vol5-no3

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 II 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, 1963, by Northwestern University. All rights reserved.

expressed in the

are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the editors.

Tri-Quarterly

EDITORIAL BOARD: The editor is EDWARD B. HUNGERFORD. Senior members of the advisory board are Professor RAY A. BILLINGTON of the College of Liberal Arts, Dean JAMES H. MCBURNEY 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: SUSAN F. MC ILVAINE, FORREST G. ROBERTSON, HERBERT M. ATHERTON, and CAROLYN BURROWS.

THE TRI-QUARTERLY is distributed by Northwestern University Press, and is under the business management of the Press. Design, layout, and production are by the University Publications Office.

Art Editor jor this issue is Lauretta Akkeron. Photographs oy Herb Comess.

Foreign Affairs and the United

Nations

ADLAI E. STEVENSON

An Address Delivered Before the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations

IWhen the United States' Ambassador to the United Nations came to Chicago to deliver an address, on February 19th, at a luncheon marking the fortieth anniversary of the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, he was kind enough to permit us to print the address in this Spring issue of The Tri-Quarterly. The copy below, taken from his manuscript, omits at his suggestion the introductory portions, which were spoken with pleasant informality merely to the members of the society and their guests.

Since the name Adlai E. Stevenson is known to all our possible readers, even to the youngest visiting student from the farthest part of the world, we note here �nly �n item which gives us an especial pride in print'"g h,s words - the fact that he is an alumnus of Northwestern, having graduated from the Law School in 1926.

I am indebted to Mr. Adlai E. stevenson III for his help, �t a busy time, in obtaining his father's permission and his manuscript.

Spring, 1963

suppose you want me to talk about foreign affairs and the U.N. Well, there have been many long days and nights in New York when I wished I was in Chicago. I am reminded of the young mother who told me her husband was being transferred to New York and when the news reached the children she overheard her small daughter saying her prayers: "God Bless Mummy, God Bless Daddy and Freddy, and now, God, I must say good bye; we are moving to New York." And I could add that moving to New York and the U.N., merits even more divine sympathy. I have heard a psychiatrist say that a diplomat at the U.N. should have a healthy split personality; he should be an idealist but also· practical; stubborn but compromising; spiritual but down to earth; dynamic but reflective. Well, I've concluded that he's right, and that to deal with diplomats from 110 countries representing every culture, race, language, interest and prejudice simultaneously and on every question - political, economic and social - quickly presents one with a choice between galloping frustration, ulcers, or a sense of humor. I've chosen the latter, plus a little perspective and a lot of patience, I hope!

There have been many changes since my previous service at the U.N. The membership has doubled - the first sovereign act of every new country is to apply for membership. The annual agenda of the General Assembly has mounted to 100 questions - and the U.S is involved directly in virtually everyone. The old, more or less kindred and democratic nations, have lost their majority to the Afro-Asians and can no longer easily dominate the scene. The cold war struggle for influence and allegiance among the newer na-

tions is much more intense, and neutrality or non-alignment has vastly increased. Peace and development, not cold war politics, are the first interest of the new nations. No, there is only one priority, national independence for all; anticolonialism and equality of status generate a passion that is sometimes irresponsible, but always understandable.

Evidently it has been something of a shock to many Americans to realize how rapidly the world has changed; that others don't always see things exactly as we do; that the U.N. is not a panacea or a wing of the State Department. A lot of people in the U.N., for example, find it hard to understand why the Russians should not have troops in Cuba while we have even more in Turkey.

But in spite of our worries, frustrations and fears the U.N. remains an incalculable asset to the peace and security of our country. So let me in my limited time take you on a short guided tour of the stormy horizon as I see it from my office overlooking the U.N. in New York.

First, by every measure, the United States continues the leading power of the world, as a result of our military power, the abundance and great reserve of our economic power, the world-wide extent of our alliances, and the talents of our people. Yet we have no monopoly of power, nor even of nuclear weapons: and we could not force our will upon the rest of the world even if we wanted to - which we don't.

Second, the new imperialist powers, the Soviet Union and Communist China - despite their profound internal conflicts - both see America as the chief obstacle to world domination. Both would bury us, the Russians by peaceful means, the Chinese by violence. But both are in favor of the funeral. And both strive to extend their power elsewhere. They sharpen every quarrel and inflame every point of friction between the United States and any other non-communist nationand thereby strive to strip one nation at a time of our friendship and our protective power.

But they're not doing very well. None of the defeats in Africa, Asia and the Middle East which the pessimists were confidently predicting not long ago has come to pass. The U.N. frustrated Communist designs to penetrate Central Africa from the Congo. In Asia the Chinese have acutely embarrassed Moscow by attacking India. And instead of taking over the Middle East the Communists are now fleeing headlong from Iraq, and much of the Communist investment there is now down the drain. Meanwhile if General De Gaulle has embarrassed the West the divisions in the Communist ranks throughout the world are far worse.

Third, the great western colonial empires are vanishing. This huge transformation had its roots in the free institutions of the colonial powers themselves, So today a billion human beings are 4

marching on to the stage. If their delegates still have a lingering distrust of the West which so recently ruled over them, they also look to the West for help in pursuing their two great aims of independence and economic and social development.

Fourth, the Communists are trying desperately to capture the great social revolution which is sweeping over Latin America and to divert these vast new energies into channels of violence and hatred. The Alliance for Progress aims to put these energies to work to create a more prosperous and egalitarian society in the Western Hemisphere. Our challenging task now is to make sure that Moscow will never again parlay the tyranny of a Batista into the tyranny of a Castro; and to see to it that a community of freedom in this hemisphere is flourishing long after the Castroism has passed into history. And the challenge in Latin America may be the most critical and difficult we have to face anywhere.

Finally, the free nations of Europe, with our help, have not only recovered from the ruin of the war and turned back the rising tide of domestic communism, but are building a new economic and political community in Europe to replace the old rivalries and civil wars.

All of you are familiar with the situation brought about by France's exclusion of Britain from the European economic community and France's rejection of a multi-national nuclear defense. The headlines have been black, but I think it may be the better part of wisdom to wait and see if the results are as black as the headlines. Few finalities are as final as they seem at first. And this is not the final blow to European unity, to the grand alliance or the Atlantic community.

President Kennedy has reacted with restraint, and I think that is a good cue for all of us, You may recall the universal despair just 10 years ago when France derailed the proposed European defense community. It drove John Foster Dulles to talk of an agonizing reappraisal. But it was not the end of hope for a united Europe and out of that disaster the present day European economic community emerged.

Victor Hugo once said: "There is nothing in all the world so powerful as an idea whose time has come." I believe the time has come - if not today - then surely tomorrow - for not only a European community, but a larger Atlantic community. And it should not be hard for us to understand why General De Gaulle with his views of the historic position of France should want more to say about when and by whom the nuclear weapon is fired. Nor should it be hard for Europe to understand why we expect it to bear a larger share of the defense burden which has been ours for so long.

Now, against this horizon, let us examine how

the decision to join the United Nations has served our national self-interest as few other decisions in our history.

What the United States wants for itself - u world free of fear, free of want, free of prejudice, a world made safe by universal adherence to the principles of the Charter - is what free men the world over want. That they do has been demonstrated these past seventeen years by their actions at the U.N., actions which never once have impaired the vital interests of the United States. To frustrate the majority view, the Soviet Union has cast 100 vetoes. The U.S. has yet to cast its first.

Nonetheless, we have, as I say, skeptics who decry our support of the United Nations. Latterly they point to the Congo and Cuba.

In the Congo, the U. N. - for more than two years and with the help of many nations, especially ours - has protected the infant republic from internal chaos, reconquest and communist subversion. Like the previous secessions in Kasai and Orientale, the secession of Katanga has ended, and with it the danger of a great power confrontation in the heart of Africa, with all its ominous implications, has been averted. There was never any valid issue of self-determination in Katanga Province under Tshombe any more than in Orientale Province under Gizenga.

The United States' objective in the Congo was to help establish conditions under which the Congolese people could work out peacefully their own future. And that is precisely what the U.N. has made possible under incredibly difficult circumstances and amid widespread and vocal opposition. This has been the U.N.'s most complex and dangerous peace-keeping mission and its most costly by far. But civil war and the danger of great power intervention has been averted, and a grave threat to the peace removed.

I would like to emphasize that this has not been a victory for the U.N. - for the U.N. seeks no victories - but it has been a notable victory for the rule of law and of peace. And if any Americans still have their doubts about it, I would ask them one question: would they have preferred that American soldiers do the job?

Now that the military phase is over the nationbuilding phase begins, and, if anything, it will be an even harder job. The Congo now faces three key obstacles to progress and survival as a united country:

An underdeveloped political system which cannot yet deal with the country's needs.

An expensive military establishment of dubious effectiveness and uncertain discipline.

A financial administration which collects much less revenue than it could, disburses funds carelessly, and is subject to more pressure than it can handle.

Spring, 1963

More than external aid, success of a nationbuilding effort depends on developing the administrative fiber to train the national army, get the fiscal system under control, and construct a political system featuring a strong executive. If these prerequisites can be met, the Congo should not be a burden to its friends in a few years' time.

As for Cuba, when that crisis erupted, the United States left no doubt about its intention to protect itself and this hemisphere. But we also acted in strict accordance with the Rio Pact through the Organization of American States, and in strict accordance with the charter of the U.N. through the Security Council. The U.N. peace-keeping machinery functioned just as the charter contemplated: it provided a forum for discussion of our complaint against the Soviet Union; it provided a means of marshaling world opinion, and it provided conciliation and mediation services. In that showdown of last October and in our subsequent negotiations with the Russians the most dangerous crisis since the War was resolved without resort to military measures and nuclear war.

And I'd like to bring to your attention some observations by an old friend, Lester Pearson of Canada, who had this to say about our handling of the Cuban crisis:

"When you have a good case, with strength to back it, stand firm: without provocation or panic. When action in defense of that case has to be taken quickly, and by yourself, bring that action before the United Nations at once - as the United States did on this occasion.

"The United Nations, once again, became the indispensable agency through which the Parties could find a way out of a crisis, without war. I know the United Nations can't force a solution on a great power which doesn't want it. But you can't exaggerate its importance as a means for finding and for supervising a solution."

That, I think, just about sums it up.

But now, despite our success in effecting the peaceful removal of the really dangerous weapons from Cuba, some politicians and columnists are suggesting that long range missiles may still be hidden in Cuba and that the remaining Russian forces are a dire danger and should be withdrawn. Of course they don't say how. But I agree emphatically that Khrushchev should take his men home, not just because he said he intended to, but because the presence of any foreign forces in this hemisphere is bound to add to the tension and sharpen the East-West conflict and therefore the hazards in another vast area of the world. And I would not be surprised if he did remove them, unless we make it too embarrassing for him to back down again.

However, having spent a couple of months in almost constant negotiation with the Russians

about Cuba this Fall, I am bold enough to suggest to you that we ought to bear two facts in mind.

First, as President Kennedy pointed out, in the unlikely event that any missiles remain hidden in Cuba, they could not be brought out into the open, placed on launching pads, and made operational, without quick detection by the United States. And neither Cuba nor Russia can be in any doubt about how we would respond.

Second, the present military complex in Cuba does not pose a threat of armed aggression. It has no logistical capacity for any seaborne or airborne aggression. And even if it did the United States has made it clear that it would stop in its tracks any adventure from Cuba - with, we can be sure, the support of the OAS.

No, the danger from Cuba is not the military build-up of the past year. The danger is what it has been ever since Castro unmasked his communism. The danger is not attack but subversion, penetration and organized violence. And the danger is not to this country but to Latin America. Venezuela is, of course, the first target. But all Latin America is in the target, and it is virtually all vulnerable. I am far more concerned about the hundreds of Latin Americans flocking to Cuba for training in communist theory and techniques and what they can do to subvert the universal social revolution than I am about the Russian troops.

So let's not lose sight of the forest for the trees. And it might be well to recall what Lincoln told Congress at another critical time:

"In times like the present, men should utter nothing for which they would not willingly be responsible through time and in eternity."

But enough of Cuba and the Congo. In the past year we must add other items to the long list of U.N. peace-keeping activities: West New Guinea; Thailand and Cambodia; Rwanda and Burundi. And Yemen, Borneo and the Malaysian Federation may not be far behind, with more trouble spots on the horizon.

With a record of successes going back to the withdrawal of the Russians from Iran in 1946 one would imagine that there would be little problem of financial support to make the organization an even more vital force for peace. But that is not the case. Some countries that promptly pay their assessments for the regular budget have not supported all the recent peace-keeping operations, notably the Soviet Union, for obvious reasons, and now France. Many smaller countries are hard put to it and feel that peace-keeping is peculiarly the responsibility of the great powers.

So a serious financial crisis is threatening. It will become acute when the proceeds of last year's bond issue are exhausted in June. A committee is now considering alternatives. It may recommend a special scale of assessments in 6

lieu of the present voluntary contributions, which would save us money. A special session of the General Assembly will probably follow in May. And, of course, much will depend on the attitude of our Congress as to the extent and effectiveness of this vital aspect of the U. N.'s functions.

Of course nothing would serve the Communist purpose better than to have America reduce or cut off entirely its financial support for peacekeeping operations that interfere with the Kremlin's designs, as in the Congo. But no matter how rich or strong we are, the United States cannot be the policeman of the world, though, unhappily, many of the smaller nations whose only security is the U.N., and many of our larger friends would gladly leave to us most of the responsibility and most of the burden.

I had hoped to talk to you about the indispensable role of the U.N. in nation-building, which is the first priority of the newer, poorer nations. Pushed to the first outskirts of modernity by western investment and trade, emancipated before they had received either the training or the powers of wealth-creation needed for a modern society, they are caught between two worldsthe powerful, affluent, expanding world of the developed "North," and the traditional, pre-technological, largely poor world of the underdeveloped "South."

As the rich get richer and the poor poorer this division in world society is a great obstacle to the expansion of confidence and community in the world.

I know there is much dissatisfaction about aid, much feeling that it is wasted and never achieves a "breakth"rough," and dribbles away down thousands of unspecified drains and ratholes. Yet just so did the Victorians talk about tax money devoted to lifting the standards of the very poor in early industrial society. But over a couple of generations, it was the raising of all this unfortunate mass of humanity that turned western society into the first social order in history in which everyone could expect something of an equal chance.

And, who can say, in the long run perhaps equal chance and equal dignity for the vast emerging masses may have more to do with peace and security for all than the cold war today or the unification of Western Europe tomorrow.

To conclude these desultory remarks: The U.N. is not the whole answer to world peace, and never was from the day the world divided after the War. It is not a World Government. It is admittedly unable to impose any settlement on the great powers against their will, though it can on occasion exercise a potent persuasive force. It is a reflection of the divided world in which we live, but the consensus of its members represents a moral force that cannot be lightly ignored.

We should not think of it just as a convenient repository for insoluble problems, but rather as an instrument of U.S. policy which we should use to further our objectives.

It is a complicated instrument, of course, because it is also an instrument of the foreign policy of 109 other countries.

It is also a limited instrument: if we want to defend Europe, the U.N. is largely irrelevant and Nato is essential; if we want to relate ourselves to the less developed countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America, the U.N. is essential and Nato is irrelevant.

Let me sum up in this way. The United States has an aim in this world, an aim to build a community of nations, diverse, tolerant and genuinely independent - but bound together by a sense of common humanity and by a common interest in peace and progress. In such a community every nation and every man, strong or weak, will have the greatest chance to develop the unlimited possibilities of freedom. In such a community we Americans ourselves will have the greatest chance to hand down our freedom and prosperity to future generations. The growth of such a community, too coherent and too vigorous for Communism to undermine, therefore, is as vital a factor in our security - and for our future - as our armed power.

To build this community one of the instruments is the U.N. It is not a magic lamp. Perhaps it is only a candle in the window. But its spirit is that of community, tolerance, give and takewithout which there can be no peace. Its method is parliamentary diplomacy, debating, voting, the writing and rewriting of resolutions, days and nights of discussion and careful listening

We are successful at it, for both the spirit and the method are second nature to Democracy.

But if Democracy is to be nurtured in new countries, as well as preserved in the old, if the U. N. is to succeed, we must all have time - a time of peace. For it is peace which generates the factors most favorable to the growth of Democracy: prosperity, stability, education, freedom of thought, and the mutual trust which encourages free and fruitful communication between nations.

I cannot agree, therefore, with those who are disdainful and impatient with world opinion as it is reflected in the United Nations. From its beginnings our country has had a "decent respect for the opinions of mankind." Our Declaration of Independence was proclaimed not as the act of separation but in order to make clear to "World Opinion" why we had taken this momentous step.

Indeed, in the new era the greatness of a nation may yet be measured not by its might but by its magnanimity. And by whatever exertions and whatever endurance history may require of us, we intend to pursue the vision of a free world at peace, and to provide other nations an example and a leadership to which "the Wise and Good may repair" - to borrow a phrase from George Washington, whose birth we celebrate at this season.

So, if you conclude from all this that I believe our membership in the U.N. serves us well, you are right. Indeed, I feel a little like the Irish peasant who said to the poet Yeats: "Sure, I believe in fairies. Never seen any, but it stands to reason."

The Tri-Quarterly is pleased to be the first to print this new poem by Mr. Stephen Spender, both for the poem itself and because he gave it to us while he was teaching at the University. What Mr. Spender says in the poem about "the white paper" might well be said by all of us about his teaching. His presence at Northwestern was a happy translation of himself into the minds and lives of his students.

Spring, 1963

THE SELF - UNFEIGNING

He thought of the white paper as Where he should be what he was. The writing was the sap that grows Up the stem to be the rose. If in the heart the blood was song Words from the heart could not be wrung. All he had to do was be His own truth flaming on a tree.

