly touching them, nearly shadowing them from the light of the window, when he heard the low words of Mrs. Betsey.
"Don't you dare."
They understood each other.
Spring, 1962
"Keeping watch" would have been in order, but it seemed indecent to watch a body nude of life, and so they drank tea on the porch and wordlessly watched the sun rise no redder than usual.
IV
The morning of this third day was aging quickly when he made the inevitable phone call. Aunt Hope appeared with the speed of a grubhunting gull, her gray dress and her concerned sadness looking bought and hung in the closet for the occasion. Her kiss froze his cheek.
At the door of the room he waited, leaning one elbow on the molding, while she paid her respects. He wanted to return her entertainment and shout, "Homo Sapiens. They bloom so seldom, you know." She was being so correct.
"Really, Justin," she said with quiet piety as she pulled the sheet over the eyes that stared at the postal road. "I can see it's a good thing I'm here to take care of things."
They went downstairs and sipped the tea that Mrs. Betsey poured with cautious tips of the pot and served with cold furrowed looks that caught Justin's eyes and escaped Miss Mapp's entirely.
"I have such a nice spot picked out," Aunt Hope told him consolingly.
"Spot?"
"In the churchyard. Near the Parks'. Quite respectable. Large enough"-she sipped in resignation-"for me to lie with him, when the time comes."
"Hmm."
"It's only a question of the papers. I've already talked to the sexton." She waited for his nod, which did not come. "Of course, you should sign
"I?"
She drew herself up, injured. "I surely thought, Justin, that you would take care of the arrangements out of Enoch's estate. At least, I certainly thought that was how you would have wanted it."
"Naturally," he said. "I'll take care of everything."
"You onLy need sign the papers."
This time he nodded.
"Perhaps this afternoon?" She tried to sound unconcerned.
Mrs. Betsey refilled the tea cup, carefully bringing the liquid to a quivering dome just above the edge of the cup. It could not be picked up.
"This afternoon," said Justin.
Aunt Hope rose to leave. "The best part is the shade. Such a nice wide tree, keeps the sun off the grass all day long. Such a cool, comfortable place. Just as he would have wanted
41
Would have wanted, would have wanted. "He always wanted," said Justin, "to be in the sun."
She wilted into her starched collar. "Justin!" Her face grew puffy and her breath short. "At a time like this."
So she was getting from Enoch, even now, what she had always wanted, the role of martyr. She was glad, he realized, that he had inherited the property, and she was glad he had insulted her efforts to take care of poor old Enoch's body now that no one else seemed to care about him. She was glad to play the suffering sister, she who had never played the loving one. It was a better part. So they each wanted something for themselves, and wanted with it to think themselves unselfish. Hurray for Henry William. Even the memory of him might teach him to laugh at himself.
"You know best," he said. "I'll come this afternoon to sign the papers." She did not turn to acknowledge his promise.
The spring of the screen door whined. The frame slammed and rattled. And Mrs. Betsey, too,
was by the porch door, about to leave with a cardboard box. He came from behind her and pulled it away.
"What you doing?" she said crossly.
"Unpacking." He pulled out a pair of worn sandals, a small bunch of newspaper that guarded a garden pot of fuzzbuds, and a battered frying pan.
"Those be mine!" She tested him, "Young Mistah Mapp."
"Just what gives you the right to leave when you know I'd starve on my own cooking. It isn't Christian.'
He pulled the four milkglass tea cups with soft pink blossoms from the bottom of the box.
"Those be mine." They both waited.
"They're very pretty," he said. "Shall we have tea in them sometimes, when I've come in from plowing?"
She tilted her head and grinned, then ordered like the mother he had never had, "Mind you wear a hat aplowing, Justin Mapp."
Marcia Masters (Mrs. William A. Schmid) is a poet and the daughter of a poet- Edgar Lee Masters. She has received several awards for her poetry, published in "The Saturday Review of Literature" and "Poetry Magazine," and has served as a trustee of "Poetry Magazine." She lives in Kenilworth. At Northwestern she studied under John Crowe Ransom.
One Evening at Mrs. William Vaughan Moody's
Father stayed at home the night we went to Mrs. Moody's-
Because he did not like her politics; And so, shivering with rain and loneliness, We hurried down the streets of brownstone mansions, Past the breathless windows, squinting like owls From out their velvet curtains.
But Mrs. Moody's house on Groveland Looked warm and tempting; And when we pushed the bellThe great door opened onto Clocks, tiptapping.
