vol6-no1

W. Leopold

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. Subcription 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 Roael, Evanston, illinois. Contributions unaccompanied by a self-addressed envelope and return postage will not be returned. Except by invitation, contributors are limited to persons who have some connection with the University. Copyright, 1963, by Northwestern University. All rights reserved.

Views expressed in the articles published are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the editors.

Since this issue of THE TRI-QUARTERLY contains stories by three of our undergraduate editors. I should like to make clear that the decision to print the work of student editors is wholly mine, not theirs. The undergraduates whom I invite to serve as editors are students who are known to me as able writers, and the invitation is made with some expectation that they will be contributors to the magazine. E.H.

EDITORIAL BOARD: The editor is EDWARD B. HUNGERFORD. Senior members of the advisory board are Dean JAMES H. MCBURNEY of the School of Speech, Dr. WIlLlAM B. WARTMAN of the School of Medicine, Mr. ROBERT P. ARMSTRONG, Director of the Northwestern University Press, and Mr. JAMES M. BARKER of the Board of Trustees.

UNDERGRADUATE EDITORS: BARRY G. BRISSMAN, GARY T. COLE, LINDA O'RIORDAN, and FRED W. STEFFEN.

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 is Lauretta Akkeron. Photograpns by Herb Comess except that of Barry Brissman.

THE PRESIDENT AND FOREIGN POLI[Y: THE TWO ROOSEVELTS

By Richard W. Leopold

The problem to which I address myself in this paper is the limits of the powers of the president in foreign affairs. It is a timely topic. Once again, as so frequently in the past, the executive and legislative branches disagree as to the precise steps to take for coping with danger from abroad. Once again, we face the risk of divided counsels and even a deadlock in the decision-making process. Once again, we see the possibility of a president being compelled to act against his own judgment. We must again ask who controls or makes foreign policy in the United States.

It is impossible in a short essay to make a complete analysis of this problem, and it is premature for a historian to concentrate on the most recent occupants of the White House. Hence I have chosen to illustrate the topic by examing the record of two men on whom we have some perspective, Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin D. Roosevelt. There are several reasons for selecting this pair, quite apart from their popular appeal. The two Roosevelts have much in common. Both were fascinating individuals, wide-ranging in their interests and far-reaching in their influence. Both were acute observers of the world scene; both were vigorous exponents of presidential powers. Both have been accused of usurp-

ing the prerogatives of Congress and of trampling upon the Constitution. Both contributed to the growth of American foreign policy and to the office of the presidency. Each had a sense of history. Each has been subjected to changing tides of historical opinion.

No one questions that the framers of the .Constitution intended to make the president 'the central figure in foreign policy. To the delegates who met at Philadelphia in 1787 one lesson of the preceding years was clear: the new government must have an executive. And perhaps the most compelling argument for the presidency was the need to handle external affairs more efficiently; for from 1775 to 1789 foreign policy was made by a unicameral legislature, working first through a committee and then through a secretary. Hence the new Constitution assigned four categories of power to the president. It said explicitly that he would communicate with foreign nations, negotiate and ratify treaties, and act as commander-in-chief of the armed forces. It implied, rather than stated explicitly, that he would formulate and initiate foreign policy.

It is clear that the founding fathers did not wish to give the president complete control over foreign policy. They were too addicted to theories

on the separation of powers and too mindful of the tyranny of some colonial governors to leave the executive unchecked. Hence they required the Senate to confirm all appointments to diplomatic posts and to consent, by a two-thirds majority, to all treaties. Most important of all, they gave to Congress as a whole the power of the purse and the power to declare war. This division in the management of external affairs between the executive and legislative branches was, in the words of Edward S. Corwin, "an invitation to struggle for the privilege of directing American foreign policy." That struggle has characterized much of our history.