So he wrote without pretence His youth, his truth, his own sentence. What it Showed was him indeed, Judgement there for all to read.

STEPHEN SPENDER

very shol't stol'ies

Thomas H. Al'thul'

Thomas H. Arthur, Speech '59, is currently studying parttime for a master's degree in the expectation of teaching. He is a native Chicagoan, was raised on the North Shore, and now lives in Hyde Park. He has worked for several Chicago area advertising magazines and has been active in University of Chicago theater and other local groups, and in Channel Eleven's Festival Series.

He likes to write short sketches, of which the pieces below are examples, some of which resulted from a recent trip to Europe.

Nuremberg to Zurich

I am on a train riding from Nuremberg to Zurich. Two companions, American soldiers on furlough whom I met at the station, and I have seated ourselves on one side of a second class compartment. A German sailor and an attractive but somewhat faded looking woman sit opposite us.

My friends are curious about the German navy and try to ask the sailor questions. What is his rank and how much do his uniforms cost and how long are his leaves and how often does he get them? The sailor, who is blond, rosy cheeked, and very young, is flattered at their interest but he knows no English and they know little German.

The woman says something to the sailor in their language and then turns to us and in slow, very correct English, offers to translate. She is about fifty years old and she has the air of bittersweet inner exhaustion that I have noticed among so many of the people of her age that I have met in Germany.

The conversation proceeds from one subject to the next and I listen with great interest. My friends ask the woman about the war but she shakes her head and will not talk about it. To change the subject she asks about American politics in which, she says, she has always had a great interest. Our elections are so tumultuous and to her eyes, undignified, and she has heard that the results are fixed in advance.

The soldiers and I become excited and enthusiastic. We all three begin to talk at once. I

talk about the structure and heritage of our system. One of my soldier friends has been a party worker in New York and he gives a colorful account of big city politics. The sailor watches us quietly as we speak with pride and affection about our country. Our elections are not fixed, we say, and if they seem undignified and even funny to the rest of the world, it is because our government actually belongs to the people and is the people. It is a big country with a lot of individuals in it, and we all have the right at any time to sound off and do something about what concerns us. This is what the rest of the world hears at election time and the fact that the noise exists is a great strength and beauty of America so we say.

We pull into a station along the way and the sailor gathers his things together. One of the soldiers leans out of the window and buys a sausage and a beer. He starts to throw the empty containers out of the train but I stop him and put the refuse under my seat. Everything in Germany is so clean that I cannot bear to see him do it.

The sailor stands up and pulls a paper bag from the roll on his back. He hands it to me with a stiff little bow. The woman says, "For the waste," and points under my seat. I open the bag and find two large apples inside. The sailor smiles and indicates that they are to be split between my two friends and myself. We try to thank him but he flushes with embarrassment and leaves hurriedly.

'f.·uill to Berlin

I am alone in the compartment as the train lurches and sways through the night. From my window the only lights that I can see come from factories, which seem to be going full blastand from regularly spaced spotlights on poles which are aimed down at the tracks. Occasionally I catch a glimpse of the barbed wire which runs along next to the train. Strange gloomy country. There is no light from houses if there are houses, nor from cars if there are roads.

From time to time we pull into stops which are more like dim fortresses than stations. We wait while soldiers climb down and march away and are replaced by other soldiers.

Each new group spreads out through the train searching for refugees, shining lights into compartments, pulling open washroom doors. They are absolutely silent.

The passengers too are quiet. The whole grim ritual seems to take place of its own accord as if an invisible presence is moving marionettes. It is a pantomime unrelated co flesh or sound, suffered by all participants as if they were not really there.

The train moves off again and, as there is nothing to see, I drowse.

I am shaken awake by a soldier. Automatically I hand him my passport and tell him that I cannot speak his language. He thumbs through it, then suddenly slams it shut and puts it in his pocket. He looks hard at me - and goes quickly out the door.

It is a bad moment. I wonder if my papers are in order. What is it that I have done? I am moving across a void - a gap in my own experience - and something is wrong. What will be done to me? Where has my passport been taken?

Finally my door is opened and the soldier comes in leading another soldier and a civilian. I see that a guard is stationed outside in the passageway. Without any preliminaries whatsoever the civilian shouts at me and keeps shouting. I am terrified. I try to explain that I don't understand his questions - his commands - but he keeps shouting as if he cannot hear me.

I am pulled out of my seat and searched. Every-

thing in my pockets is laid out on the seat next to mine. My luggage is pulled open and scattered. All the while the civilian is screaming questions at me.

I try in my terrible German to explain that I am a tourist - going to Berlin to see the city, and that is all. Abruptly he pushes me down and sits opposite me. He scribbles something on a sheet of paper and takes some money. He tucks the paper into my passport and shuts it. Then he looks at me and smiles.

It is not a pleasant smile but I relax a little. His smile grows broader and he leans toward me and holds out my passport. I reach for it but just as I am about to touch it he pulls it back. He is still smiling. My terror grows. Again he leans toward me with my passport in his extended hand. Again I reach for it and again he pulls it back.

It dawns on me that I must do this over and over and it is too much. I am more frightened than I can be and I begin to laugh. One of the soldiers breaks into laughter too and for a moment we both howl.

The civilian literally screams at the top of his lungs at the soldier and then turns to me redfaced and shaking with fury. He rages and bellows and threatens until he runs out of breath. Then he thrusts the passport under my nose. I look away from him and reach for it Again and again I reach for it.

When he and the soldiers have gone, and I have my passport, I fall asleep very soundly asleep, and I do not wake up again until the train stops with a jolt. We have pulled up next to a brilliantly lighted building and platform, surrounded by barbed wire. There are soldiers everywhere.

When the last East German is off the train we begin slowly to move. I see the two soldiers who were in my compartment, walking together. The one who laughed looks up toward my window and I stick out my tongue at him. He laughs again and makes an obscene gesture which I can see until the train curves into the woods that mark the border of Berlin.

New York Bus

I am on a shuttle bus from the airport into the city. We have pulled off the expressway and are moving along the outside lane on Queens Highway. It is close to midnight but the traffic is still heavy and we must swerve this way and that to avoid it. Suddenly the driver stops in the middle of the lane and pulls on his emergency brake. He swings around in his seat.

"Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention please?" We look at him and at each other in confusion. What has happened? What will he say? This is obviously some sort of crisis.

"Ladies and gentlemen," he says, "look around. One of you is sitting next to a louse!" He lets this sink in for a moment and then he says solemnly, "There are thirty-five of you aboard but I count only thirty-four paid fares." We all begin to feel uncomfortable.

"I would like to talk to that thirty-fifth person," he says. "The rest of you can tune out. Sir or Madam, as the case may be, before this trip into the city started, I carefully packed everybody's luggage in the back of the bus. I tried to collect money for tickets at the same time but one of you snuck onto the bus anyhow."

He continues, "I got a wife and three kids to support. My oldest boy is seven, my second is five, and I got a little girl who just passed her

first birthday. They are nice pretty kids." He pauses but does not take his eyes off us. We shift in our seats and sneak suspicious looks at each other. It is an uneasy moment.

He clears his throat and says, "After we pull into the depot I'll have to get the dough together and take it to the company office. I'd appreciate it if the person who cheated would slip me the money as he gets off the bus. I won't even look up to see who it is. If I don't get it back I'll have to make it up out of my own pocket and I ain't got it to spare."

He glares at each of us, one after the other, a last time. "C'mon!" he says. "I done my job, now you take care of yours!" He turns around, releases the brake, and starts the engine. We ride the rest of the way into the city in silence steeped in mutual guilt.

At the bus terminal I stay in my seat to avoid the crush when the other passengers file out. I watch three of them slip money to the driver as they go by. He counts thirty-five fares out after they have passed him and puts this money into a satchel which he snaps shut. He counts the remaining cash, three [ares, out loud to himself, then stuffs this money into his wallet and puts it in his back pocket. He is humming to himself as he leaves the bus.

In Munich

I am in a night club in Munich. My date and I have come to hear what is supposed to be the best jazz in Bavaria. It is a lovely place laid out in two stories with flowers and huge green plants everywhere. A spiral staircase winds from behind the dance area up to the second tier.

The singer is a clean-cut, handsome fellow in a plaid dinner jacket and tight ivy-league trousers with a buckle on the back. He sings German songs and a few American numbers with German words. His finale is the famous "Mack, the Knife," probably Germany's most famous popular song. He does it in English it la Louis Armstrong.

The singer sits down and his group takes off on "j azz." It is very pleasant to listen to - a sort of rag-time done to a strict four-four tempo. It sounds like what might happen if you crossed Benny Goodman with Wayne King and McNamara's band jazz, but sweet and bouncy.

The jazz ends and the combo plays dance music. My date and I get out on the dance floor and when we do the jitterbug, people stare at us, for our version is somewhat different from theirs.

When we are ready to leave, we get up and go towards the door. Several couples block our path. They see us coming but make no move to get out of the way, even though there is no other exit. I think of the grown men and women who have pushed in front of me in lines at airports and restaurants, and looked pleased with themselves for having done so and I get angry. This is the way Germans get along with each other. They are not polite. They are aggressive. They push and jostle. Up till now I have given way quietly, for I have wanted to be a "good ambassador" and not an "ugly American." Now I am mad.

We walk toward the couple nearest us and I bump into the boy hard! The couple gets out of our way, and we march toward the next human blockade. Just before we reach them they move aside. We keep going and a path opens for us all the way to the door.

I begin to feel ashamed of myself, and before we leave I look guiltily back at the dance floor. The boy whom I bumped catches my eye and winks.

Over East Gerlnany

I am on a plane flying over East Germany. From my seat on the aisle I am straining to see the ground. The gentleman next to the window smiles and asks me in a combination of English and German if I would like to exchange seats with him. He assures me that he doesn't mind, as he has made the flight many times. I accept his offer, and soon we are talking in a combination of English, German, and French. He is thin and gray haired and dressed beautifully in the double-breasted continental style. He tells me that he is an official of the West German Customs Bureau. He is a native of Berlin and

has lived there all his life. He is attractive, warm, urbane and I wonder to myself what he was doing during the war.

I tell him that I admire his city for its beautiful. churches, its office buildings, its wide streets and lovely parks.

"All of that is new," he says. "You should have seen it right after the end of the war. It was a heap of rubble - a junkyard." His voice is sharp now almost accusing.

I keep quiet but I think to myself, I am a Jew. Would you like to talk?

Uptown New York

I am standing in line at an uptown movie theater. I have been told by a friend that a sneak preview of a movie that I want to see is to be shown here tonight. However, I am evidently not the only one who knows it. There is in addition to the crowd that has come to see the gangster picture being featured, a sizable group of couples who are dressed in the style of the Village. All of them are males.

Inside, the regularly scheduled movie is shown first. It is about the Mafia and its methods of

operation. At the climax of the film all of the killers are gathered together to draw cards for the privilege of executing the hero. The winner in a rather grim ritual is then kissed on the mouth by each of his brothers in crime.

Once, twice, three times he is kissed and this is too much for the group from the Village. Just before a fourth embrace is completed, someone leaps out up into a standing position on his chair. Arms waving and long hair flying he shouts excitedly, "We've won! We've won!"

ROMA

The Via Veneto is wide, the chocolate ice-cream dark at the trattoria Doney where Hadrian's boy sits, new muscled now from naked marble into insolence of flesh contained in faded blue-jeans. Spring, 1963

Immaculate with hyacinthine hair, he fingers sun above the molded plastic table top, and quiet waits in depths of haunted glance antique regard that yields to life

lost imperial eyes.

JOHN STEWART CARTER, L.A '31

THE OTHER SIDE OF SAIGON

by leff Corydon III

Jeff Corydon III, born in Chicago, is a Foreign Service officer now serving with the U.S. Embassy in Rabat, Morocco. The present article stems from experiences and observations at his previous post of Saigon, South Viet Nam, from 1957 to 1959. Before two years as a U.S. Air Force officer launched him on a career of government service, he had prepared for a journalistic career at Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism (B.S.J., 1950, M.S.J., 1953). As an undergraduate, he was President of the Northwestern University Class of 1950 and was elected to the Medill chapter of Sigma Delta Chi Professional Journalistic Society. He received the latter's Harrington Memorial Citation as Medill's outstanding student in his graduate class. Between 1950 and 1952, while completing studies for his M.S.J., he worked as Assistant to the Coordinator of the Northwestern Centennial Celebration.

Mr. Corydon has been located in Rabat since October 1961, when he finished a year of Arabic language study at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.

Now that the once gainsaid meeting of East and West has become reality - in respect to tourism, at least - Saigon's provisional absence from the travel circuit must cause regret.

Only two decades ago, fattened on the brimming rice bowl which is Indo-China's richest resource, this Asian city was renowned as "The Paris of the Orient." Of course, in those bygone

days when the mysterious East seemed impossibly remote, and before Febris Tourismus infected the American species, most world-voyagers were content to plumb the pleasures of the other Paris and let it go at that. But Saigon already was a favored haven of French administrators and colons, for - aside from the prerequisites to be had serving in an outpost of empire - its exotic qualities piqued the Frenchman's artistic spirit.

The post-war years saw the Viet Namese independence movement flare into armed conflict, climaxed by the defeat of France at Dien Bien Phu which sealed its retreat from Indo-China. But when Viet Nam emerged from colonial status in 1954, the Geneva accords carved away the northern half of the country as the prize of Communist resistance forces. In the southern zone, with Saigon as capital, strongly nationalist and pro-Western Ngo Dinh Diem soon rose to power.

In different circumstances, independence might have opened Saigon to Far East travelers as another port of call - like Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Bangkok. But the South Viet Nam republic was born fighting for its life against entrenched guerillas sponsored by the Communist north, and eight years later the struggle still rages. With the recent neutralization of neighboring Laos, Viet Nam has become the main cold war battleground in Asia.

NORTHWESTERN TRI-QUARTERLY

Dateline for much of the press's hottest cold war copy, Saigon is now familiar in our lexicon of Asian names. But most Americans have come to know it solely as the command post in Viet Na ms bitter war. A symbol of U.S. resolve to stop Communist aggression, it is today the "Berlin" of the Orient much more than its "Paris," and while violence stalks the plateaus and paddies of the nation around it only the exceptional tourist is tempted to pay a visit.

Thus Americans who have served in Viet Nam have reaped a double satisfaction to offset the sting of those quiet or ugly epithets that occasionally have been applied to their efforts. Besides seconding a valiant fight against uneven odds, they have had the rare good luck to shake hands with Saigon and size up her non-political merits. Most of them have found her, as I did, still an engaging Oriental lady despite the somber days through which she is living.

Saigon's particular charm doesn't lie in outward trappings. For reasons of history, the visage of the present city is much more modern than ancient - not so different from that of a middlesized American or European settlement.

Born as a village within Cambodian borders, it counted only a few thousand inhabitants - as against almost two million today - when it fell before Viet Namese expansion southward from Hanoi in the late 17th century. It flourished sporadically during the turbulent years which followed and even served briefly, toward 1800, as imperial residence of the famous Emperor GiaLong, who unified Viet Nam within roughly the present frontiers to end three centuries of dynastic war. His descendant of our day, ex-Emperor Bao Dai, was driven into exile in France by President Diem's government.

There are few traces in Saigon of these earlier times except scattered monuments and pagodas reflecting the Viet Namese penchant for ancestor worship. Only after the French protectorate's establishment in the 19th century did real impetus to metropolitan evolution come. Saigon's main period of construction, early in the 1900's, bequeathed the present city a fashionable main street with Parisian flavor and surrounding residential districts featuring angular, yellow-stuccoed villas with gardens walled for privacy and generous eaves and unglassed windows calculated to beat the tropical heat.

A major landmark dating to that period is sprawling Independence Palace, the President's official residence, which formerly was the seat of the French governor-general in Indo-China. Ensconced in a park of several acres where deer and an elephant have been known to play - the latter a gift to Diem from another Asian dignitary

Spring, 1963

- its mid-city setting is strongly reminiscent of the White House.

Adjacent to the palace grounds, and throughout the city, course broad avenues arched by a half-century's growth of towering tamarind, a: rustic touch that sets Saigon off from other Asian capitals. It is several minutes' walk, past government offices and the cathedral where Diem and many others of Saigon's large Catholic minority worship, to centre-ville with its inviting open-front shops. Since independence, stocks of colorful native wares have been enhanced gradually by a brisk revival of age-old crafts aimed at the expanding world markets for pottery, lacquers, brassware, wickerwork, and other art of Oriental flavor.

But when all is said, 20 years of war and austerity have kept the city's physical profile unpretentious in spite of its growth in population and importance. Moreover, the improvisations worked by successive generations offer no sharp contrast between past and present, or East and West, as in some former colonial centers. Not streets and structures, but the people they serve, engrave Saigon in the Westerner's eye. Indeed, the city's modesty of architectural aspect somehow magnifies the vitality it exudes - as if figures on a canvas had swarmed from their frame to fill new dimensions unintended by the artist.

* * *

Viet Nam's partition and insecurity of the countryside have helped write the script for a spectacular of human effervescence in Saigon. For years now refugees streaming in from the Communist north and from outlying areas of the south have been swelling the flow through arteries of a structurally middle-sized city. Today, as the rush hour crowds converge on centers of commerce and administration, the pavements become a vast open-air factory, market place, playground, and waiting room of humanity. There is none of the perfunctory motorized unison which marks the streets of most metropolises West and East but a splendid hurry and scurry of daily life with the accent on diversity and individuality. Middle-classmen and the army of functionaries have taken to Western clothes, but the panorama of other apparel in Saigon is still an object of fascination. Varied clothing of the mass of laboring men ranges from peasant outfits of serviceable calico nair or khaki separates culled from military surplus to sporty Western-style pajamas which - in Saigon's climate - qualify as the most

sensible of street wear. The traditional male garb of long white trousers with knee-length tunic of black silk is still to be seen, but mainly the elders of society wear it for everyday, with others reserving it for special family or official occasions.