Stamping our coats off, We shook our curls in place upon our fresh lace collars, And curtsied to Mrs. Moody Who led us up the stairway Round a landing banked with fern, Past many doors, and flickering candlesticks, To the quiet of her room, Not made for robes, or lace, or uncapped scents; The ceiling, higher than the trees outside, Stared down, a long ways off, upon a flowering silver brush and comb.
When we carne down, we raced up to the huge square mattress
That dangled from above on copper chains; We jumped on it, and pushed, and floated, Kicking our patent leathers as we would kick at flames.
And then we saw the poetsCountryfuls of poets: Some had the rumpled strength of shepherds With voices tousled by the wind; Others, shy, and slim, were listening to the fireRed and sapphire coals cupped in an old iron basket That matched the fences down the street.
Women, dressed in smoky colors, Mysterious as Chinese lanterns, Held cigarettes in long jet holders, Ivory, or amber.
And feasts went past us, stopped, went past again, Borne through the air by Hindu servants, Turbaned with golden lamplight, and treading barefoot, Their arms curved up, shapely as urns,And bearing trays, laden with curried dishes, Saffron chickens, kumquats deep in syrup; Chocolates frilled with white narcissi, Or bluebells sprouting leaves of green.
Around the firelight, orange and purple mingled: Elephant tusks lay on tables drowsed in Paisley; A samovar that almost puffed away a drapery Sculptured a beggar out of steamThat came to life, and hobbled off A well-fed figure.
Spinsters with dry-wheat bosoms, And rings of garnet or lapis-lazuli, Circled by prairie poets, Exchanging proclamations.
And then Tagore took us aside To hear the seashells of his poems.
And when we left, a few small cakes came with us, And a fan whose life was almost gone; We stepped out' to the street Where the raindrops, like a crowd of urchins, Were playing jacks on Mrs. Moody's steps.
Marcia Masters.
42
NORTHWESTERN TRI-QUARTERLY
JoAnna Sympson is a junior in the College 01 Liberal Arts. She was born in Kansas, and (her lather was in the U.S. Air Force) has lived in Florida, Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas, the Panama Canal Zone, and South Dakota. For the past three summers she has worked as a surgical and obstetrical technician at the Sioux Valley Hospital in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
VARIATION OF A THEME
The night battered itself against the windows, trying desperately to come in, but the artificial light from the lamp beside the bed stubbornly refused it admittance. Hester was reading and waiting, trying to be patient, when a pain seared through her abdomen, continuing around and down her back. She looked at the clock on the bedstand and fumbled for the buzzer pinned to the pillowcase. Her fingers pushed the center in and a nurse came quickly into the room.
"They're three minutes apart now and last about 45 seconds," Hester reported quietly.
The nurse checked her, saying she had dilated four to five centimeters and was doing just fine. They'd fix a table for her and notify the doctor of her progress. And then she left.
Hester thought the nurse too efficient and matter-of-fact. She hadn't even bothered to ask how she was feeling, or if she needed anything. She wouldn't have minded the nurses' blunt behavior if they had been busy but Hester could see that she was the only one in the labor rooms at the time. It made her angry to think that they might not care what happened to her and the baby. After all, wasn't she just as important as any other woman who was getting ready to deliver?
She lay quietly feeling the life within her, mysterious, frightening. She knew that heaviness would never leave her body. Reaching out she switched off the light by the bed and felt the warm dark blind her panic and make her more acutely aware of fear - the fear of being alone. She turned over on her side, her face towards the window, feeling as she did so the wet fluid between her legs. Stars were making themselves known to her through the dark, immediately becoming her friends, and suddenly she found herself crying, indulging in what she called at times self-pity.
Suddenly she felt a hand gripping her shoulder and she turned to face whoever it was.
"How are you doing, Hester?"
Everyone at the hospital called her by her first name, Hester. No last name, Miss, or Mrs., just
Spring, 1962
By [oAnna Sympson
Hester. "Fine, Doctor," she replied, "I'm fine."
"Well, I thought I'd better come down and see how you were getting along. It won't be too much longer now," he added gently. "I thought I heard you crying. Do you want me to call the welfare worker? Which one was handling your case?"
"Mrs. Bennet, but please, I don't want anyone."
"Are you sure?"
"I'm very sure."
"Well, try some of those exercises I showed you. They'll make it easier when the time comes."