That struggle can take many forms. It is enough here to mention three. One is over treaties, where the president proposes but the Senate disposes. Given our party system it is relatively easy for a minority of one third plus one to block a treaty. A second point of friction is the overlapping of the power of the president as commander-in-chief and the prerogative of Congress to declare war. By deploying men, ships, and planes, the executive can precipitate hostilities and thus deprive the legislature of its most cherished right. The third area of conflict is in formulating policy. Although the president normally takes the initiative, Congress may at any moment hobble him by launching investigations that disrupt his negotiations, adopting resolutions that condemn his course, or passing laws that narrow his jurisdiction.

I have pictured the worst. Most policies have been formulated by the executive, as the origins of isolationism, neutrality, the Monroe Doctrine,

This article, first delivered in ledure form on February 28, 1963, in the Alumni Fund series, is now slightly altered for inclusion, at the invitation of the editor, in The Tri-Quarterly.

Richard W. Leopold came to Northwestern in 1948 and is presently the William Smith Mason Professor of American History, teaching primarily in the field of American foreign policy. He was educated at Princeton (B.A., '33) and Harvard (Ph.D., '38). He taught at Harvard from 1937 to 1948 with a World War 1/ interval of four years as Lieutenant in the U.S. Naval Reserve, aHached to the Office of Naval History. He is a member of the learned societies in his field, serves on The Advisory CommiHee on Naval History for the Navy Department, on The Advisory Committee on Foreign Relations, a publication of the State Department, and The Advisory Committe on the Papers of Woodrow Wilson. His books include Robert Dale Owen, A Biography, 1940, Elihu Root and the Conservative Tradition, 1954, The Growth of American Foreign Policy, A History, 1962; and he is now revising for book form his Albert Shaw Lectures in Diplomatic History, given in April, 1963, at The Johns Hopkins University.

and the open door attest. Yet only four years before Theodore Roosevelt took office, a Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee threatened impeachment of a Democratic president if he refused, as it was alleged he would refuse, to carry out a joint resolution directing him to recognize the so-called rebel government in Cuba. Twenty years later Woodrow Wilson publicly warned that he could not conduct delicate negotiations with Germany over the submarine if Congress adopted, as it seemed about to adopt, certain resolutions. In 1916 Wilson repeated what men as diverse as Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and John Marshall had said earlier: in foreign affairs the republic can speak with but one voice, and that voice must be the voice of the president. Who speaks for the republic today on Cuba, Russia and China?

As to treaties, most have been approved, yet the deadlock over the Versailles settlement in 1919-1920 caused many to fear paralysis in the conduct of foreign policy and some to advocate a change in the treaty-making process. Most wars have begun with a vote by Congress, yet at the outset of the air age Franklin Roosevelt was accused of waging undeclared war in the Atlantic and of provoking Japan to strike first so as to present Congress with a fait accompli. Today, in the thermonuclear age, we cannot expect the Senate and House to debate the issue of war during the fifteen minutes that we know an intercontinental ballistic missile is in flight. Of course, under any system of government we must distinguish between the formal grant of power and the way in which it is used. Common sense, compromise, and individual leadership all enter in, and it is precisely on that last point that the record of the two Roosevelts is instructive.

Let us turn to the first Roosevelt. What image does he conjure up? What mark did he leave on the presidency? What contribution did he make to foreign policy? I think of his boundless energy, his inquisitive mind, his voracious reading, his extensive friendships, his cosmopolitan outlook. To be sure, he was an incurable romantic in many things and a captive of late-Victorian standards of morality. His ideas on war sound ridiculous today, and no modern politician would talk of standing at Armageddon and battling for the Lord when he referred to a presidential nominating convention. It is easy to poke fun at Roosevelt, and he could laugh at himself - as when Elihu Root said: "The thing I most admire about you, Theodore, is your discovery of the Ten Commandments," or when Finley Peter Dunne suggested that Roosevelt's book on his exploits in the War with Spain be entitled Alone in Cuba. Yet he is still very much with us today - and I am not thinking only of President Kennedy's fifty-mile hikes (an idea first suggested by TR) or of Mrs. Kennedy's televised tour in which the names of

James Monroe and Theodore Roosevelt stood out as renovators of the White House (and Monroe had more reason to refurbish after the British got through with Washington in 1814).