Saigon's women are irrespressibly traditional in dress, and for good reason. Perhaps the most finely-featured and delicately-framed ladies of the Orient, they cling to a national costume which highlights their slender natural beauty. Heads are haloed by wide-brimmed conical hats of dried, pressed palm leaves, often embellished by ribbons or embroidery. The role of the Western skirt is filled by billowing trousers of sleek satin or rayon, either black or a dazzling white. As overgarments, laboring women usually wear short jackets of assorted colors arid fabrics, but those of higher status display superb ao dai - graceful gowns of near ankle-length that lick at their wooden-sandaled feet with every step. High-collared and long-sleeved, they are at once modest, as custom dictates, and supremely elegant. Except that nylon and rayon have gained favor over the silk of yesterday, they are the same as generations ago.

According to a woman's whim, the demands of the occasion, and a few lightlycontrived taboos - no seductive yellow for the married girl, it's said - they vary from delicate pastels through floral prints to brilliant eye-filling hues which range the spectrum. The pageant of ao dai passing in ever-shifting configurations is unique to Saigon, where women form an exclusive sorority of unwitting artists, each splashing her private tint on the mural of the observer's mind.

Other actors in the drama of Saigon street-life are as diverse as the hues of these gowns. As in every non-affluent society there are the many with no place to go who stand or squat, chattering among themselves, or trace solitary paths of unwelcome idleness. But for the larger part of the bubbling crowd business is the byword - the stakes being a few piasters which mean the difference between full and empty stomach. Beggars are remarkably few, for the Oriental concept of "face" is deeply ingrained in Viet Namese thinking.

Sidewalk tradesmen abound, seeming to include a bootblack for every eligible pair of shoes, headline-hawking newsboys by the hundreds, and an army of peddlers dispensing souvenirs along

the main avenues frequented by Westerners. Specialists in the hard sell, their determination is whetted by a simple "no," and their triumph almost assured by a smile or a hint of interest. Three generations are spanned between the toothless rascal crying boats of buffalo horn and the smudge-nosed princess of peanuts with her inexhaustible basket of peanut-filled paper cones and samples for all who glance her way.

With distinctive rings, rattles, and calls that are an important feature of the sidewalk soundtrack, ambulant snack merchants announce a varied fare of savory native foods. Favored dishes include steaming Chinese soup and rice laced with nuoe mam, a fish-oil seasoning revered by the Viet Namese to the point that some argue its vintages and "great years." For the sweet tooth there are Oriental cakes and candies, succulent sugarcane stalks, pineapple rings, and other luscious fruits with which the country is lavishly endowed.

A few of these roving restaurateurs serve from carts, rolled by hand or shrewdly mated with bicycles. But the majority have less elaborate facilities. Their trademark is the ganh - a pliant bamboo yoke poised on one shoulder, from which swing neatly balanced baskets, one fore one aft, heaped with delicacies. Although they tote a man's load, nearly all are women. One marvels at their crouching, bouncing, yet graceful gait - refined by practice to seemingly effortless perfection. * *

Curbstones often become extraneous boundaries as the pedestrian throng challenges vehicular competitors on their nome ground. No one doubts that the latter eventually will rule the roads, but today they are still far from bringing Saigon to mechanized order. Neither the traffic laws in force nor multiplying lights and signs have bridled their hubbub, for the only common denominator of vehicles used is the wheel, and no scrap of paper or scheme of controls could hope to regulate such a potpourri.

Automobiles are overwhelmingly outnumbered by smaller vehicles, although registrations are rising and even American makes have been taking a place gradually beside the French models which echo Viet Nam's colonial lineage. For every car there are some ten bicycles, plus an additional host of bicycle offspring to swell the clan. Carts pushed or pulled by bikes have been contrived ingeniously to transport everything under Saigon's blazing sun, from human cargo bunched like bananas to precariously-piled pagodas of household effects.

The pride of Saigon velocipedes is the cyclopousse, or pedicab, descendant of the abandoned

rickshaw. Its operator pedals from a high tricycle seat behind his fare, one or several persons depending on their build and baggage. Cyclo drivers form a social class in themselves, sr-vernl thousand strong, whose home is the saddle lind whose range is the length and breadth of the city. The main band makes a preserve of the downtown district, specializing in the short hauls which pay off most handsomely, but even at Saigon's remotest frontier the call "cyclo!" seldom goes unanswered. Between fares they congregate in competitive knots at likely pick-up points or patrol in quest of the weary walker. When the drivers weary in turn, they climb down in a spot of public shade and advertise the cushioned comfort of their canvas-topped cabs by personal example.

During recent years a fleet of motor scooters has appeared to rival the bicycle brigade. Variations include scooter-drawn carts, scooter-pushed carts, and scooter-driven cyclos - besides the just plain scooter familiar to Western eyes. For many Saigonese this amounts to the "family car," and among the younger set it is almost de riguer for dating or courting. A common street sight is the Viet Narnese maiden balanced sidesaddle behind her beaming beau, arms daintily waving turns and elegant gown trailing in a swirl of color. If courting days are over, several tots may be crammed in front of the driver or the flowing gown, clinging to one another in approximate order of height and fright.

The quaintest throwbacks still in evidence on the streets are high-wheeled peasant traps which daily make their way into town from the rural suburbs - dubbed "matchboxes" by the French for their miniature size. The "matches" inside are country folk en route to market, conical hats bowed as in prayer beneath low-slung roofs, with baskets and bags of produce jammed among them or lashed space-savingly to tops and sides of the coaches. Some are drawn by lumbering, docile water buffalo on leave from the rice paddies

PRAYER

Behind is a man

With a dog on a leash. The dog is White-muzzled, white-eyed, With a hump in his Back like a pyramid. When he falls, The man lifts him up with A cane made of bone. Kill the dog. The man is Already dead. Amen.

BLAKE LEACH, Speech '63

where they usually toil. But most are pulled by prancing ponies, cockfeather hats aflutter atop bobbing brows. Not quite the festooned headdress of the fierce warhorses of antiquity pictured in Viet Namese art, but one wonders if those steeds of yesteryear ever lifted their plumes of office more proudly,

Even so does Saigon itself face the uncertain road ahead, with chin high, conscious of a past which has known both struggle and splendor. The modest visage it offers today still vibrates with colorful commotion that is at once the result and the rebuttal of the war beyond city limits.

The war is incalculably grim, and its sober details have been advertised widely, so one understands why tourists are not exactly beating a path to this Oriental crossroads now. Meanwhile, Saigon goes on hoarding the ingredients of an eventual pleasant surprise for Far East travelers - including those who thought they had seen everything.

AFTER AESCHYLUS

Gather in the harvest: Time no longer is, No time for time, No room for time's turning upward gaze away from aching eartfi's distress. Pick up the broken apples, and learn to savor the tasteless taste of ashes:

A second harvest sown by the first, and reaped from its blighted fruit.

MICHAEL DALZELL, L.A

'63

Spring, 1963

Age,

Edward Schmidt Petersen holds a number of positions in the Northwestern University Medical School-Assistant Dean, Assistant Professor in the Department of Medicine, Oirector of the Medical School Clinics and of the Graduate Division, and Coordinator, for the Medical School, of Medical Education for National Defense. He is Chairman of the Committee on Hospitals and Clinics for the II/inois Public Aid Commission.

Born in Chicago, he received both his undergraduate and professional training at Harvard (M.D. 1945). His internship was at St. Luke's Hospital in Chicago. After service with the U.S. Medical Corps (1946-8) he became Assistant Resident in Medicine at the University of Chicago. He came to Northwestern in 1951. He has held a number of professional positions, and is a fellow of the American College of Physicians and a member of the American Diabetes Association, the American Public Health Association, and the Association of American Medical Colleges.

The article below was wriHen for The Tri-Quarterly at the invitation of the editor.

It may seem puzzling that medication of the aged should have come to share in these times the central political platform, along with the more traditional issues of war, bread and circuses. After all, age is not new: there was a time when good authority states it to have far exceeded the best current record. Nor is medicine: this profession has long called attention to its rank as the second oldest; and medicine has never been dispensed without a reasonable contribution of money, whether requested by Hippocrates for the Temple Treasury at Cos, or by the Director of Internal Revenue for the Temple of Research at Bethesda. But suddenly, in recent years, fission would seem to have stirred in the atoms of each of these factors, and they have fused into a storm blowing candidates from their platforms and legislators from their accustomed log-rolling.

Of the aged, there are more. This is incontestable. In 1920, the American population numbered 106 million, of whom 4.9 million, or 4.7 per cent, were over 65. By 1960, the population had increased to 179 million, including 16.6 million, or 9.2 per cent, over 65. In 1984, 250 million citizens are anticipated, 25 million, or 10 per cent of whom are expected to be over 65.

The aged are poor. This some may contest. But

in 1960, 53 per cent of those over 65 years had a total cash income of less than $1,000. Only 13.5 per cent received an income in excess of $5,000.

The aged are chronically sick. Twice as many of those over 65, in proportion to the population, have one chronic illness; and four times as many have three or more illnesses. Those 65 to 75 are bedridden 11 days annually; those 25 to 45, five days. When hospitalized, the aged remain longer, 14 days as against 8.6 days. They visit their physicians more often, 6.8 visits versus 5 visits per person per year.

Medical care is more expensive. Between 1929 and 1960, the consumers' price index rose 70 per cent for all items, 105 per cent for medical care. From 1950 to 1960, the rise in the medical care index was twice that of the overall, and more than that of any other component. In 1940, private expenditures for medical care amounted to $3.0 billion, public $0.9 billion, totaling $3.9 billion or 4.1 per cent of the gross national product. By 1960, these had increased to $20.3 billion and $6.2 billion respectively, totaling $26.5 billion, now 5.4 per cent of the gross national product. Of this, the senior citizen spends the patriarch's share. In 1958, the per capita gross expenditure for medical care of those over 65 was $177; for those under, $86.

While the costs of medical care are under consideration, a historical digression may prove enlightening. Might it not be appropriate to compare the problem of medicating the aged with that of educating the young? Both activities usually represent the major service effort of a community. There is scarcely a town in which the school and the hospital are not now the largest and finest structures. Both are expensive activities, generally considered to benefit the community. Both require heavy expenditure for an intangible and never guaranteed result. Both, if in varying degrees and at different stages, fall upon every citizen.

If some resemblance of these problems is conceded, then one may wonder why the public support of education was a major issue of the early 19th century in the United States, and that of medical care would seem to be one of the late 20th.

Ind MODey

It is said that prior to 1800, education was a function of the church, and of the occasional private academy. So, too, was medicine, though subsequent to the Middle Ages with decreasing emphasis on the monastic hospital, and increasing effort by the individual physician. Then during the early decades of the 19th century, debate stirred this country and most of the western world, with the result that public school systems of various types and levels became accepted and established.

The most ready hypothesis would seem to be that a century and a half ago medical care was cheap, and education relatively expensive; and that now both are expensive, medical care probably the moreso. Indeed, reference may easily be found as to how cheap medical care once was. For example, in 1870 an office visit cost 25 cents, a house call 50 cents, and a complete obstetrical delivery $5.00. Unfortunately, national figures for medical expenditures are not available except for relatively recent years. As regards education, in 1850 the total national expenditure is reported as $16 million; in 1870, $95 million; and in 1910, $560 million. By 1940, educational expenditures had increased to public expenditure of $2.7 billion and private of $0.5 billion, totaling $3.2 billion; but at this time, as noted above, medical expenditures were already $3.9 billion. In 1960, public educational expeditures were $16 billion and private $4.5 billion, totaling $20.5 billion, a striking rise but not as great as that of medical expenditures to $26.5 billion. It may well be that expenditures in these two areas have always been approximately the same. At least, were one to base an estimate on the number of physicians as contrasted to the number of teachers, one might conclude that educational expenditures actually have increased relatively more rapidly than medical. In 1870, there were 221,000 teachers and 62,383 physicians in the United States. Now there are 1,400,000 teachers or more than six times as many, and 256,000 physicians, a fourfold increase. Of course, it is not accurate to base an estimate of total medical expenditure on the number of physicians. The percentage of medical expenditures devoted to physicians' services has decreased markedly as other areas of health service have increased far more rapidly. Over the past 40

Spring, 1963

By EDWARD S. PETERSEN

years the number of nurses has grown tenfold, now totaling 504,000. In 1873, there were 180 hospitals; now there are 6,876. By 1957-1958, when the mean private gross expenditure for health care for all persons was $94, physicians' services amounted to $31, hospital care $22, drugs $19, dental care $14, other medical services $8.

Perhaps there was less interest in the provision of public medical care than of public education a century and a half ago for reasons quite other than financial. Perhaps the citizen of that day was only too well aware that the some 30,000 physicians he supported were harmless at best, and quite dangerous at worst. It may be noted that only four remedies of that time were of actual benefit. Those were the prescription of lime juice for scurvey vaccination for smallpox, quinine for fever (if it chanced to be due to malaria), and digitalis for dropsy (if due to heart failure). Essentially all other efforts were useless, or deadly, as was the prevalent custom of massive bleeding, which helped to kill at least one President. In striking contrast, successful educational efforts would seem to have been undertaken by Socrates and other teachers back to Zinjanthropus.

To return from this unresolved historical digression to the medical problems of the currently aged.

The medical care of the aged is currently supported through a great variety of sources. Generally, among those supporting themselves, a much greater proportion is paid directly rather than through insurance, as contrasted to the general population. In a recent survey, those under 65 paid out of pocket less than 30 per cent of hospital bills averaging around $300; those over 65 paid more than 50 per cent of bills around $400. The remainder in each instance was paid by insurance. For those with insufficient resources of their own, sources of support depend on chance, tradition and individual talent for scraping up help. The fortunate citizen who spent at least a short period in the Armed Forces in time of war receives the most excellent of care at no expense. He who presents an intriguing medical problem, preferably one that is surgically removable, and is able to reach a teaching or research center, is as well off technically as the Veteran, if not

quite financially. Traditionally, the medical care of the indigent has been provided by the local community or county, supplemented by private charitable resources. Public support has usually been limited to the provision of hospital facilities, with physicians expected to provide their services without recompense. While there has been an increasing tendency to staff such hospitals with salaried physicians, much of the burden of care still falls upon the volunteer attending physician.

The totally indigent citizen, supported through the Old Age Assistance Program, is provided medical care through a combination of federal and state support varying to a great extent in accordance with his state of residence. In Illinois, hospital, nursing home and office medical care are provided by the Program,

Since the passage of the Kerr-Mills Amendment of 1960, the citizen need not be totally indigent and receiving Old Age Assistance to be eligible to receive this new combined federai-state support of his medical care. This program has been implemented in about half the states, and the type of assistance provided varies a great deal, in Illinois being limited essentially to hospital care. There is an inherent administrative difficulty in this program due to the necessity of investigating the patient's financial resources when application for support is made on admission to a hospital. Consequently, by the time the patient's eligibility has been established, he is apt to have died, recovered and paid his own bill, or recov€:red and vanished, leaving the hospital to collect as best it can.

Still another resource remains for the talented and persistent citizen. All he need do is convince the Federal or State Office of Vocational Rehabilitation that given a certain amount of care, a new leg, or a new wig, he is certain to regain employment; all medical expenses involved in his rehabilitation will then be paid.

It would be pleasant to conclude a presentation of the medical problems of the aged with the customary suggestion that given another $20 billion or so for research, a healthy and carefree senior citizenship will become available for all at no expense to anyone. A somewhat different outlook seems more likely. Consider in the future a landscape of giant institutions, anyone of them the size of the collected pyramids of Egypt. There, attached to his artificial heart-lung-kidney, the aging citizen will be sustained in unconsciousness forever, or until the last of his descendants joins him in exhaustion.

In some ways, it may well prove regrettable that the problem of public support of medical care was not raised at the time of its resolution in the field of education. Our present educational system, based upon multiple sources of support, local, state, federal and private, would Seem far

better adapted to a large and varied nation than one supported entirely by the federal government. It is discouraging to see how attitudes have changed, and how the senior citizen now feels that his problems should be solved. In a recent survey, individuals over 6'5 were asked to respond to the following question: "Who do you think should provide for the older person who has stopped working, if he needs help?" Their responses are summarized below. (Percentages total more than 100 because respondents mentioned more than one source of assistance.)

his

The very complexity of the problem leads to hope for an easy solution through bills and amendments in Washington in place of seeking and experimenting with solutions at home. Unfortunately, various national health services have been devised since the first in Germany in 1883, and none has provided more than a temporary and partial solution. All have stumbled against the hard but inescapable fact that every person, especially when feeling under par, prefers to be cared for hand and foot; and nowhere is a totally comfortable environment provided at no cost to the individual save in the hospital of a national health service. It is usually assumed that access to the universally desired, but unfortunately limited and expensive environment of the hospital, can be controlled successfully by the admitting physician. It is too much to expect of a profession dedicated to enhancing the welfare and comfort of mankind to undertake so vicious a task as to deny the patient his one desire. In the first place, the physician himself prefers to have his patient in the well-controlled environment of the hospital; it is much easier for him to care for the patient neatly placed in a hospital bed rather than inconveniently appearing at the office or demandingly calling from his home. In the second place, it may be physically hazardous for the physician to deny to the patient what he considers his absolute right. The life of at least one physician in a government hospital was saved only when the pistol of a patient demanding admission failed to fire.