He left, turning out the lights before he stepped out of the room, and she was alone in warm dark once again. It was natural for her to be alone, and especially now of all times. She remembered a time when she was much younger and loved to climb trees. Sometimes in the afternoon after school she would take a sketching pad attached to a clipboard, hang it around her neck, put some pencils in her teeth, and climb an old scrub oak tree in a grove of trees behind their house. It gave her freedom, a different perspective, and she could see the bay from the limb, splashing itself on a white sand beach she could not see. One time she hadn't heard her mother's call and had lost all sense of time until the deepened dark of shadows and changing sky had made her aware of the lateness; and she remembered how concerned her mother had been and how relieved to find she was all right. Her mother had always worried about her. Odd, but now she was worried about her mother. Things change and people change: nothing, nothing is permanent. Hester knew her parents had wanted to be with her, but somehow she wished to spare them at this time. They never could quite understand why or when she wanted to be alone and now she was alone, terribly, frighteningly alone.
Another pain brought her thoughts back t o the immediate situation. It was unlike the others, more demanding in its hardness, and again she fumbled for the buzzer, perspiration dripping from her forehead.
They said it was air-conditioned in the delivery
43
rooms but Hester was past feeling hot or cold. All she was aware of was the heaviness in her body, fighting itself lower and lower. The huge overhead light rayed heat downwards to her body. Her feet had been pushed upwards into stirrups, a most undignified position. What if he could see her now? And she laughed aloud privately to herself but the others in the room heard it.
"Here, dear, take a deep breath of this."
Hester shook her head. "No, not yet. I don't need any yet.
Somehow, she thought, they managed to rob it of all its beauty and significance. The bright lights of a stage, her position exposing her parts, and the ritualistic dress of the doctor, seemed too unreal, unnatural, holding back the life within her which was straining to come out to make itself heard.
"Give her some cyclo with the next pain," the doctor said to the anesthetist. "Hester, with the next pain I want you to push down. Grip those bars by your side and pull on them like you're rowing a boat. Will you do that for me?"
Hester nodded. "Now," she said to the anesthetist and a mask was placed over her face. She could feel herself bearing down hard.
"It's all right, Hester. The pain's gone. I don't want you to wear yourself out." The doctor turned to the young intern by his side. "Check her for a ROA or LOA position. Well, what is it?"
"I can't tell, doctor, it's rotating."
'Can you feel the frontella then?"
"I'm not sure," came the hesitant reply.
"Are you sure you're in the right place? Wake up, man," and the doctor gave an exasperated sigh.
"Hester, with this next pain I'm going to inject something like novocaine and make a small cut. That's what we call an episiotomy." At least the doctor is patient with me, Hester thought to herself. Her eyes grew round and she could feel her protruding belly covered with green sheets grow tight.
"Come on, dear, take a deep breath. That's it."
Hester breathed the sweet-smelling gas gratefully and felt herself relax. It was a hard feeling, painful, but yet so wonderful she wanted to laugh and cry. Nine months of carrying part of him inside of her would almost be over and it would be a part of him which she would never let go of. She knew now what her mother had meant when they had talked before she left to go to the home. Her parents had been understanding and she was grateful. They had even wanted her to stay in their home town to have her baby but somehow she couldn't put them through that. She had felt secure and protected in their love, but she had to go away. It was a curious kind of shame she felt, mingled with pride. She had
loved him, and knowing this she smiled from within herself.
"Ah, the head's on the peroneum now." The doctor's voice brought her turned thoughts back to the place and time she was experiencing now. "Well, Hester, one more push should do it."
"I'll try, Doctor," was all she could manage to say.
It was over with rather quickly. Her whole inside relaxed and she became aware of a great tiredness. A cry pierced the shafts of light from the overhead beacon and Hester felt the heaviness come up to surround her heart and choke her breathing passage. "What is it? she asked.
The doctor looked at the nurse, who nodded. "A boy, a fine boy, and he has ten fingers and ten toes. I think he'll weigh in about seven pounds, too."
Hester could see his eyes above the mask and they looked as if they were smiling' at her.
They took her back to her room immediately and let her hold the baby until they reached the nursery. She kissed the small form, looking at its nakedness beneath the blankets, realizing how completely alone it was now. He was covered in places with a white cream-like substance and his eyes blinked uncomprehensibly at her. He wouldn't be alone, she told herself, not ever, not for one minute.
Two days later she called her parents to inform them that they had a seven pound, three ounce grandson. Her mother had asked if there was anything she wanted and Hester said no. Her father said that they would drive up to pick her and the baby up when she was dismissed from the hospital. And then it was her mother speaking again. "Hester, dear, what are you feeding him so I can be sure to get some formula ready?"