As president, Roosevelt understood the potential of the office. Power and responsibility, he Iiked to assert, must go hand in hand. The executive must employ not only those prerogatives which the Constitution explicitly grants to him but also those which it does not specifically assign to the legislature. Where Wilson later regarded himself as a prime minister whose function was to guide through Congress a positive program, Roosevelt saw himself as a commander-in-chief. "In a crisis," he wrote in 1913, "the duty of a leader is to lead and not to take refuge behind the generally timid wisdom of a multitude of councillors."

Roosevelt did lead, but he also drew upon the advice of strong men like Root and Taft who were anything but timid. Through skillful publicity and a laudable cultivation of the press Roosevelt focused attention on the executive. Through a voluminous correspondence with eminent citizens at home and abroad, with his envoys overseas, and even with heads of state or government in Europe he kept himself superbly informed. He was a mobile president, and he was the first to leave the country while in office. One technique he overlooked, and probably he never forgave Wilson for reviving it. That was to deliver in person his messages to Congress, a practice dormant since Jefferson discarded it in 1801.

As president, Roosevelt also understood the enlarged role the republic must play in world affairs. Where Grover Cleveland had resisted stubbornly the trend toward great-power status and William McKinley had chosen reluctantly the path of empire, Roosevelt faced the twentieth century with a bold excitement. Speaking in 1903, he said: "We have no choice, we the people of the United States, as to whether or not we shall play a great part in the world. That has been determined for us by fate, by the march of events. All that we can decide is whether we shall play it well or ill." Roosevelt sought stability and order in his day not by paper agreements and sweeping pledges but by an equipoise of power. More fully than most presidents, he comprehended and preached the need of correlating foreign policy and military strength. He never faltered in his adherence to civilian supremacy, but he knew at first hand and respected the fighting force and the men in uniform.

The first Roosevelt did not alter markedly the basic guidelines of foreign policy. At the outset he moved cautiously. He was an accidental president and, remembering the difficulties of others who had inherited the office - Tyler, Johnson, and Arthur - he promised to carry out McKinley's POlicies. He endorsed several far-reaching decisions of his predecessor: to retain overseas coloFall, 1963

nies, to build an American-owned interoceanic canal, to demand a favored status in liberated Cuba, to promote the open door in China. The main steps that he took in his first term were to choose the Panama route, to benefit from (though not instigate) a timely rebellion against Colombia on the Isthmus, to force a favorable settlement of a long-standing boundary dispute with Canada, to persuade Germany and England to end a blockade of Venezuela, and to add a corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. Some of these developments would have occurred if McKinley had lived; others had a flavor distinctly Rooseveltian.

It was on the larger world stage that Roosevelt made his most novel contribution to American foreign policy, and the opportunity did not come until he had been elected in his own right in 1904. The occasion was the Russo-Japanese War over Korea and Manchuria and the Franco-German rivalry over Morocco. In both episodes he sought to promote peace because he felt a major war in any quarter of the globe could imperil American security. This notion is commonplace today; not so in 1905. When Japan attacked Port Arthur in 1904 without declaring war, Roosevelt's sympathy, like that of his countrymen, lay with the Japanese. Since 1900 Russia had been the chief threat to the open door in China, whereas Japan had long been considered a protege of the United States. But when Japan's uninterrupted victories revealed the appalling weakness of the Tsar's forces in East Asia, the President feared that the balance of power there would disappear. He counted upon an equipose to uphold American interests. Hence he accepted invitations from both belligerents in 1905 to use his good offices to bring about an end to hostilities. In responding to such pleas, Roosevelt showed a completely opposite attitude from that of President Cleveland ten years earlier when China and Japan were at war. Cleveland took the position that the conflict then raging in the Orient touched no vital interest of the United States. Thus where the Sino-Japanese peace was written at Shimonoseki in 1895 under Russian, German, and French pressure, the Russo-Japanese peace was signed at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in 1905 under American auspices at the request of the belligerents.