A new universal law has been recognized to the effect that a hospital will fill to capacity no matter how many beds are available in a community. In the United States, it has been felt for some years that four general hospital beds per thousand people is the most desirable number. In most

parts of the country, these are now available, and almost everyone is filled. The West Germans have built beds even faster, and have eleve-n P('I" thousand available; these are all filled, and there are long lists of national health service participants waiting to be admitted. Hitherto, the only successful solution has been that of the British, which simply has been to provide no new hospitals at all. The existing ones, many built early in the 19th century, apparently are sufficiently uncomfortable to permit those requiring emergency admission at least to be accommodated. Sweden, where the national health service began in 1955, has not been as fortunate, and already there are complaints of 40 patients dying while on the waiting list of a hospital.

There is nothing whatever to indicate a more successful outcome should the national program under consideration in this country be adopted. While the patient is expected to make a modest contribution, the amount is not such as to exclude the hospital from remaining the best "travel bargain" available to the elderly patient in need of a change. It is most unfortunate that a national health plan has been proposed and seconded in this country when proper attention has not been paid to studying the excellent arrangements devised in Australia and Switzerland; there federal support for those in need is combined with strong local and voluntary programs. Having avoided a fixed national pattern, both countries have been able to evolve and improve their pro-

LAZARUS

All that - the joy so close

To horror in the sisters' eyes, The joy of it: to realize

The awful meaning of repose With ending of it; the force

Beneath the instant earth, churning, Terribly alive, the fearful force Of life, beyond all learning ; All that, the glory of itWe know the story of it.

We know the story, but never Know the end of the endeavour.

Tell me: did that man sever From the earth's behaviour

To deny again his saviour, Jesus, who deprived him of forever ?

MALCOLM McCOLLUM, L.A., '64

grams continually, and adapt them to local conditions. Canada, likewise, achieves its health effort primarily through its provinces, and benefits from vigorous provincial experimentation, as the recent turmoil in Saskatchewan will attest. It does not speak well for the strength of the individual American state, community and citizen that their counterparts from the Swiss canton to the Australian state should show so much more of a forceful, imaginative and adaptive approach to the financial problems of medical care.

The difficulties inherent in financing medical care for the aged, and for all, are not to be ignored, and will not resolve themselves. They will not be cured by an antiquated patchwork; of federal amendments, hastily conceived and pohtically balanced. There is abundant time for thorough study and a search for new approaches at every level, individual, organizational, local, state and national. If we must display immediate political vigor, let it be to dig cellars to fend off the Horseman of War, and fill the holes with grain to drive away Famine. Death and the Devil should be riding with us leisurely for a sufficiently' long time to permit ample planning for their unlikely departure.

Acknowledgement. Factual data in this report are taken primarily from "Financing Health Care of the Aged, Part I: A study of the dimensions of the problem." This was prepared by a joint task force of the Blue Cross Association and American Hospital Association and published jointly by these Associations in October, 1962.

BEACH IN WINTER

The secret snow is falling upon the lonely beach; Blanketing the life-guard chair, a summer object of long ago, The fragile flakes compact, icing smooth rough sand; The dune grass grows stiff, erect with cold. Seagulls leave their crying; a hush entombs the beachA stillness ruffled only by the mourning of the surf.

MICHAEL DALZELL, L.A '63

Spring, 1963

the more things seem to change • • •

by WILBERT SEIDEL

It is a temptation for us to describe almost everything we do today in terms of our dramatic break with the past. Our preoccupation with our differenoes from our predecessors implies a belief that ever-accelerating change somehow makes our time as well as ourselves unique. We begin to believe that progress and the value of man's acts are proportional to this change. We forget that the more things look different to us the more they conceal their relationship to the past. For example, in art today everyone observes mostly what is strange, unfamiliar or new, sometimes even to the amazement of the artist who makes it. Occasionally he alone remains aware of his artistic origins when others do not.

Art students in universities naturally reflect the interests and pursuits which characterize the thinking of serious contemporary artists. It is therefore interesting to observe the interaction of tradition and innovation in their work, and to note how the more things seem to change, the more they are the same.

The prints reproduced here are from the collection of undergraduate student work in graphic arts in the Department of Art.

A Japanese student draws from her own culture the ancient symbol of youth and courage - the fish - but the vigorous and free carving reflects the interests of the contemporary woodcutter and produces a feeling unlike that of the traditional Japanese print.

A reminder that everyone who has cut a linoleum block remains indebted to the inventive imagination of the Chinese artists of the sixth century who were probably the first to print impressions from carved blocks of wood.

Woodcut - "Fish" (201;4" x 43;4") by Fujiko Nakaya, L.A., 1957

Linocut - "Fish" (8" x 3") by Russell Asala, L.A., 1961

Lithographs are prints made from limestones about 3 inches thick upon which drawings have been made with an oily crayon or liquid tusche. The stone is chemically treated arid kept wet so that, when rolled with an oily ink, the ink will adhere to the drawn parts but not to the clear parts of the stone. The process is unique in allowing printing from a flat surface.

by David Stuntzner, L.A., 1960

It is probable that nothing is done today that was unknown to the discoverer of lithography some 200 years ago. The print below shows a student drawing on a stone.

L· h h "W

D'" (10" x 14112.") tt ograp - oman raunng I:

Lithograph - "The Burning Bush" (73;.1" x 12") by William Ishmael, L.A., 19.59

Lithograph - "The Hospital Bed" (8Y2" x 10Y2") by Maren Mouritsen, Speech, 1961

Drawing from living models continues to fascinate the artist as it has for centuries. This was drawn in a city orphanage hospital. It was later reproduced on the cover of a hospital publication - The PresbyterianSt. Luke's Review.

Spr.ing, 1963

The sense of mystery associated with this traditional subject is achieved through technical means quite different from those customarily employed several decades ago.

This inclination on the part of the artist to alter his methods in the interest of expression illustrates one aspect of the contemporary artist's freedom.

First, a lithographic stone was blackened with crayon. This head was then drawn by scraping away crayon with a razor blade. Head drawing can easily deteriorate into unimaginative, imitative portraiture, but in this instance the choice of scraping tool suggested new effects to the artist and transformed the qualities of the drawing into something unexpected.

u h h "H d" (7112" x 10") b L WOl LA' 1956

Lt ograp - ea 7� y ynn L son,

Lithograph - "Tree and Rock" (6lj2" x 93/4") by Mary

Frankenberger, L.A., 1957

In commercial printing today the artists' work can be transferred photographically to a sheet o] thin metaL, then printed on highspeed presses. For making the original drawing, however, the artist still needs the special surface and character of the stone to achieve the many unique qualities that distinguish lithography. Thus, although methods change in one shop, in the other they remain the same.

The editors invited Wilbert Seidel, Professor in the Department of Art, to choose for The Tri-QuarterLy some examples of student work, done in his classes in the graphic arts. These are drawings which, over the years, he has especially remembered.

Spring, 1963 25

tHe

A John Hay fellow at Northwestern this year, B. forrest Shearon is an English teacher in the Jefferson County School System, Louisville, Kentucky. Born near Bolivar, Tennessee, he received his Bachelor of Arts degree (1956) from Union University, Jackson, Tennessee, and taught in West Tennessee for two years before moving to Louisville. He is one of eighty-seven of the nation's high school teachers chosen for a year's study by the John Hay fellowship Program. (fourteen of the fellows are at Northwestern and the rest are studying in five other universities: California, Chicago, Columbia, Harvard, or Yale.) He has also done graduate work at Memphis State University and the University of Louisville.

Anold man in West Tennessee once told me a simple anecdote which he called a joke. It went something like this: Two farmers were talking about the moon. One asked if there had been a full moon the night before. The other replied that he wasn't sure because he had just seen it "from a distance." I have probably remembered this little - joke because I never understood why the old man laughed so loudly when he finished telling it. But there is a bit of folk wisdom in the fact that we cannot be positive about many things we see or hear from a distance.

In the past decade the distance problem has often been reflected in the numerous articles and speeches about the South. It has become almost axiomatic to discuss the Southern part of the United States in terms of the racial conflicts there. Since this is true, perhaps it is well to remind the outside observer that he has many advantages, in addition to some limitations, when he views, from his distant vantage point, the South's negro-white question. By recognizing his advantages and admitting his limitations, the remote viewer may eventually come to a better un-

derstanding - a prerequisite to the solution - of the racial problem in the South.

FAIR ADVANTAGES

When the distant observer focuses his penetrating gaze on the South, he has, it seems to me, both fair and unfair advantages Because of his position away from the scene, he can often see rights denied the negro which may not be as apparent to the Southerners themselves. This is not to say that many Southerners cannot, or have not, recognized their own discriminations; it is simply a statement of the obvious - the outside observer can see some things more clearly than can others who are in the middle of the picture.

The legal rights denied the negro are perhaps the ones best seen by the distant witness. He has viewed with disgust the denial of many negroes' voting rights in the South. Only recently he read about the investigation concerning voting procedures in the home county of Mississippi's Senator Eastland, himself the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee! With equal disgust the outside viewer may follow the seemingly slow pace of public school integration in parts of the South. The fact that after the well-known 1954 Supreme Court decision some Southern states began massive negro school building programs is enough almost to bring cries of treason to the lips of the concerned outsider. But he had to learn that this subtle evasion of the orders from the nation's highest court was mild when comoared to the outright defiance of the Faubuses and the Barnetts. The equal use of public parks, public libraries, public transportation, even some public streets has also been denied the Southern negro at times. The conscientious observer from the outside often has the advantage of seeing all these denials of basic legal rights as endangering the very foundations of our legal system.

Unimpeded by strong emotional attitudes, the distant witness may also have the advantage of seeing the human rights being denied the no I� I'll in many parts of the South. In a sectioll of t lucountry steeped in the Christian tradition or hrutherly love, the entire concept has often been lost by many so-called Christians. In 1957 I was asked to present the opening devotional at a teachers' meeting in the small county in West Tennessee where I was teaching at the time. Already a "soft-spoken" integrationist, I decided this was a good chance to teach teachers my beliefs. I chose a rather strong text from the Bible - 'If anyone says, 'I love God,' and hates his brother, he is a liar" - and invented a "parable" to go along with it. Since I knew my teaching position would be endangered if I directly talked about having love for the negro (and being willing to demonstrate that love by, for example, integrating the schools), 1 used a Japanese family on the West Coast during World War II as the heroes of my parable. After carefully showing the prejudice against these "yellow Japs," I fully expected all of the teachers immediately to see the similarity with the South's prejudice against the "black niggers." Unfortunately, this was not the case. The devotional was highly praised; but, as far as 1 could observe by their comments, not a single teacher or administrator understood my real point. (I have jokingly thought that this was my time of closest sympathy with the Master Teacher who was so often misunderstood, even when he was infrequently praised.) The distant viewer has the legitimate advantage of immediately recognizing the basic inconsistency in the South's professed religious beliefs and its actual practices.

Undoubtedly the outside observer has the rightful benefit of also seeing, apart from the religious implications of racial segregation, the wrong that is done to the individual character of the negro because he is discriminated against. When the Little Rock spectacle was at its height, a rather loud-mouthed, ignorant high school senior in one of my classes came in a bit early and said to the students already there, "Anybody want to go to Little Rock with me to fight them niggers?" His sentiments, expressed in West Tennessee just across the Mississippi River from Arkansas, reflect those of far too many (but certainly not all) of the whites in the Deep South. The phrase, "them niggers," is an indication of the total lack of respect for the negro as a human being. Coupled with this lack of respect is the apparent lack of understanding in the South of the importance of good education for the negro (and for the white, sometimes). It is rather easy for the outside observer to see the human wrong done to an individual who is neither respected nor given proper educational opportunities.

There is still another area in which the dis-

Spring, 1963

interested outsider may have a rightful advantag!': he can see the world implications of continual discrimination against the negro in the South. Once, when I pointed out to a Southern (ru-nd of mine what the rest of the world was saying and thinking about our treatment of the negro, he replied rather vehemently, "To hell with world opinion! I'm getting sick and tired of this talk." He may continue to get "sick and tired" of hearing about world opinion, but - in spite of the retrogressive comments of the Goldwater's, the Towers, and the Welches - the talk of an increasingly smaller world will not subside; indeed, it will increase.

To imply that all Southern whites do not see the wrongs done to the negro (and to the nation) by continued discrimination would be, of course, completely false. Many Southerners, even those in the Deep South, do recognize their wrongs; but the impartial observer from the outside has a far greater chance of readily detecting those wrongs and their implications.

Certain pressures - especially legal ones relating to the right to vote, the right to equal treatment under the law, the right to equal use of public facilities and institutions - should be brought to bear on the South by concerned outsiders. United States history for the past hundred years has shown, in fact, that unless external pressures are applied, the South will do little to improve the negro's status in many of these areas. Because, of his unique position, the distant viewer can openly discuss the injustices done to the Southern negro and can, without fear, press the negro's legal claims. (While he is pushing the negro's legal rights, perhaps the outsider should leave the moral suasion to the Southern leaders themselves; it must ultimately come from them anyway.) The fact of his rightful advantages should be realized by the person away from the southern picture and should be utilized properly to help improve racial relations there.

UNFAIR ADVANTAGES

Quite apart from the many rightful advantages he has, the outside critic should recognize that he also has some unfair ones. It may be inevitable that some benefits will be derived by the distant observer, but heneeds to know when he is being unjust in his criticism. The Southerner, it seems to me, has the right to remind the distant viewer about some of these wrongful practices.

When the outside witness' continually points his long-fingered glove at the South to cover up the dirt under his own nails, he is certainly taking an unfair advantage. One has only to walk through the streets of certain areas in South Chicago - or observe the treatment of the Indian or the Mexican in the West, or read about the

racial problems in Washington, D.C. or in New York City - to realize that all is not perfect in the realm of race relations outside of the South either. It is hoped that Mr. Outside Fingerpointer is trying to solve his own racial problems also; but, if he is not. his disgust with the South may be viewed only as ill-concealed hypocrisy. Recently, at an Evanston, Illinois, service station, an Evanston citizen told me he liked the South's attitude toward the negro. "Down there," he said, "the nigger knows his place and stays in it." This man, who was stationed in one of the Southern army camps during the Korean conflict, may express the opinion of many more people outside of the South than the distant viewer would care to admit. Perhaps the outside observer feels that if he shouts loudly enough about the South's problems, no one will hear about this Evanston man or about the other respectable citizens who refuse to allow a negro family to move into their neighborhood. Is it any wonder that many Southerners look a bit askance at the distant viewer whose actions belie his words of indignation about the South?

Another unfair advantage the person outside of the South may take is the gaining of a personal position of power through his finger-pointing activities. The best example of this, unfortunately, is often the politician, especially some conservative Northern and Western Republicans. A few of them, as an aid to election, have loudly proclaimed their sympathy with the rights of negroes; then, with the election over, they have frequently voted with Southern Democrats to defeat issues which would do so much to help the negroes attain those same rights. Federal aid to education, so desperately needed in the South, has been defeated time and again by this "righteous" coalition. The same group helped to defeat the advancement of Dr. Robert Weaver, a negro, to a cabinet position. The refusal to halt filibustering on many civil rights bills must also be credited to this coalition. The list could go on. When any outsider, politician or not, denounces the South as a means of attaining personal power or of achieving certain personal ambitions, he is taking an unfair advantage of his position away from the scene. One hopes that there are few who derive (or desire to derive) unjust benefits from their distant accusations; but they, like the nonegroes-in-this-neighborhood distant observers, need some gentle reminders about their own hypocrisy.

LIMITATIONS

The advantages - both fair and unfair onesof the external witness must be seen in proper perspective with the limitations he has because of his distance from the scene. Those limitations often are the result of the difficulty, or even the

inability, to understand at least three things: the mind of the South; the hardships under which Southern racial moderates and liberals operate; and the changes and improvements being made in the South.

There is really no such a thing as the Southern mind, any more than there is the Northern mind or the democratic mind. The mind (I use this term in relation to the total personality) of the South must be generalized greatly in order to make any concrete statements about it. It is certainly difficult for the distant viewer to comprehend the prejudice many Southerners hold against the negro. In fact, these same Southerners would usually deny that they are prejudiced at all. They would merely say that the negro has his rights and his place just as the white has his rights and his place. The fact that the "rights" and the "place" of the negro are on a separate and frequently lower level than those of the white seems to be completely forgotten by the Deep South mind. Numerous arguments - such as the "low morals" of the negro, his presumed low mentality, the so-called Biblican injunction against integration, the fear of intermarriage - are glibly presented by many Southerners. Behind these frequently false or, at best, half-true arguments lies a mind that almost must be lived to be understood. Generations of ingrained prejudice have produced this mind. I remember, as a Southern youngster, always assuming that the negro would go to the back door of my house, that he would sit in the back of the bus, that he would go to a different school. It is extremely difficult for a Southerner to lose this sort of prejudice - which I would not have called prejudice at all at that time. Perhaps the dispassionate outsider, who has not lived the Southern mind, can get closer to it by somewhat shabby parallels outside the field of race relations. It is very hard for many of us to understand the adamant stand of the American Medical Association against the administration's Medicare plan. But not many of us have lived to reap the financial harvest of the AMA's mind. The Catholic church's opposition to birth control is equally incomprehensible to many of us who have not lived the Catholic religion. If the distant viewer really wishes to understand the prejudiced mind of some Southerners, he might look deeply into himself for some secret prejudice of his own.