"I'm breast feeding him, Mom," she replied.
There was a small silence on the other end of the phone. And then very quietly, "I breast fed you, Hester. We'll be there in two days," and then she hung up.
The welfare worker had Hester sign some papers, muttering how unusual it all was, and she should think of the child. They would find a good home for it and it would get the best of care, probably better than she could give it. And Hester had stood there, smiling, saying that she was his mother, looking at the yellow-blanketed mass in the middle of the bed.
They had always wanted her to give her child up, but how could she? And especially now, now that she had let the small mouth have her breast, have her whole body. How could she, after knowing that he had been bathed in her blood, and their two systems had been one for three-fourths of a year? No, he was too much hers now.
Her parents came that afternoon. It seemed to Hester that they both looked sad around their
44
NORTHWESTERN TRI-QUARTERLY
eyes though they smiled and tried to look happy. She realized then, with a bitter feeling, what she had done to them. Hester knew she had been her father's pride and now, how was he going to explain his daughter's illegitimate child to his business associates, his friends? They all knew her too well and she knew she couldn't lie. She didn't even want to fabricate a story. Before, she had suggested to them that she would move to another city, find employment, and support herself and the baby, but her mother had argued that she would have trouble finding anyone suitable to stay with the baby and then, too, she would probably have a harder time because she wouldn't deny anything. At least in their own community people might accept it. But Hester knew they never would.
Every mile they got closer to home filled Hester with more apprehension. Her father had looked a little uncomfortable when he noticed her nursing the infant, but her mother had smiled and changed his diapers, putting the soiled ones in a diaper bag they had bought her.
It was night when they drove into the driveway. It was a beautiful night and she pressed the baby to her, assuring herself that it wasn't a dream. They walked quietly into the house and her mother fixed dinner, everything that was Hester's favorite, and she ate hungrily. Afterwards she helped her mother with the dishes, answering he} questions half shyly, feeling a communion that had never been there before because now they understood each other as women on the same level. She kissed her father goodnight, leaving him to the rest of his newspaper, and went into her room - their room now. Her parents had taken great pains in fixing up half her old room into a nursery.
Hester undressed and slipped quietly into bed. She fell asleep immediately because the long trip had tired her out. But in two hours she awakened and decided that she wanted a glass of milk. She put on her robe and went downstairs to the kitchen. Hearing her mother's and father's voices she stopped short. Her mother seemed to be crying and Hester walked softly closer to hear what she was saying.
"Oh, Jerold, I just don't know what to do. She's not like other girls, you should know that. She always tried to do, to be everything we always wanted her to be, but now this."
"That's right, but how can we blame ourselves or her? We brought her up in a middle-class society and taught her to believe in a middle-class code of morals, forgetting that sometimes they don't stretch to cover everything. You aren't sorry she kept the baby, are you, Elizabeth?"
"No, that's what I wanted her to do. Do you think we can take it?"
"Take what?"
"Oh, you know, what other people will say."
Spring, 1962
"Oh hell." Her father's voice softened. "You know and I know that other girls have to get married, that the percentage of nonvirgin brides is probably on the increase. And we know thai she loves this child, don't we? Well, that's all that counts. Sure, sure, it's going to be hard to take having an 'unmarried' mother on our hands, but after all she is our daughter and our responsibility no matter how old she is and she's not quite twenty-one yet."
"I'm sorry, Jerold, but I'm afraid for her sake and ours."
"Elizabeth, Elizabeth. It must have been hard on her, too. You and I both knew what there was between them and it wasn't blind adolescent passion. Oh, to hell with what anyone else thinks, anyway."
"We should have let them get married when they wanted to."
"Yes, but we didn't. We wanted her to finish her education first. So now, what are we going to do about it? Condemn ourselves? No! After all, we're all human beings. And you know that people do make mistakes."
She could see her father light his pipe.
"Oh this god-damn crazy world. Let's stop talking about it, Elizabeth. It's done.
Her mother was crying again now and Hester leaned weakly against the wall. The phrase "unmarried mother" stung her ears and she wanted to go in and throw her arms around her parents and tell them how sorry she was to make them suffer. Was she being selfish, she thought to herself as she slowly walked back up the stairs? No, that couldn't be it. She opened the door to her bedroom, utterly confused with herself. It was only natural, wasn't it, to keep What belonged to you, what was a part of you? Yes, she could see it now. That's why her parents had offered her their love, and especially now. She needed it more now than she had ever needed it.