One Northern friend of mine once asked, "Why should I try to understand the South's prejudiced mind? If it's wrong, it's wrong; and we ought to stamp it out." One of my answers to him is the obvious: the attempt to understand a problem is the first step toward its solution. Even the recognition of the difficulty in comprehending some Deep South attitudes toward the negro is better than blatant condemnation.

The second limitation of the remote observer's position is his difficulty in realizing the hardships under which the racial moderate or liberal in the Deep South must operate. The economic, physical, and social pressures have constuntly silenced the voices of many of these inwardly courageous souls. Some of those who have spoken out in favor of the negro's rights have lost their jobs, had their houses bombed and their lives and those of their families endangered, or have lost lifetime friends. Examples are numerous. Representative Brooks Hayes was defeated in a spectacular write-in campaign in Little Rock after he merely asked for common sense in the situation. A Baptist minister, Paul Turner, in Clinton, Tennessee, was cursed, spit upon, even slugged by his fellow townsmen when he dared to walk with a few negro children to the newly integrated school. A number of Southernersnewspapermen, businessmen, lawyers, professors, ministers and priests - have recently spoken out and begged for sanity in the Deep South. They did so knowing full well that their businesses might be boycotted, their homes or offices fired into, or their positions removed. The distant observer might well try to put himself in situations of people like these before he condemns too loudly the silence of others. The Southern racial liberal, of course, does not always walk in continual fear, but examples such as the above do show that some fear is justified - at least in a few areas of the South. Without consideration of these fears, the outsider is limited in his understanding of the real Southern picture.

There is a third area, relating either directly or indirectly to the race problem, in which the external witness may be limited. Unless he has carefully studied the South in recent years, he may be unaware of the changes (and often improvements) - in the economy, in educational standards, in integration, in voting rightswhich are taking place there. The rapid industrial development in many Southern states, which have depended on agriculture since colonial days, is making an impact on the area. New people, sometimes with new attitudes toward race relations, have moved in; and slowly their influence is being felt. The populations are becoming more urban centered, contrasting sharply with the earlier rural dominance. This too is making a difference - sometimes producing, ironically, racial ghettos similar to those in some Northern and Western cities. Educational standards are gradually being raised in the South as teachers' salaries (still pitifully low!) are increased, as college teacher-training programs are improved, and as the need for better education is understood. Universities - such as Vanderbilt, Duke, North Carolina, Georgia Tech, Louisville (really a Midwestern rather than a Southern university), and Tu-

Spring, 1963

lane - are often recognized for their excellence. It is not surprising that most of these universities are integrated. (Even athletics seems to be helping to integrate some Southern collegesmany alumni would like to see the good negro athletes improving the won-lost record of their alma mater.) The right to vote is being gained, and used, by more and more negroes. Public schools, parks, libraries, and zoos have recently been integrated, usually without incident. News media naturally highlight the problem areas, thus leaving the outsider without knowledge of the quiet progress being made in many places. The Old South has not, of course, gone with the wind, but it is going with the advent of new ideas, new blood, new industry, and new external and internal pressures. Perhaps a sincere effort on the part of the concerned distant observer to understand and overcome, if possible, his limitations would be helpful, not only to himself but also to his efforts in improving racial relations in the South.

CONTRADICTIONS IN THE SOUTH

If there are advantages and limitations to the distant viewer's position outside the South, is there an "ideal" distance? Possibly not. Just as in viewing any other group of complicated individuals, the ideal observer, if he exists, must recognize the contradictions that are present. For example, while one church member will talk about the good race relations that used to prevail in his church when "ole Uncle Henry" would come every Sunday and sit in his back-corner seat, the young minister of that same church may be pleading with his congregation to sit in the same waiting room with the negro at the bus station! At the same time many negroes are accepting the responsibilities that go along with more rights, others are seizing the rights and shunning the responsibilities.

Different areas of the South also point up the contradictions. The ideal observer would never make the mistake of confusing racial problems in Louisville, Kentucky, for example, with those in Jackson, Mississippi. These two areas, like so many others, are completely different; yet too often the entire South has been lumped into one huge mold by some uninformed outside viewers.

The mere passage of time or a provocative discussion may reveal contradictions within individuals themselves. Several years ago a young Southern man told me, "Integration will never come to Mississippi." Last spring he told me, "Integration will be a long time in coming to Mississippi." Of course he has been proved wrong on both counts. Perhaps he will now begin his sentence with "complete integration!" When I was teaching in a small town in West Tennessee

in 1957, I asked my students to write personal essays stating why they believed in segregation or integration. After the papers were written, I (under the pretense of being objective) tried to controvert their arguments, regardless of the position they took. Needless to say, most of the papers favored segregation, so I had the chance to counter most of the segregationist arguments. Many of these students had never had the opportunity really to argue with an integrationist before. At least one of them, an extremely bright sophomore boy, was slightly "enlightened." He first wrote his essay favoring segregation; but on the day after we had discussed the papers in class, he turned in another paper (without my asking for it) stating why he now believed in integration of the races. Undoubtedly this rather hasty reversal had not been clearly thought out, but it does indicate the contradictions that so often fill the Southern mind.

Although I spent the first twenty-four years of my life in West Tennessee, near the Mississippi state line; and although I left the Deep South nearly five years ago I am certainly not' an ideal observer. My memories of the South swiftly change from those of nostalgia to nausea (especially when I remember Little Rock or Oxford, Mississippi). Like many other viewers of "far away places," I fluctuate between the highly romantic view and the sharply critical one. Feeling this way about the South (which I have known from personal experience and have also observed from a distance), it is difficult for me to conceive of an ideal witness who has never really had a close-up view. The intricate details almost demand careful scrutiny. Sometimes the Southerner himself can best guide the outside observer in his tour of the intricacies there. In an essay regarding the critics of modern poetry, the poet Randall Jarrell wrote that some critics, if engaged in a bacon-judging contest, would impatiently say �o a pig if it wandered up, "Go away, Pig! What do you know about bacon?" The critic of the South must not object to a bit of onthe-scene guidance, especially if he wishes to become that elusive ideal observer.

Even if he only desires to become an individual well informed about the South's racial problems, the concerned outsider should do three things: recognize his just advantages and use them properly; candidly admit (or seek to overcome) his limitations and not misuse them; and realize that contradictions exist in the South, as they do elsewhere. The South, like the moon when seen "from a distance," presents a perplexing picture; and the outside observer must be cognizant of this complicated scene if he wishes to help improve racial relations there.

TThe Pond�

By Barry G. Brissm.

HE DOOR opened and a puff of wind blew in, followed by Charlie. "Jim is dead," he said. I stood there in the middle of the aisle with the feed bucket in my hand. "He's over to the stud barn Charlie said. "Somebody got him in the chest with a pitch fork." I set the bucket down on the dirt floor then and followed Charlie outside. An even cover of grey clouds moved steadily across the sky; it was November.

A police car was parked in front of the stud barn, a bright piece of city thrown amongst the weathered cluster of buildings and rail fences, framed against pine trees and mountains, sinister and out of place. I didn't go inside to look at Jim, just waited by the door. After a while they came out, two of them, carrying him. Four holes were evenly spaced across his chest, and the blood had dried on his wool shirt. His blond hair was still combed, the front locks falling across his brow as they always did. Denton helped them load him into the car, and then, straightening up, he said, "Duke's gone, all right. He lived up there in the apartment over the garage, and now he ain't there. He ain't on the place. Either of you guys seen Duke around this morning?" Denton looked at us. Charlie and I shook our heads.

"Looks to me like he run off," Denton said, "This is the first time Duke has been off the place since we hired him on here a year ago. Duke has killed him and run off."

The two policemen got into the car then and slammed the doors. We stood there watching as they drove out of the yard - Denton and Charlie and I - and when they had gone Denton stood for a while rubbing the stubble on his chin with a big hand and looking vacantly down the road after them, and then he looked at Charlie. "Don't let them mares into the south pasture any more this year," he said. "Better put 'em somewheres else."

"I think we'd just as well leave 'em, Denton, being as -

"Dammit, old man, I told you I don't want any horses in that south pasture and I mean it!"

Charlie looked full into the broad, unshaven face. "Where d'you want 'em?"

"I don't give a rip where you put 'em. Keep 'em in the barn if you have to, but do what I tell you. Keep 'em out of that south pasture." He turned and walked away from us, and Charlie glared after him.

The police came back later that day, this time with two cars and eight men. They formed a search party and moved off into the foothills to the west, and it was evening and beginning to get dark before they gave up looking and came walking back into the yard. Denton came out of the house to talk to them, and they were still standing there talking, the whole group of them, shaking their heads in the dimming light when I finished chores and went in for supper.

I was fourteen then, and Charlie nearly sixty. We lived in the bunkhouse, Charlie and I, which was old but pretty nice. (It had been the main house until Jim and Denton had built the new one up on the hill ten or fifteen years before.) After supper we generally played cards, played gin rummy most often. So we played gin rummy that night too, but disinterestedly. I couldn't stop talking.

"Jim sure used to curse at Duke something awful," I said.

"Yeah," Charlie grunted, "Duke don't like to work."

"Seemed Duke was pretty used to it. Never seemed to pay any attention to it, did he?"

"Never seemed."

"Guess Denton will have to hire another man or so now."

Spring, 1963

8arry G. 8rissman, who comes from Naperville, Illinois, is a junior in the Col/ege of Liberal Arts, majoring in English. Graduate school lies ahead of him, with college teaching as his probable career. Farming and music are his non-curricular specialties. The music is "popular piano," and the farming runs from last summer's work on a thoroughbred farm near Wheaton, lIIinois, back to boyhood summers working on his uncle's farm in North Dakota.

Charlie sat stooped over the table looking at the cards in his hand. He never looked at me when he talked, and he- always half muttered, as if he were talking to himself. "He'll have to hire one more than he figures on if he don't quit losing his temper. He's a wild man. He can treat them horses bad and I don't say too much, but when he bellows his fool head off at me for no good reason .'

"Gin," I said. We counted points and Charlie shuffied the cards.

"Don't know how Jim could get on with that foul-mouthed Denton for a partner all these years," Charlie muttered, "and I ain't sure I can put up with Denton now he's gone."

"I liked Jim," I said.

"He's the only one ever treated me half decent, or you either, boy." Charlie dealt the cards.

"Wonder where Duke ran off to," I said.

"He'll stay away from the roads, maybe hide in one of them cabins in the hills. He's got no place to run to and they'll get him in a couple days."

I won the card game that night, and afterwards I went down to water the horses in the barn before going to bed. It was a little colder and the wind was down, the sky clouded over solid. I walked from stall to stall, putting the hose through the iron bars, filling the buckets. And then I began thinking about Duke, about the hulking shoulders and the inscrutable face with the stupidly staring black eyes. He was out there somewhere and he'd killed Jim: the idea wore on my mind, and that night in my sleep Duke's baleful face appeared over and over.

The next day winter came, suddenly, like the strike of a snake, and coldness set in the extremities of the earth. It snowed all day, hard, and the police couldn't go out to look for Duke that day. Even finding the buildings around the place was difficult. By noon we had to fight through drifts

and wind to get to the barns, Charlie with a scarf tied over his ears and wearing his hat, I with my parka hood drawn up tight. And always I imagined that Duke would be lurking in the barn, come there to get out of the cold. And whenever I went into the barn I felt it creeping up my back, like an animal, gripping my spine with its icy claws and I knew it was fear.

That night when I went out to water the horses the fear was worse, something filthy and terrible, breathing on my neck. Three dim bulbs above the aisle lit the barn, and everywhere else was blackness. I stood leaning motionless on the iron bars at each stall, staring into the shadows; and every few moments a thrill came out of the pit of my stomach and shot through my heart and my limbs. There was the smell of the horses and the hay, and the smell of the cold. And there was the crunching sound of horses eating, the gurgle of water in a pail, and outside the wind and the creaking of the barn. When I finished I dropped the hose on the floor without coiling it and went out. The drifts were deep - I was running through them and the exertion made the thrills stop shooting through me. And as I ran I was remembering what Charlie had said at supper: "He's around here somewhere. They'll find him tomorrow."

That face, impassionate, blank as the snow, and the black eyes around here somewhere here somewhere And I stumbled through the drifts toward the bunkhouse.

But they didn't find him the next day. The roads were blocked and again the police didn't come out from town. The snow had stopped and the cold had come, a steel needle numbing the land and the man. It pierced my parka and my gloves and my boots, and pricked me with its deadening pain. The day passed slowly, the fear always pervading, soaking in to my bone like the cold.

About four in the afternoon I trudged back to the bunkhouse to thaw out. Charlie was there, sitting in front of the heat vent. He moved his chair over to share the heat with me, and by and by I forgot about the cold outside. I asked if I could go skating before supper.

"Can if you want to," he said, "but it's terrible cold."

"Where's the shovel?" I asked. "Have to clear the ice where it's not blown off."

"Believe it's up by the big house."

So after a bit I slung my skates over my shoulder and went out again, up the hill to the house to get the shovel. The pond was about three hundred yards into the south pasture, just over a little rise. It was shallow - knee-deep on the horses when they waded in it - not deep enough for swimming but good for skating in winter. I was breathing hard by the time I got there: my feet were already a little cold. And then I was shoveling, whiteness blinding my eyes and wind \ blurring them with tears, and the sound of the shovel distant through the wind. For maybe five minutes only the blur and the cold and the scrape of the shovel, and then, suddenly, I was tired. I dropped the shovel on the cleared ice, straightened up stiffly, and wiped my eyes with the back of my glove. The wind whispered sounds of isolation in my ears; overhead a leaden cover of greyness moved steadily across the sky.

I looked down at my skates lying in the snow, and then at the little patch of ice I had cleared. The land was white and the sky grey, everywhere colorless cold. I decided to go home. As I leaned over to pick up the shovel I thought I heard someone shout my name. And then I saw him - the terrible impassive face and the black eyes, staring at me from out the ice, meaningless as in life, frozen in an eternal stare, obscured slightly by the frozen thickness between us.

Then I heard the voice again, the shout. "Boy, get away from that pond! Go do your work! You

And then he saw me staring into the ice, and the shout became a scream of rage that shattered the wind. I saw Denton standing at the top of the rise, fumbling in his pocket; and now a knife was in his hand. The cold held me there motionless, that horror beneath my feet and Denton now stumbling down the slope shouting furious obscenities, and I not knowing where to place my fear. The greyness and the whiteness, the fear and the horror, the wind and the cold, and I standing there motionless. And then behind the rage and the knife descending the slope I saw Charlie appear at the top of the rise, the glint of a rifle barrel in his hands.

LIGHTNING

Lightning

When it flashes

Sends staccato chills down my spine

Because in my teens

A bolt killed a friend

And because it was the God of my teens

That did the killing.

THOMAS H. ARTHUR, Speech '59

By Yohma Gray

The Poetry of LOUIS SIMPSON

Yohma Gray, who came to Northwestern as an instructor in English in the Fall of 1960, is teaching here and is a candidate at Yale for her doctor's degree. She is writing a critical analysis of the Negro novelist, Richard Wright. Miss Gray was born in Jamestown, New York, went to school and grew up there, in the beautiful lake country near the old town of Chautauqua, then went to Syracuse University (A.B. 1957). She began her graduate work at Yale, taking an A.M. in 1958.

The article below is the twelfth in a series upon contemporary American poets, written for The Tri-Quarterly by members of the English Department. Under the title Poets in Progress the first ten of these were published in book form by the University Press last Spring.

The paradox inherent in objective criticism of lyric poetry is nowhere more apparent than in an analysis of Louis Simpson's poetry. Lyric poetry seeks to describe intense but transient sensations and emotions which prose cannot, seeks to suspend primary experience for a moment in time so that it may be savored and relished. Many primary experiences are basically incommunicable on any level. Consider the difficulty of describing, to someone totally ignorant of the experience, how a cello sounds, or how sandpaper feels, or how a puppy's mouth smells. So-called objective or judicial criticism, therefore, which is mere explication de texte, is obviously self-defeating because the subject of a lyric poem is, by definition, beyond the ordinary domain of prose. It does not gain its effect through the information it contains but through the feeling it evokes, and the poem exists because poetry is the only medium through which the experience can be shared.

Louis Simpson published his first book of poems, The Arrivistes, in 1949, Good News of Death in

Spring, 1963

1955, and A Dream of Governors in 1959. Shortly he will publish a fourth volume of verse, At the End of the Open Road, and he plans an edition of Selected. Poems in 1964. Many of his poems have been published separately in The New Yorker, Hudson Review, American Scholar, Paris Review, Partisan Review and in other journals and anthologies. In addition to his poems he has published one novel, Riverside Drive, in 1962, one record in the YaLe Series of Recorded Poets, one critical study, James Hogg, in 1963. He edited The New Poets of EngLand and America, together with Donald Hall and Robert Pack, in 1957, and he has published critical articles in leading magazines. He is married, has three children, and is currently an associate professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley.

Although anyone of his poems is self-sufficient and self-contained, the relationship between the

"Arm in Arm," "Ballad of the Beery Boys," "Invitation to a Quiet Life," "Jamaica," "The Lady Sings," "Over at the Baroque Ryehouse," "Room and Board," (© 1949 Louis Simpson), are reprinted with permission of Fine Editions Press from The Arrivistes (1949) by Louis Simpson. "The Battle," "Early in the Morning," "The Heroes," "Islanders," (© 1955 Louis Simpson), are reprinted with permission of Charles Scribner's Sons from Good News of Death and Other Poems (1955) by Louis Simpson (POETS OF TODAY Ill. "The Boarder," "The Green Shepherd," "Hot Night on Water Street," "I Dreamed that in a City Dark as Paris," "Music in Venice," "Song: 'Rough Winds Do Shake,''' (© 1949, 1956, 1957, 1958, 1959, 1963 Louis Simpson), are reprinted with permission of Wesleyan University Press from A Dream of Governors (1959) and At the End of the Open Road (in press) by Louis Simpson. All poems, in whole or in part, are reprinted with permission of Louis Simpson. Five are printed with permission of magazines credited in the text.

poems, and between his life and the poems, perhaps deserves some mention. With first-person authority he writes primarily about war, love, urbanism, the American dream, and human mortality. He was born in 1923 in Jamaica, British West Indies, of varied national ancestry. He came to New York to study at Columbia College in 1940 but his studies were interrupted by World War II, during which he served in the 101st Airborne Division of the U.S. Army, through the invasion of Europe from Normandy to Berchtesgaden. He emerged from the war with a bronze star, a purple heart, and United States citizenship, not to mention frozen feet and delayed shock. He returned to Columbia to receive bachelor's, master's, and doctor's degrees. He was an associate editor with the Bobbs-Merrill publishing company until 1955, and since then has been teaching. The obvious use he has made, therefore, of all this experience, invites the so-called intentional fallacy, or the use of biographical material and explicit intention, and the so-called affective fallacy, or the use of emotion and association through "objective correlatives."

Formally his poems fall into three general types: short lyrics; longer poems which depend on topical and historical allusions but which are nevertheless more lyrical than academic in tone; and long dramatic poems. His point of view is more subjective than objective; the reader is aware of the intrusion of the poet's private, inner life in the poems rather than the insertion of an invented character from whom the poet is detached. He does not demonstrate what Keats called "negative capability," or what has been more recently called aesthetic distance. Although he sometimes writes in the third person, the reader senses a subjective "I" in the poem, just as Browning often writes in the first person but conveys the sense of an objective "he." (His dramatic poems are no exception; however, the focus of this essay is on the lyrical poems.) In "The Battle," for example, he delays and thereby intensifies the meaning of the experience to the subjective "I":

Helmet and rifle, pack and overcoat

Marched through a forest. Somewhere up ahead Guns thudded. Like the circle of a throat

The night on every side was turning red.

They halted and they dug. They sank like moles Into the clammy earth between the trees.

And soon the sentries, standing in their holes, Felt the first snow. Their feet began to freeze.

At dawn the first shell landed with a crack. Then shells and bullets swept the icy woods. This lasted many days. The snow was black. The corpses stiffened in their scarlet hoods.

Most clearly of that battle I remember The tiredness in eyes, how hands looked thin Around a cigarette, and the bright ember Would pulse with all the life there was within.

In the midst of all that death, the meaning of life becomes momentarily clear in the ordinary act of smoking a cigarette; and in the midst of all those extraordinarily dramatic images, the mundane image becomes extraordinarily intense.

I am not suggesting that the poems are more concerned with literal than artistic truth or that Louis Simpson is masquerading as all the characters he creates; rather, I mean to call attention to the re-personalization which these poems represent in the direct relationship between reader and writer. They seek to create a rapport which has not been generally characteristic of poetry in the first half of the twentieth century. They appeal not to some past, lost, and eternal truth as a means of salvation, but rather to some present, hidden, and internal relationship which can become an effective conspiracy against the dehumanizing forces in the modern world. His intention becomes explicit in "Room and Board";

The curtained windows of New York Conceal her secrets. Walls of stone Muffle the clatter of the fork.

Tomorrow we shall see the bone.

In silence we construct a sect

Each of us, comrades, has his own. Poems that will not take effect, Pictures that never will be known.

The landlord wipes his mouth of pork, Pauses to eavesdrop, disconnect The water and the telephone;

And Death's unmarried daughter crawls Along the thin lath of the walls And knocks, because we live alone.

Despite the tone, however, there is never a sense of the narrowly parochial nor the embarrassingly intimate. This is not merely self-introspection nor self-analysis. Theodore Hoffman says of the poetry, ". nor is it the victim of either of the affable poetic vices of the day, for it neither attempts to buckle its matter into a self-designed system nor is it engaged in a capricious quest for conceits." That, I think, is one of its major achievements as mid-twentieth century American poetry.

Louis Simpson never departs from traditional form and structure and yet he never departs from contemporary themes and concerns. In "The Lady Sings," for example, he handles a modern psychological situation in the delicate cadence of seventeenth century verse;

The lady sings her child Will be such a one As the world has not known: Jesus without tears.

And as her heart goes wild Between gates of bone He comes into his own, Having his own ideas.

The days her lover smiled

Are as a summer gone.

Over a telephone

We talk across the years.

Now she may be beguiled By apricocks, and groan Her secret to the sun.

Shake her and she bears.

The central feeling of the defeat of a possessive mother through the independence of her son begins with a reference to the Virgin, ends with an oblique reference to the Duchess of Matti, and contains diction as diverse as "apricocks" and "telephone," yet synthesizes the elements gracefully.

In the last stanza of "Invitation to a Quiet Life" Simpson demonstrates the precision of his ear as well as of his eye as he imitates a traditional pastoral form:

Since, Amaryllis, you and I

Adore an advertising sky

And find happiness to stare

At the enchantments of thin air, Let us go in, and not regret The endings that we never met, But in security applaud The ecstasies we can't afford. So shall we manage till the day Death takes the furniture away.

The pastoral form and the urban theme combine ironically and the irony intensifies and clarifies the metropolitan anxieties which are the subject of the poem. Simpson uses a similar device in "Arm in Arm," a war poem:

Beside a Church we dug our holes, By tombstone and by cross. They were too shallow for our souls When the ground began to toss.

Which were the new, which the old dead It was a sight to ask.

One private found a polished head And took the skull to task

For spying on us Till along Driving the clouds like sheep, Our bombers came in a great throng: And so we fell asleep.

The tumultuous chaos of the bombing of a churchyard and the grisly mingling of old corpses and new is the subject of the poem, but the fragmentary senselessness of the experience is enhanced by the deliberately measured and regular meter, and the strife of the battle is heightened by the suggestion of sleep and of the calm of the pastoral scene. There is a kind of literary dialectic in these poems thesis, antithesis, synthesis which forms the dynamic process of an "internal colloquy."

In examining the plight of modern man, Louis Simpson finds all the contemporary tensions between imagination and reality, between fragmen-

Spring, 1963

tation and continuity, between city and country, between Old World and New World, between military and human values, between the American dream and the American actuality; but he neither moralizes nor wails. To him poetry is not the only suitable subject for poetry, nor expressionism the only suitable mode for it. He does indeed juxtapose images which are abstracted from their normal context, creating an apocalyptic quality, but the final effect is to clarify rather than to cloud. If his poems do not always follow an obviously logical progression, the total insight is rational and conscious and the associative progression makes ultimate sense. Throughout his "Jamaica," for example, he relies on metaphors of the body until the final stanza when he shifts to prestige symbols of modern culture:

Life is a winter liner, here history passes Like tourists on top-decks, seeing the shore through sun-glasses: And death, a delightful life-long disease, Sighs in sideways languor of twisted trees.

The shift from organic to mechanistic images is significant in itself and provides an insight into the values of modern life. The form and theme are skillfully unified by the unexpected break at the end of the second line, where the word "sun" (the natural light which makes all sight possible) is sharply juxtaposed to the word "glasses" (artificial devices which alter vision) at the beginning of the third line, with the hyphen intensifying the cleavage. Thus the very abruptness of the shift in associations has a logic of its own to modern man. Simpson is not courting madness in this "multiverse," nor is he insisting that modern man is forever "caught between two worlds, the one dead, the other powerless to be born." In the Romantic tradition he is relying on sensibility as a basis for orientation and movement in a chaotic world, but his reliance on human viscera and cerebra is neither frightening nor agonizing to him. He is quite explicit in a stanza from "Islanders":

Enough of these images - they set the teeth on edge!

Life. if you like, is a metaphor of deathThe difference is you, a place for the passing of breath.

That is what man is. He is the time between, The palpable glass through which all things are seen.

Nothing. Silence. A syllable. A word.

Everything.

Sensational perception and individual identity are his broad concerns. His rhetoric is often ironic; that is, a subtle reversal takes place between the literally expressed and the implied values, through naive narration, understatement, and romantic illusion and disintegration. His presentation of these generalities, however,

is always through the animation of particulars. "He who wishes to see a Vision, a perfect Whole, must see it in its Minute Particulars," according to William Blake, and Louis Simpson adheres to that dictum. He sees reality through particulars; he is a kind of "responsible vagrant" who finds meaning in any situation. He has the talent, however, to generalize his experience without dimishing its concreteness. That is why he can be personal but universal in his tone. "Hot Night on Water Street" is little more than a series of particulars but it conveys the whole of an American small town, universally recognizable:

Three hardware stores, a barbershop, a bar

A movie playing Westerns - where I went To see a dream of horses called The Star Someday, when this uncertain continent Is marble, and men ask what was the good We lived by, dust may whisper "Hollywood."

At the newsstand in the lobby, a cigar Was talkative: "Since I've been in this town I've seen one likely woman, and a car

As she was crossing Main Street, knocked her down." I was a stranger here myself, I said, And bought the New York Times, and went to bed.

"Music in Venice" demonstrates a similar capacity to evoke wholeness through particulars:

It's night in the Piazza. Lighted space Burns like your brandy. Violins and brass Play waltzes, fox-trots. On a cloud, St. Mark's Winged lion perches; High palaces go sailing to the moon, Which, as advertised, is perfectly clear. The lovers rise, moon-struck, and whisper their Arrivedercis.

Venice, the city built on speculation, Still stands on it. Love sails from India And Swedenevery hanging cloud pours out A treasure-chest.

It's love on the Rialto, news of love, That gives Antonio his golden life, Even to Envy, sharpening a knife, His interest.

In "The Inner Part"! a few trivial particulars serve to characterize American mentality before her emergence as a world power into the twentieth century, and American maturity and deep disillusionment after the war to make the "world safe for democracy":

When they had won the war, And for the first time in history Americans were the most important peopleWhen the leading citizens no longer lived in their shirt sleeves, And their wives did not scratch in public; Just when they'd stopped saying "Gosh!"When their daughters seemed as sensitive As the tip of a fly rod, And their sons were as smooth as a V-8 engine -

Priests, examining the entrails of birds, Found the heart misplaced, and seeds

As black as death, emitting a strange odor.

1. © 1963 The Sixties Magazine.

In this poem the shift from the naive buoyancy of pre-World War I America to the sophisticated despair of post-World War I America conveys, as a prose paraphrase cannot, a sense of the exchange of innocence for the knowledge of good and evil. The oblique reference to classical civilization ominously suggests the inevitable consequence of that knowledge, death. Ironically it prophesies World War II.

The value of such a talent is inestimable. Every society has areas of gross insensitivity, some of them positively necessary for carrying on the life processes and some of them merely destructive of the subtle nuances of primary experience which comprise human fulfillment, realization, and delight. There are primitive tribes, for example, which have only three words to denote color: one term for white, one term for black, and one term for all others. Assuming that language and perception are inextricably linked, the level of color awareness in these societies is extremely primitive. Reading the poetry of Louis Simpson makes it obvious that some of our perceptions are equally primitive and undeveloped. We are daily bombarded with sensations from which the conscious mind extracts only a few functional impressions, leaving a vast aggregate of experience to be dismissed or buried in the inner recesses of awareness, below the conscious level. The economy of concentration is often practical but it deprives us of our full power and the responsibilities of that power; it makes us "emotional illiterates," often totally out of touch with our own feelings. Even in the most mundane experience there is a vast area of unperceived reality and it is Louis Simpson's kind of poetry which brings it to our notice. It enables us to see things which are ordinarily all about us but which we do not ordinarily see; it adds a new dimension to our sensational perception, making us hear with our eyes and see with our ears. His poem "F'rogs;"" for example, seems to be a recollection of details of ordinary experience and yet subtly becomes an implied metaphor so that in the resolution, both the particular and the general are sharply impressed on the consciousness: The storm broke, and it rained, And water rose in the pool, And frogs hopped into the gutter,

With their skins of yellow and green, And just their eyes shining above the surface Of the warm solution of slime.

At night, when fireflies trace Light-lines between the trees and flowers Exhaling perfume, The frogs speak to each other In rhythm. The sound is monstrous. But their voices are filled with satisfaction. In the city I pine for the country; In the country I long for conservationOur happy croaking.

2. © 1963 Prism Magazine.

The "shock of recognition" in the final stanza is all the more powerful because of the reader's obtuseness and complacency in the first four stanzas and because the subject of the poem is finally an implied obtuseness and com pi a CPJ1(_'y "Birch"3 is another poem which depends ultimately on a metaphor which is really obvious, but only after the reading of the poem:

Birch tree, you remind me

Of a room filled with breathing, The sway and whisper of love.

She slips off her shoes; Unzips her skirt; arms raised, Unclasps an earring, and the other.

Just so the sallow trunk Divides, and the branches Are straight and smooth.

In "The Boarder," Simpson once again selects the most mundane particulars of a situation to convey the most profound of human feelings:

The time is after dinner. Cigarettes Glow on the lawn: Glasses begin to tinkle; TV sets

Have been turned on.

The moon is brimming like a glass of beer

Above the town, And love keeps her appointments - "Harry's here!" "I'll be right down."

But the pale stranger in the furnished room Lies on his back

Looking at paper roses, how they bloom, And ceilings crack.

The images of the first two stanzas convey the feeling of conviviality and community, and the images of the last stanza convey the feeling of alienation and separation so powerfully because of the contrast between the dynamic processes implied in the former and the static situation implied in the latter. The contrast depends primarily on the jarring tension between the adjective "paper" and the noun "roses," and the implication of disintegration. Simpson is creating meaning from the raw material of experience and is bringing the reader to a deeper level of awareness.

In the same manner but on a different level of matter, Simpson vivifies experience which is not a part of everyone's ordinary storehouse but which then becomes as real as frogs or birches or paper roses. In short, some of his subject matter is "raw" and some of it is "cooked"; some depends on common experience and some on special knowledge, but the meaning is always universal. "A Story About Chicken SOUp,"4 for example, depends on some general knowledge of World War II and on some general association of chicken soup with Jewish customs:

In the ruins of Berchtesgaden

A child with yellow hair

Ran out of a doorway.

3. e 1963 Generation Magazine.

4. © 1963 Louis Simpson.

Spring, 1963

A German girl-childCuckoo, all skin and bones -

Not even enough to make chicken soup. She sat by the stream and smiled.

Then as we splashed in the sun

She laughed at us.

We had killed her mechanical brothers, So we forgave her.

Similarly, familiarity with literary history intensifies appreciation of Simpson's ability to imitate faultlessly. "Invitation to a Quiet Life" reverberates through three centuries of poetry with its echoes of Marlowe:

Come, Amaryllis, let us go

To see the moving picture show Where the small people, closely pressed, Walk all together in their best.

"Ballad of the Beery Boys" humorously combines strains of Browning and a familiar popular poem:

Up Flotsam, up Jetsam, up Donner and Blitzen!

I galloped, he galloped through barrels of Pilsen

To Maidenhead, Munich, Sversk and Vienna, (A landscape of umber, a sky of sienna):

"Over at the Baroque Ryehouse" is reminiscent of the style of Emily Dickinson:

I've had my cut of sin, A passing glimpse of heaven, And hope to meet Christ in The city after seven.

"Room and Board" is suggestive of Auden's "Musee des Beaux Arts" in the stanza

The landlord wipes his mouth of pork, Pauses to eavesdrop, disconnect The water and the telephone.

Finally "Song: 'Rough Winds Do Shake the Darling Buds of May'" combines Renaissance conceits and modern form:

Rough winds do shake do shake

the darling buds of May

The darling buds rose-buds the winds do shake

That are her breasts.

Those darling buds, dew-tipped, her sighing moods do shake.

On several levels, then, Simpson's poetry has an incisive quality which enables us simultaneously to see and to be suddenly aware that we are seeing, and thus to double the delight. Sometimes he gives the reader the relief of "what oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed," but more often he intensifies particulars which have never been anything but amorphous, which have never taken on the discipline of form. Who does

not remember the delight of seeing, on a cold, wintry day, snowflakes under a magnifying glass for the first time, and who has forgotten the awe at the illumination of the hitherto unsuspected and unperceived mystery, both as an external phenomenon of nature and as an internal phenomenon of perception? Perhaps Robert Louis Stevenson was aware of that kind of delight when he said, "The world is so full of a number of things, I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings." Reality, of course, has a dark as well as a light side, and reality in itself is not always delightful to human perception, is often more somber; perceiving and knowing, however, are always an enhancement of human values, whether their objects be beautiful or ugly. Louis Simpson's poetry imparts new sensibility; the heat of his imagination and the pressure of his experience fuse both the raw materials and organized systems of life into lyrical poems which reflect and refract hum an emotion with the same beauty and brilliance that diamonds do physical light.

Mid-twentieth century society is generally unsympathetic to knowing for the sake of knowing. (Even in the realm of science, pure research has been defined as the name we give any project when we don't know what we're doing). Useless, that is, inapplicable knowledge is a term of opprobrium. The truth of the human heart is, however, that some things are worth knowing for the sake of knowing, that somehow awareness and perception are fundamental to the quality of being human. There is a value simply in knowing, and Louis Simpson's poetry reflects and refines that value. Descriptions of so-called objective reality, that is, reality irrelevant to human passion, are very recent developments in human evolution, but very powerful developments for all their newness. Man has always tried to resolve the mystery of his environment and himself, but only recently has he sought to do this by discounting and dismissing his own reaction to the world around him, by the so-called scientific method. In many ways, of course, science and art serve the same general function, the penetration and description of reality, but science elevates the fact and submerges the emotion, and art elevates the emotion and submerges the fact. The world within, however, is still as important as the world without, and the publication in the last decade and a half of lyric poetry of the quality of Simpson's is firm testimony to the fact that it is still a lively art whose concern is human feeling and whose instrument is human imagination.