Hester looked down at the tiny infant in the crib and wondered if she would be able to do the right thing for him when the time came. But her parents were going to have to go through an awful lot just for her. And at that moment she wasn't sure she was worth it. There were only three of them against everyone else and three seemed like a pretty small number to her. Who was she anyway to deny her child a home, father, and everything that she had? She could see all this clearly now that she was at home and surrounded by these familiar elements.
She threw herself across the bed, the shadows from the trees lacing themselves over her, and far away she heard the pounding of water or. the white sand. You can't really be alone, she thought, not completely alone any more. But it seemed to her that her soul was lying naked, cold, bathed in black darkness, alone in a room somewhere, totally alone.
45
Is Spring
Knox Munson studied (1939-40) under Lew Sarett at the School of Speech and wal a clese friend of the poet. Mr. Knox hll$ published many poems in magazinel, anthologiel, and textbooks: his volume of poems, "So Little Done," received a number of awards. Hil home is in Wilmette.
What unbelievable strength in this blade of grass, Effortlessly splitting the stonelike ground! What wizardry!
The morning glory vine, the hollyhock, the spears Of mint push up until the imperforate earth Gives way.
The tender lily of the valley joins the turning Of the hard earth.
What might is spring!
The rain comes, beating an angry fist. The wind sweeps heedlessly, relentlessly.
The new-born fronds weather the merciless Flogging.
Of what are these feathery mysteries made? What brand of zeal? What enduring strength?
What shame this strength is not for man!
I grasp the unabatable designThe mortal herd is out of tune.
Knox Munson
COMMUNION WITH A
Felix Pollak, formerly Curator of Deering Library's Special Collections, and now in charge of the Rare Book Department of the University of Wisconsin, was born in Vienna, received his doctorate in jurisprudence at the University of Vienna, and degrees in library science from the University of Buffalo and the University of Michigan. He has published prose and poetry in Austrian and German periodicals, and in many magazines in this country, including his translations of some amusing squibs by the Austrian writ�r, Alfred Polgar, which he contributed to THE TRI-QUARTERlY in 1959.
There is a strangely strong bond between me and the thief who plundered my car this after-
THIEF
By Felix Pollak
noon. As I lie in my bed, I am thinking of him; and I have the feeling that he is thinking of me also. He of course knows considerably more about me than I about him - but that is in the nature of our relationship.
By now he may have read my correspondence with a little magazine editor and, if he is literaryminded, browsed through the issues of Poetry, Harper's and The New Yorker that were on top of my shirts in the suitcase. I wonder what he thought of the profile on Susanne Langer, a superb piece of writing - as far as I had read. And does he agree or disagree with Mr. C. Wright Mill's sympathetic appraisal of Fidel Castro? I'll never know, alas, even should the police find him - which, the police assured me, is most unlikely.
.�I;gh'
TFhat
46
NORTHWESTERN TRI-QUARTERLY
If he, at this late hour, is like me resting from his day's labors, he may be doing so in my pajamas; though he might, conceivably, be squeamish about wearing another man's pajamas before laundering them. Since he stole my things late in the afternoon in a busy street of Chicago's asphalt jungle, he has perhaps not yet disposed of my typewriter, a present from my brother and my companion for many years. In case the thief decides to try it out before selling it so that he can, with a good conscience, reassure the potential buyer as to its working condition and appraise him of possible flaws, he will, I'm afraid, discover that the "e" has a tendency to get stuck. I must admit I've been slothful about getting it fixed, since it seems to be my nature to put up with continual small annoyances rather than face the larger discomfort of doing something about them. It would be intriguing to know whether the new owner will be a procrastinating weakling like myself, or a man of bold and energetic action who won't stand for any nonsense. In my case, much as I grieve about the loss of the typewriter, I am somehow relieved that the problem of having that "e" repaired is no longer with me. There is some truth to the saying that every loss has its gain - and of course vice versa, as the new owner will find out.
In the reflex camera which I had trustingly left on the car seat next to the typewriter was a partially exposed film containing, I had reason to believe, some especially good shots. To hope that the thief will have the decency to have the film developed and mail it to me - he has my address from various sources, including my check book - would no doubt be naive. But will he have it developed at all, compelled by the curiosity to find out what sights my eyes had seen, what places I had been to, what my wife and my friends and perhaps even I myself do look like? Or will he simply and rudely open the camera and throw the ruined film away? If the latter, I hope life will do likewise to him some dark and rainy day, and my electric razor, which he also acquired, will burn his skin even worse than it had mine, without ever shaving him clean!