I do not suggest, however, that his poetry inspires only isolated flashes of dissociated insights. Poetry in general and his poetry in particular can and does produce systematic and coherent

organizations of reality which take us deeper into the mystery than we could ever go by ourselves.

Simpson is an intellectually mature and responsible poet who is ultimately committed to making human sense of what is, although he is never unaware of the eternal paradoxes and possibilities of what ought to be. His war poems, for example, intensify particulars but ominously suggest also in a systematic way that war is a singularly ineffective behavior pattern if the human animal really wants to improve his condition. "1 Dreamed that in a City Dark as Paris" links both world wars to suggest the futility:

I dreamed that in a city dark as Paris

I stood alone in a deserted square.

The night was trembling with a violet Expectancy. At the far edge it moved And rumbled; on that flickering horizon

The guns were pumping color in the sky.

These wars have been so great, they are forgotten Like Egyptian dynasts. My confrere

In whose thick boots I stood, were you amazed To wander through my brain four decades later As I have wandered in a dream through yours?

The violence of waking life disrupts

The order of our death. Strange dreams occur, For dreams are licensed as they never were.

Simpson also consistently suggests the futility of heroism through war, as in "The Heroes":

I dreamed of war-heroes, of wounded war-heroes With just enough of their charms shot away To make them more handsome. The women moved nearer To touch their brave wounds and their hair streaked with gray.

A fine dust has settled on all that scrap metal. The heroes were packaged and sent home in parts To pluck at a poppy and sew on a petal And count the long night by the stroke of their hearts.

In the same manner, Simpson vitalizes the particular images of love but generalizes about its timeless quality in "The Green Shepherd":

Here sit a shepherd and a shepherdess, He playing on his melancholy flute; The sea wind ruffles up her simple dress And shows the delicacy of her foot.

And there you see Constantinople's wall With arrows and Greek fire, molten lead; Down from a turret seven virgins fall, Hands folded, each one praying on her head.

But the green shepherd travels in her eye And whispers nothings in his lady's ear, And sings a little song, that roses die, Carpe diem, which she seems pleased to hear.

The groaning pole had gone more than a mile; These shepherds did not feel it where they loved, For time was sympathetic all the while And on the magic mountain nothing moved.

"The Silent Lover":" is more fragmentary In its 5. © 1962 The New Yorker Magazine.

progression, but it equates love to concrete images which are in turn associated with eternity, and thus accomplishes the same end:

She sighs. What shall I say?

For beauty seems to grow

In silence, when the heart is faint and slow. Sing, sing How shall I sing?

In silent eyes, where clouds and islands gaze, The waves bring Eros in.

I think the rustling of her clothes Is like the sea, and she A wild white bird, And love is like the sighing of the sand.

Similarly, his poems on an urban theme illuminate the strange, historic dilemma of alienation from and integration with the great masses of people and materials that we call cities; thus in the poem "In California"? Simpson combines his urban concern with his feeling of the failure of the American dream as it was articulated by Walt Whitman:

Here I am, troubling the dream coast With my New York face, Bearing among the realtors And tennis-players my dark preoccupation.

There once was an epical clatterVoices and banjos, Tennessee, Ohio, Rising like incense in the sight of heaven. Today, there is an angel in the gate.

Lie back, Walt Whitman, There, on the fabulous raft with the King and the Duke!

For the white row of the Marina Faces the Rock. Turn round the wagons here.

Lie back! We cannot bear The stars any more, those infinite spaces. Let the realtors divide the mountain, For they already subdivided the valley.

Rectangular city block astonished Herodotus in Babylon, Cortes in Tenochtitlan, And here's the same old city-planner, death. We cannot turn or stay.

For though we sleep, and let the reins fall slack, The great cloud-wagons move Outward still, dreaming of a Pacific.

Finally, while Simpson passionately and graphically describes the ugliness of death in particulars, he generalizes in a more restrained manner about the fact of human mortality in "Early in the Morning":

Early in the morning

The dark Queen said, "The trumpets are warning There's trouble ahead."

Spent with carousing With wine-soaked wits, Antony drowsing Whispered, "It's Too cold a morning

To get out of bed."

The army's retreating, The fleet has fled, Caesar is beating 6. © 1963 Louis Simpson.

Spring, 1963

His drums through the dead.

"Antony, horses!

We'll get away

Gather our forces

For another day

"It's a cold morning," Antony said.

Caesar Augustus Cleared his phlegm. "Corpses disgust us. Cover them."

Caesar Augustus In his time lay Dying, and just as Cold as they, On the cold morning Of a cold day.

His tragic sense serves to intensify the quality of life just as his imagination intensifies the quality of reality.

Simpson's art imposes order from within on chaos without, gives meaning to the apparently meaningless, suggests fresh vantage points from which to probe experience. In "Lines Written Near San Francisco"7 he summarizes the current American condition with oblique references to our military and material madness, and he proffers a possible solution which suggests the process toward individual human realization and maturity as the defeat of death:

Every night, at the end of America

We taste our wine, looking at the Pacific.

How sad it is, the end of America!

While we were waiting for the land, They'd finished it - with gas drums

On the hilltops, cheap housing in the valleys

Where lives are mean and wretched.

But the banks thrive and the realtors

Rejoice - they have their America.

Still, there is something unsettled in the air.

Out there on the Pacific

There's no America but the Marines.

Whitman was wrong about the People, But right about himself. The land is within.

At the end of the open road we come to ourselves.

Though mad Columbus follows the sun

Into the sea, we cannot follow.

We must remain, to serve the returning sun,

And to set tables for death.

For we are the colonists of DeathNot, as some think, of the English.

And we are preparing thrones for him to sit, Poems to read, and beds

In which it may please him to rest.

This is the Land

The pioneers looked for, shading their eyes

Against the sun - the world of flowers and dreams.

Poetry rarely commands the intensity of religious belief, but it seeks the same end, that of using the materials of human life senses, emotions, intelligence to formulate a coherent and significant meaning for life. The poetry of Louis Simpson offers us that meaning.

7. © 1963 Paris Review Magazine.

Gary L. Blonston is a senior in the Medill School of Journalism, studying political science and newspaper writing. He is presently managing editor of the Daily Northwestern. Last summer he spent as reporter for the Miami Herald, in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and plans to return to that job this coming summer. Blonston was born in Ohio, but had his schooling in Gainesville, Florida.

Wedding Knot

By Gary L. Blonston

SHE WAS sitting too close. She smelled good, and she felt good, but she was too close. The day before he had found it difficult to stay away from her, to keep his hands from touching her, to restrain himself. But now he needed room to breathe.

"Hey, doll, would you close the window a little? It's getting cold in here."

She murmured and leaned over to roll up the window. He bent forward and wrapped his arms around the steering wheel, grasping it with both hands. She moved back again without looking and bumped his arm.

"Careful.

"You moved."

He didn't say anything but kept his eyes on the road dimming with the afternoon. His head ached nowhere in particular. It was over. He sighed in his throat.

She put her arm across the back of the seat and ran long fingernails across his back.

"Tired, baby?" She looked around his shoulder at him with the big-eyed-little-girl look that used to be so much more appealing.

"No. Just relaxing. Big day." He glanced at her and smiled faintly.

She kissed him too hard on the cheek and sat back to study the shiny, unworn ring on her hand. He took his left hand off the wheel, and his thumb rubbed the skin under his ring, an enlargement of the gold band she wore.

It had been terrible. He felt suddenly trapped and out of place. The feeling had been growing since he arrived the night before. After their brief kiss at the door, with her parents watching anxiously inside, John had stepped into three hours of what he had lacked during the two weeks they were together and the month they were apart - a real look at the girl he was to marry.

He had arrived too late for the wedding rehearsal, exhausted after eighteen hours of driving. It was raining when he pulled up in front of the house. He combed his hair and rehearsed the first awkward moments of conversation ahead. Suddenly he stopped, realizing he had forgotten Helen's step-father's name. He laughed softly and leaned back in the seat. What the hell was his name? Ferris or Hillis or something. He sat a while longer, becoming a little uneasy. What if he just wasn't able to remember? "Happy to meet you, Mr err, what was that name again?" He smiled and shook his head. What the hell was his name? He looked up at the house. There were people in the living room, probably wondering why he didn't come in. Parked in front of his car was a delivery truck, and on the back door, in big white letters, was emblazoned ELLIS POULTRY MART. Ellis. Of course. "Happy to meet you, Mr. Ellis." He got out of the car and trotted through the rain up to the front porch.

Helen met him at the door, kissed him, and then "Come in out of the rain" boomed behind her. They did, and her step-father grabbed his hand.

"Fred Ellis, John. Good to see you. How was the trip?"

"Happy to meet you, Mr. Ellis."

"Call me Fred, son. After all, we're almost family." He laughed as loudly as he talked.

"All right, Fred." John smiled. "The trip wasn't bad. The rain just started."

The rest of the family hovered around them expectantly.

"This is Mrs. Ellis, John." They shook hands and smiled.

"And Helen's younger sister, Brenda."

Brenda smiled coyly through her make-up and slipped her hand through John's arm.

"Hello, brother-to-be. You're as pretty as Helen said.

"So are you, Brenda." He smiled uneasily and turned to look for Helen.

"How about a beer, son?" Fred roared. "You've had a long trip." He clapped an arm around John's shoulder and directed him toward the kitchen. Brenda clung to his other arm.

Spring, 1963

In a few minutes, Helen joined them.

"Fred, let Johnny come and sit down in the living room with all of us. After all, he's mine, not yours."

"I guess you're right." Fred again clutched John's shoulder and steered him back toward the living room. "He'll be seeing a lot of kitchens from now on anyway." He laughed uproariously.

"Oh, no, he won't. My Johnny isn't going to set foot in our kitchen except for me to feed him." She stepped around Fred, outmaneuvered Brenda, and grasped John's free arm as if denying her sister the use of a toy. She nearly spilled his beer, already washing the sides of the glass from the impact of Fred's guiding hand.

For the next hour, the family made small talk about John's school, Fred's poultry business, how much Helen had surprised the family when she returned from vacation with an engagement ring. John's exhaustion prevented him from keeping up with Fred's hearty beer drinking, but Fred became even more talkative. Since John had missed the rehearsal, Fred explained it in loud, minute detail.

"Helen might have some trouble with the more Catholic parts of the thing, but I suppose you can guide her through all right. Bet this'll be the first time a Catholic bride ever had her step-father give her away." He laughed at his joke and didn't notice the look Helen flashed her mother.

John had hoped there would be little said about Helen's conversion. It had seemed so easy that any mention of it affected him like a forecast of difficulty.

"You' should see the church. Just a beautiful place. I've always said, 'If there's anybody who knows how to make a church worth going to, it's the Catholics.'

"Fred, we haven't given the children much time together. Let's go to bed. John must be tired from his trip." Helen's mother stood up, and John followed. He didn't know why, but he felt suddenly closed in and needed fresh air.

"1 am a little beat. Tomorrow's going to be a busy day."

"Yes sir, boy, I guess you'd better get some rest. No telling when you'll get to sleep tomorrow night."

John smiled to make Fred happy, although he wasn't sure why that should concern him.

They finally got out of the house, and Helen snuggled close to him in the car.

"I'm so glad you and Fred got along so well. I was afraid maybe you wouldn't. I think so much of him." She paused. "He tries real hard to be a father to us, and he's taken the biggest interest in you and me. Fred and Mother are already talking about how often they'll be able to come and visit us when we get settled. It'll almost be like living at home."

John opened his mouth to speak but changed

his mind, patted Helen's leg and started the car.

After she had directed him to his hotel, and he had taken her home, John lay awake in bed. For the first time he thought seriously about what his friends at home had said of the wedding. It was too fast. He should get to know her better. Meet her family. But he didn't want to wait and neither did Helen. There was something different about her, something innocent and honest that he had never seen among the wealthy, put-on girls in school or among the secretaries he manhandled when they came to visit Miami from New York and Hartford and Cleveland.

Helen had been on vacation, too, but it hadn't worked out the same. She wasn't another easy, fun-seeking girl. She had stood him off, had been afraid of him, so he came back the next night and they spent a gentle evening together, unlike any he had ever known. She had stayed two weeks, and by the time she had stepped on the train, she had agreed to marry him. His Catholicism didn't matter. She would be anything he wanted.

As he lay in bed, he wondered just what it was he wanted. And for the first time, he wondered if Helen was really it. The family of caricatures he had met a few hours before had placed her in a new light-one that showed little flaws unnoticed before. At the house, she had seemed to be only a minor character in a badly conceived comic strip. The things she had said were no longer charming and little-girlish but a trifle stupid.

Maybe it was just the situation. No one had performed very well, not even himself. He knew it would be different. His friends at home had known, too. He remembered the uplifted eyebrows when he told them she hadn't been to college. What would he talk to her about? What did they have in common? Hasn't her family been to school either? He ignored them. He knew there would be no problem. He loved her. They'd get along.

But Mr. Ellis-Fred-was another matter. He reminded John of a sideshow barker. "See the boy and the girl. Watch them perform. And one of them is a gen-u-ine Catholic."

John turned on the light and lit a cigarette. They hadn't picked much of a room for him. The plaster was cracking and the bed was worn and uncomfortable. And since he had stepped into the room, the toilet had been running.

He finished the cigarette and turned out the light. A red coal from the cigarette butt glowed beside the bed in an ash tray. By the time it burned out, fatigue had dulled the edge of his misgivings and he was asleep.

When he awakened, Charlie was about to break down the door.

"Goddammit, Johnny, if you don't wake up, you can sure as hell get married without a best man."

"Hang on." He climbed out of bed and unlocked the door.

"I didn't have to drive up here all night. I could have stayed in bed, too."

"All right, all right. Sit down and shut up."

"You're really going through with it, huh?"

"Of course. Why not?"

"We've been all through that. How are her folks?"

"Oh, they're all right. Her step-father is a little hard to take."

John doused his face at the sink, and Charlie took his tuxedo out of his suitcase. As he dressed, John suddenly didn't want Charlie to meet Helen's parents, didn't want him to hear the uncomfortable, forced conversation, didn't want Charlie to know what his friend was getting into.

"Ready to go?" Charlie asked.

"Why not?"

Forty-five minutes later they were standing in the sanctuary of the church listening to the priest describe the ceremony. Seated in the church were about twenty of Helen's friends. They were scattered through the first five rows of the huge church, like reviewers at a play rehearsal. At the entrance, Fred was marshalling the two ushers, in his out-of-season dinner jacket, looking like an irritated head-waiter. He motioned expansively, pointing here and there while the two white-jacketed high school boys, Brenda's friends, watched him vacantly.

The ushers came to the front of the church, John and Charlie marched out, and the girls began their long walk to the altar. Two fouryear-old ring boys in black velvet shorts stumbled down the aisle and seated themselves indifferently at the priest's feet. One looked up at the cleric and laughed.

Helen and her attendants reached the altar and the priest began to speak. John said a quick "I will" and then lost track of the message of the ceremony. The ring boys were restless and walked back and forth behind the altar. Their mother, Helen's aunt, began whispering warnings to sit still that carried loudly over the priest's soft intonations.

The boys paid no attention to her, so she left her seat, grabbed each of them by a wrist and pulled them out of the ceremony. One of the ushers laughed, not quite quietly enough. Then Fred whispered to a photographer who walked up behind the priest and snapped a picture.

Charlie shifted on his feet and glared at the photographer.

Then the ceremony was over, and the procession was filing toward the door. John and Helen stood at the front of the church greeting the crowd of middle-aged women and teary-eyed adolescents who pushed toward them. John pulled himself clear of them and moved over to his best man. Charlie was furious.

"That bitch and her little brats shouldn't be allowed in a church. And that photographer

"Take it easy. It's over, anyway. Wasn't all that bad. How about bringing the car around?"

In a half hour, they were all seated around H big table in a motel restaurant. Fred was standing with a glass in his hand. "Here's to a perfect wedding."

"Whoopee," Charlie said under his breath. He poured the sweet wine down in one motion. A waitress came up beside John's bride.

"What can I get you, Helen? The usual?"

They exchanged familiar smiles. "Sure," Helen answered.

A moment later the waitress came back and placed in front of Helen a huge glass of orange soda with two bright red plastic straws standing in it. Helen sipped at the drink absently, her wedding gown more out of place than the drink.

The spectacle was too much for Charlie.

"Excuse me, please," he said. He hurried to the men's room and lit a cigarette. In a moment, John joined him.

"What are you doing, boy?"

"Johnny, you have to get out of this. These people can't be real. Look, let's just go out the back and get in the car and

"Look, dammit, I'm in love with the girl. We're married. I'm glad we're married. If you disapprove, clear out because I'm tired of listening to you bitch."

"You crazy bastard. Go ahead. Ruin whatever good might have come of you. I'll give you six months. You'll wish then you had listened to me. You're too good for her and her nutty family'. Leave them alone." He stamped on his cigarette. "And I won't be bothering you anymore."

He charged out of the rest room and out the door of the restaurant.

John returned to the table. "Charlie had to leave. It's a personal thing, and he said to tell you all he was sorry."

The rest of the meal was an empty, meaningless, mechanical operation for John. He had never seen Charlie worked up so much about anything before. The table conversation grated on him even more, and he thought back to the night he told Charlie of his plans. His friend had listened quietly as he spoke of Helen and the wedding. When he had finished, Charlie had paused. Then he had shaken his head and scratched it.