It has of course occurred to me that he may try to purchase his needs and perhaps even his luxuries, with the unused checks in my checkbook, but I am not too worried about that eventuality, really. In the first place, he has rather convincingly demonstrated his basic aversion to the procurement of merchandise by purchase, and in the seond place, I shall tomorrow morning work out a very clever and top secret code sign which all my future checks must bear in order to be honored by the bank. That may not teach him a lesson, but it will afford me protection, and this is a selfish, dog-eats-dog world - a world I never made but according to whose mores I must live, very sorry.
Spring, 1962
Will he be wearing my shirts from now on? Or will he be disappointed by my taste in colors and patterns? Some meanness in me laughs at the thought that my sleeve length may not fit him at all, and my collars choke him. On the other hand, it would be a shame to throw those good shirts away, and they'll be hard to sell with all the big sales coming up right after Christmas. Perhaps he has a relative who fits my size, a son, or a brother, or even a cousin. And as for my wife's cosmetic kit, I do hope its contents will bring that magic, miracle-wrapped touch-andglow to a skin he likes to touch. May that skin belong to a comely and deserving woman, preferably young, who in return will give the kind of happiness only she can give to a thoughtful and generous friend and provider, Amen.
The representatives of the Chicago Police Department - both of them built to fit the cliche adjective "burly" - assured me, as I have mentioned, that I needn't harbor any false hopes regarding their apprehending my thief. As far as they were concerned, he was in no danger from them, and wherever he was sitting, he was sitting as safe as in Abraham's lap. Their unwavering confidence in their inability was awesome. "How can you be so positive you won't find him?" I inquired. "Mister," one of them said indulgently, "we have experience in those matters. It's our job. Just leave it to us, we'll do our best. And take it from us, you'll never see them goods again. Your safest bet is to have insurance." "Yeah," agreed his colleague, "take that typewriter. Why, the guy can afford to sell it for 20 bucks! That's a bargain, ain't it?" "A bargain!" I exclaimed. "Man, it's a steal!" "Well sir, there you are," he grinned proudly, adding, "At that price, I'd buy it myself." "Even though you'd suspect that it's hot?" He shrugged, eyeing me with condescension. "That, mister, is human nature," he explained. "In our profession you got to understand human nature." He turned to his partner. "Am I right, Mac?" Mac agreed with him. "Particularly at Christmas," he said cryptically.
The notion that one of their colleagues might have my belongings in his possession at this very minute fleetingly came to my mind, but I thought it wiser not to voice it; they might have misconstrued my meaning. "Well then, Merry Christmas," I said heartily. "May Santa be good to you!" "Merry Christmas, sir," they responded with all the cheer of the season, and as they turned and marched away, I resolved to take my loss into their stride.
But now, lying here at this late hour of the night, my extrasensory perception that the thief and I are mentally communing with each other is as palpable to me as the moon that hangs high and tissue-paper transparent in the paling sky behind my window.
47
from NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY PRESS
A�D THE HU�IA:�aTIES
E. Prior
science? "What are the humanities? "nat distinguishes these two forms of ereways of bringing order and meaning to the data of experience? What are peculiar to these disciplines. the boundaries by which each is circumscribed, and qualities and powers characteristic of each?"
exploration of the two approaches to experience will stimulate, even irritate the will put this book down feeling that the controversy has been clarified and examined.
PROGRESS
Prefaces to Ten Contemporary Americans
Edu-ard B. Hungerford
Theodore Roethke, Robert Lowell, Stanley Kunitz, Richard Wilbur, Rich· William DeWitt Snodgrass, Howard Nemerov, J. V. Cunningham, Randall Jar\Ierwin.
critiques are provided w ith liberal selections from the poetry itself; the reader is the shoulders of the poets as they work.
s were originally published in Tri-Quarterly.
E::\GLISH NOVEL IN THE MAGAZINES, 1740 -1815
D_ Mayo
$5.00
brings to the attention of students of prose fiction the nearly forgotten magthe 18th century.
feature of this work is the inclusion of a 200 page catalogue of 1,375 maganovelettes of over 5,000 words each and published in 238 different British pe1740 and 1815. Dr. Mayo is professor of English at Northwestern University.
$10.50
e
I iss Florence 3t�.
�.I-V/V / ,-",
l)f"erin
Libr"'.Y'" .n.rclJiv
S Attn.
t2V
$3.50