"Johnny, you know what I think? I think you won't go through with it. You're going to sit back some night and say, 'Is this worth all the work I've done and all the time I've spent building a future?' Sure, she seems like the greatest thing going right now, but hell, you've got too much effort invested to throw it away on some little country bumpkin. There's a lot of nice

Spring, 1963

stuff running around loose. Take your time, man.

John had laughed and said, "You don't understand.

"Like hell I don't," Charlie had snapped back. "I understand a lot better than you do. You need better than her. She's way out of your league. 1 mean, find somebody who can keep up with you. You didn't go to school and win scholarships and make the grades you did so you could spend the rest of your life talking down to somebody. It won't work, Johnny. It really won't."

John pulled himself back to the dinner. Fred was on his feet again, preparing another toast.

"I want to drink to the best-looking pair of newlyweds I've ever seen. I was afraid our pretty little girl would pick some lunkhead-looking fellow, but Johnny, I think you can just about keep up with her."

"I do my best," John answered and gulped at the wine.

Following the dinner, the wedding party trooped into a little hotel ballroom where a three-piece band was already playing happy Dixieland music. The reception was to last all afternoon, but John wasn't in the mood for being polite to people he didn't know. He led Helen onto the dance floor.

"Darling, let's get out and on our way early. It's a long drive, and 1 haven't seen you much at all, considering it's our wedding day."

"Whatever you want. I wanted you to get to know everyone better though. They're all so anxious to meet you. Mother and Fred just think you're wonderful, and 1 want everyone else to find out about you, too."

A group of six girls swept into the room and around the couple. After Helen recited the six unintelligible names, John excused himself and walked to a large corrugated metal tub on wheels, where Fred had said earlier the "best beer made" was on ice.

As he was opening a bottle, Fred came up beside him.

"Well, son, you're just about to the end of a perfect day. Don't push yourself driving when you leave. Pull into a motel when you feel like it." He winked.

"We'll get along all right, Fred."

"We know you'll take good care of our little girl. She hasn't been around a whole lot, John. You know what I mean. We're counting on you to raise her right. You've seen a lot and you can take her under your wing the way she deserves. She'll fit right in after a while."

"I'm not complaining about her at the moment."

"Oh, you know what 1 mean. She hasn't moved in the circles you do, and it will take some teaching from you before she'll be able to hold her own with your crowd. You know what I

mean. You probably thought it was strange that we'd consent to her marriage without even meeting you, but when she told us about you and your job and everything, why, we just knew she'd be well taken care of. She needs to see your side of the world, too."

"Sure, I'll take care of her. That's part of the reason I married her. But I don't know where my job fits in and I don't quite know what you mean by 'my crowd' and 'my side of the world.' Maybe I should explain a little more of

"Come on, boy, don't be modest. We understand. And you're always welcome in this family." He slapped John's shoulder and walked away, waving to some new arrivals.

He stood clutching the bottle and watching Fred move away. Then he felt a hand on his arm.

"Hi, new brother. Dance with me." Brenda looked much older in her gown. She took his free hand and placed it around her waist.

"Put your beer down."

They danced around the floor once before Brenda leaned her head against his chest. "Welcome aboard, John. We're all happy to have you, especially me."

"Say, Brenda, I hope you'll excuse me. I have to talk to your sister." John unwrapped himself and motioned to Helen. She left a group of guests and came to him.

"Let's go, darling. It's getting late."

"Already? But you haven't met everyone."

"Yes, I have. Your bag is in the car. Say goodby to your parents, and I'll take you back to change clothes."

"But John, we have a lot of "Helen, let's go."

She looked at him and nodded weakly. Fifteen minutes later they were in the car, and an hour later they were out of Helen's town, away from Helen's family.

It was just becoming evening when it started to rain again.

The water obscured the road and made oncoming cars next to invisible. John switched on his lights. The rain depressed him even more than the vague displeasure he had been feeling. It had rained ever since he pulled up in front of the Ellis house and now it was raining as they left.

"I love the rain," Helen said. "In the car with you like this, it seems like no one else can come in, and we can never be separated."

John nodded and smiled. "I was just thinking the same thing."

Austin Stoll majored in Geology at Northwestern, graduating in 1959. He had previously attended Beloit College for two years. He was a member of the Triangle Fraternity at Northwestern and won two letters as a miler. He served for two years in the Army, stationed at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri. Stoll was born in Aurora, Illinois, and now works in Evanston. He writes that he began writing short stories while he was recovering from an attack of mononucleosis, and that he is now some 30,000 words into a first novel.

Austin StoU

CRAIG

DONAHUE spent at least thirty minutes every morning standing in front of the mirror in the bathroom of the UG fraternity house. And he spent at least half of the thirty minutes arranging and combing his short blond hair, patting and smoothing it down in the back, wetting it with his comb, and changing the part several times until he was satisfied. It was a ritual.

Craig grinned at himself in the mirror and bent nearer the glass for a closer inspection of his face. There were two or three blackheads clustered on the tip of his nose. He deftly popped them out. He continued the inspection, running his hand over his chin where he had just removed a thin yellow stubble.

It was a handsome face, as were all the other faces in his fraternity, and, as a freshman, he had been accepted at once by his brothers. With his face he needed no entrance examination, passport, or credentials. It could get him anywhere. It was better than money.

Craig stepped back from the mirror and adjusted the collar of his minutely patterned sport shirt

beneath his shaggy wool sweater. He appraised himself from long range and strained to examine his profile out of the corner of his eye. It was impossible, of course, but every morning for yeurs he had glanced sideways into the mirror, hoping to see his face in absolute profile.

Next he adjusted the bottom of his sweater, rolling it so it hung below his belt in a casual fold. He looked down at his shoes. They were a dirty, used grey and looked as if they had been worn for months in all kinds of weather. Only Craig knew that yesterday they had been white and new, and that he had spent a good hour the night before rubbing dirt into them.

Finally he picked up his UG fraternity pin and pinned it to his sweater. He looked into the mirror again and watched the little gold emblem of security, status, and acceptance glitter in the bathroom light. Not everyone could be a UG. Pins were given out not for what you've done, but for what you are. And either you are, or you aren't. Practice didn't help. "The next best thing to being a UG is to be pinned to one," he used to say with a laugh, and only he knew that he was serious.

Craig didn't like the location of the pin and moved it a quarter of an inch up and to the left; then another glance in the mirror. It still wasn't right. On the fourth try he was satisfied and stepped back for a final look.

Before he left the bathroom, Craig spent several minutes practicing facial expressions in the mirror. He scowled, as if he had just been asked a profound question, then raised his eyebrows and, intelligently and without hesitation, answered it. Next came the squint-eyed, harassed look, and the bored, satiated look. He ran through them rapidly. It was an old game. Finally he smiled his big personality smile and was ready to walk to class.

"What are you doing?" a voice spoke behind him. One of his fraternity brothers had silently opened the door and was looking at Craig in the mirror.

"Nothing, nothing." Craig jerked around, embarrassed that he had almost been caught at his game. "Are you ready?"

"Ready! Jesus, I've been waiting for ten minutes. I thought maybe you fell in, or something. You spend more time in the can than any ten guys in the house."

"You could have left, you know, if you were in such a damn big rush. I can find the goddamn classroom without a guide."

Except for the color of their sweaters, Craig and his friend were dressed identically. His friend's smooth, unlined face was as good-looking as Craig's, but darker, as was his hair. They put on identical raincoats, soiled and beat, and walked out into the fall sunshine.

"When are you going to get that rag cleaned?" asked his friend.

Spring, 1963

"Rag? What about yours? It looks like it was dragged through a sewer after a dysentery epidemic.

"But mine isn't full of lipstick stains," he said, and motioned with his head toward Craig's coat collar, where some pale red smears were plainly visible.

Craig looked down, causing about six folds to form in his neck, and stared at the marks. "Oh yeah. I didn't notice them before."

"Bull!

"Whatdaya mean, bull?"

"I mean I've looked at those damn stains every day for the last two weeks."

"Well, I didn't notice them till now.

"Bull."

"You think I left them there on purpose," said Craig, fearful that his ego-bolstering deceit was no longer a secret.

"Did I say that?"

"That's what you meant."

"I'm just saying it doesn't look good."

"All right, I'll get it cleaned, if it will make you happy. But not this week. I'm low on money."

They walked in silence, looking at the girls but pretending to be occupied with other thoughts. Craig glanced furtively at a pretty blond just as they were abreast on the sidewalk. Their eyes met for an instant. He looked quickly away, embarrassed that she had seen through his blase composure, but satisfied that she had been looking at him.

They walked up the steps to the classroom. "God-damn it, I forgot my notebook," Craig said.

"I'll let you use my notes later."

"There's no use going to class if I can't take notes."

"You can Listen to what he says."

"There's no point in that. I'm going to the Grill. Besides, I haven't cut his damn class yet."

"All right, I'll meet you there after class," his friend said, and disappeared into the building.

Craig walked back down the steps and paused indecisively for a moment. There was a noise behind him. He looked around and saw a dumpy coed scrambling around on the steps trying to pick up a stack of papers she had just dropped. He turned away quickly, pretending he hadn't seen her, and walked across the street.

Craig stopped in front of the Grill and slipped his raincoat back a little farther on his shoulders, bringing his UG pin into view. He hoped he would meet someone he knew. It made him uneasy to sit and drink coffee by himself. Besides, people would think it was funny if they saw him in there alone all the time. But then, if anyone saw his UG pin, they would know he was all right.

The Grill was crowded. Craig stood in the entrance and peered over everyone's head, pretend-

ing that he was looking for someone. He bought a cup of coffee and looked for a seat. He didn't see anyone he knew.

On the opposite side of the room a lovely blond girl sat in a booth - alone. She bent intently over some sort of workbook and occasionally sipped coffee out of the cup at her elbow. Craig edged his way through the people over to her booth, trying not to spill his coffee.

"Is anyone sitting here?" he said.

She looked up at him. "No," she said, "I'll move my things."

He looked down quickly as he sat, trying to see what kind of a body she had, but she still wore her raincoat and he couldn't see much. She had a cute face and a fine complexion, though.

He glanced at her over the rim of his coffee cup. The girl had gone back to writing in her workbook.

"Is that Economic Geography?" he began.

"Yes, have you had it?"

"No, but some of my fraternity brothers have."

"Oh.

"Who do you have, Englehardt or Olsen?"

"Olsen. He's very good."

"I hear he wears the same sport coat and tie every day of the year."

"I guess so. I haven't paid too much attention, though," she said. The girl closed her workbook, gave Craig her complete attention, and waited expectantly for him to speak.

Craig reached under his sweater and withdrew a pack of cigarettes. He shook one out of the crumpled pack and stuck it in the corner of his mouth. It dangled limply as he fished in his pants' pocket for his lighter. He brought the lighter up in his hand and snapped it open.

"Didn't I see you at the ZIT open house last Saturday?" he said, the cigarette bobbing wildly up and down in his mouth as he spoke. The question seemed harmless enough, but Craig hoped the answer would tell him what he most wanted to know.

The girl stared at the flapping cigarette.

"No, I was at my own open house," she said, instinctively, or perhaps purposely, rejecting the bait.

"Oh, my name's Craig Donahue," he said, without removing the wavering cigarette from his mouth, and wrinkling his brow into a perturbed scowl. The lighter still burned in his hand.

"I'm Joan Buchek." She smiled.

He finally lit the cigarette and put the lighter back in his pocket. Just as he was about to replace the pack under his sweater he said, almost as an afterthought, the cigarette still hanging from his lips, "Would you like a cigarette?"

"No, thank you."

Craig blew a thin stream of smoke out through his mouth and across the table toward the girl. A

very nice looking girl, he thought, and friendly.

"My fraternity's having a

"Don't you think it's warm in here?"

"I hadn't noticed. My fra

"Wait, I'm going to take my coat off." Craig watched her slip out of the raincoat. She let it fall between her back and the back of the booth, disclosing a small, diamond-shaped Delta Phi pin hanging from the soft backdrop of her sweater. Craig stared at it for an instant, then looked quickly away.

"I'm sorry, what were you saying?" she said.

"I wasn't saying anything."

"Oh.

For several moments neither spoke. Craig dragged on his cigarette and looked around the room, then down at his watch. "God, I didn't know it was so late," he said, "I have an appointment with a professor at nine o'clock."

Craig got up hurriedly, leaving his coffee half finished. "It's been nice talking to you, Joanne. I'll probably see you around campus."

"Goodby," she said.

Craig walked quickly out the door without looking back. He wasted an hour in the library reading magazines, then went to a history class and listened indifferently to the lecture. After class he walked back to the fraternity house for lunch, assuming his bored, haggard expression as he walked lazily along.

As he stood in the living room of the house, waiting for lunch to be served, his friend from earlier that morning spoke to him.

"I looked for you in the Grill after class. I thought you were going to meet me there."

"I was, but I had to leave. I went into the Grill for coffee and there was this girl sitting alone so I sat down- and started talking to her. She still had

"Who was she?"

"I don't know who she was. I just sat down and started talking to her. She had on her coat and was drinking coffee. Anyway, I was just ready to ask her to the Fidel Castro party when she said it was hot and took off her coat. Then I saw this big Delta Pig pin hanging from her

"Was she pretty?"

"Yeah, she was all right, I guess. But Jesus, I saw that damn Delta Pig's pin dangling from "What was her name? Maybe I know her from someplace.'

"I don't know what her name was. June or Joanne, or something. When I saw that damn pin, I left."

"Oh yeah?"

"Not that there's anything wrong with the DP's. I mean, if it was myself, I would have been glad to take her out. But it might look bad for the house, you know."

"Yeah, I probably would have done the same thing.

HOTAI

Merry round man of teak

With shining ivory eyes

And great polished stomach to be rubbedYou stand, feet wide spread, Praising Buddha, happy priest, Fat robed arms high, palms up to your Maker.

Blissful, tranquil mannequin, Smiling with your whole faceWide, fiat, shiny nose, Wide, smooth, shiny brow, Great, wide, laughing mouth, praising your Maker.

Do you never weep, Hotai, With cocked brown head And long ear lobes brushing your necklace? You wait on your pedestal, Laughing such a deep teakwood laugh. You have a great secret, shared with your Maker.

But look at you, mannequin, Smiling in your woodennessThin, dry, yellow lines, Thin, deep, yellow cracks, Sharp, thin, hurting pains - call to your Maker!

You are of another place, Not this arid, splitting heat. You are of steaming rice fields, tender bamboo shoots, juicy water chestnuts.

Call to your Maker! Now, Hotai Call to Buddha!

He will not hear you, Crying for your wooden life, Far away from rice fields, Far away from bamboo shoots, Far away from water chestnuts. But still you praise Him, Trusting, dreaming, laughing man of teak.

SUSAN ALLEN,

Speech '63

COTTON

SIGN

Neither statistician Nor metaphysician Am I, but I incline To believe in a sign Of good, a sign of evil.

At boll's heart, the weevil Looks dark as the devil.

That was a metaphor. Don't ask, "What was it for?"

Spring, 1963

I'm no histor-ian, No prognosticatorian, But only see signs Of good, signs of evil,

And at boll's heart, the weevil Looks dark as the devil.

These haphazard rhymes May be wrong, may be right, But I have seen signs Of dark times, dark times, And hoped for some sign of light.

Yet, at boll's heart, the weevil Looks' dark devil.

But that's a metaphor Would be better for My purpose were weevil And cotton one thing. That's what my signs sing, Dark in light, good from evil.

And around the dark, weevil heart of the boll, Cotton shines, cotton shines like a soul.

MALCOLM McCOLLUM, L.A., '64

THE INTERVIEW

Good morning, Miss Marvel. You feel well, Miss Marvel?

I'm sorry to hear that. But now let's get started.

Your work before coming? Take any dictation?

And what about typing? Some work with computers?

Educational background? Graduation from college? Your interest or major? Your grades: about average?

Now personal data. Your health as a rule?

Hm. Time out for sick leave?

Dependable? Punctual?

Your salary requirements? How many dependents? Now just one last question. Your plans for advancement?

Well, thank you for coming. A warning's in order.

Don't call us - we'll call you.

Good morning, Miss Marvel.

Morning. Badly. Thank you. Gladly. Filing. Rarely. Seldom. Barely. General. Nearly. Home ec. Merely. Yessir. Poorly. Never. Surely. Modest. One, sir. FinallY· None, sir. Welcome. Warning? GladlY· Morning.

SUSAN ALLEN, Speech '63

ROETHKE RICHARD WILBUR

RICHARD EBERHART

HOWARD NEMEROV

J. V. CUNNINGHAM

RANDALL JARRELL

W. S. MERWIN

WILLIAM DEWITT SNODGRASS

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to Ten Contemporary American Poets

EDWARD B. HUNGERFORD

fortunate to be able "to meet" authors in full flight of their to wait for the appraisal of succeeding generations. For tendered toothless old men in their dotage and eulogies over gestures. It is much more vital and exciting to see these to look over their shoulders and watch as they respond in. These essays achieve just that and give understanding articulate talents.

224 pages $5.00 trade * * *

the United Nations

by THOMAS HOVET, JR.

25,000 individual votes participated in by Africans in the Professor Hovet has isolated and identified important patterns characterize Africa's role in the world organization.

statistics show that in 66.4% of the total votes, the nations of the Soviet bloc voted identically. However, Professor Hovet those who would infer from this statist ic an undue influence states incorrectly interpret the facts. The evidence shows that, the Soviet bloc that, in the majority of instances, votes nations.

characterize Professor Hover's study, and make AFRICA NATIONS valuable for everyone interested in Africa and future of the United Nations.

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