Roosevelt's role in resolving the Moroccan controversy, which threatened to drag the rival alliance systems into a general war, was not so decisive. Many factors were at work. But the important thing is that he was willing to venture into the forbidden arena of European power politics. He helped organize a conference at Algeciras, sent American delegates, and authorized them to sign a treaty in 1906. Because of criticism at home Secretary Root had to justify this attendance as protection of American trade, while the Senate appended a reservation which dis-

claimed any intention to depart from the policy of isolationism.

An earlier generation of historians accused Roosevelt of stumbling in ignorance into world politics. Today 's verdict is more favorable. Although no statesmen at the time grasped all the forces at work, Roosevelt's perception was as good as anyone's, and he achieved what he set out to do. Nor did he overestimate what he might accomplish. Writing to the ambassador in England in August 1905, he said: "In all these matters where I am asked to interfere between two foreign nations, all I can do is this. If there is a chance to prevent trouble by preventing simple misunderstanding, or by myself taking the first step when it has become a matter of punctilio with the two parties then I am entirely willing and glad to see if I can be of any value in preventing the misunderstanding from becoming acute to the danger point. If, however, there is a genuine conflict of interest which has made each party resolute to carry its point even at the cost of war, there is no use in my interfering." This would not seem very ambitious or effective today, but in 1905 it was unprecedented. It was also enough to win Roosevelt the Nobel Peace Prize.

Although Roosevelt clashed frequently with Congress on matters of policy, he aroused relatively little conflict over prerogative. He was criticized for sending as delegates to Algeciras men who had not been confirmed by the Senate for that purpose, but most of the critics were opposed to participation in any case. He did stir up protest when, as commander-in-chief, he sent the battle fleet on a practice drill from the Atlantic to the Pacific and then kept the vessels going around the world; but the success of the feat quickly silenced objectors. The bitterest hassle came when he attempted to establish a customs receivership in the Dominican Republic by an executive agreement rather than by a treaty; and even when he backed down, the Senate refused for two years to sanction his action. There were several reasons why this disharmony over prerogative remained in a minor key. The Republicans had large majorities in both houses and were reasonably united. After 1905 Secretary Root handled the Senate with skill. But most of all, there was no major crisis as there had been under Madison and Polk and as there would be under Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt, for it is during crises such as these men faced that presidents are most likely to stretch their powers and set off a countervailing force.

Now we must turn to the second Roosevelt, who entered the White House twenty-four years after his distant cousin and namesake left it. Much had happened in the interim in respect to foreign relations. Under the stress of the Great War Woodrow Wilson had challenged his country-

men to abandon the policies of isolationism and neutrality - to recognize that war or threat of war anywhere in the world was their concern, to join a concert of free peoples designed to keep the peace, and to agree to defend the independence and territory of any member under attack. Wilson had failed, but in failing he left his mark on American foreign policy. The United States could never again remain indifferent: what had been the exception under Theodore Roosevelt became the rule under Wilson's successors.

Presidential procedures had also changed between 1909 and 1933. Wilson had not only left the country for an extended period (over seven months less a three-week return visit) but also negotiated directly with heads of government. The Great War saw the beginning of the practice where foreign rulers or leaders visit Washington for ceremonial or diplomatic reasons. The interim witnessed too the advent of radio. If that medium of mass communication had been available in 1919 and if Wilson had chosen to use it rather than embark on an exhausting transcontinental speaking tour - which led to a paralyzing stroke - the outcome of the League fight might have been different. Finally, there had been the inevitable reaction in Congress to Wilson's broad use of presidential powers in wartime, and even in 1933 the relations between the White House and Capitol Hill were influenced by experience of the battle over the Versailles Treaty.

Franklin D. Roosevelt possessed a temperament and talents well suited to exploit the potential of the presidency. Even more than Al Smith, he was the Happy Warrior. Sanguine and gay, he was instinctively a leader. Despite his privileged upbringing, he had the common touch. He coined phrases that inspired his fellow men. He could say "My friends" in ten different ways. A superb speaker with a mellifluous voice, he developed the medium of radio with effective fireside chats. A skilled actor with a flair for the dramatic, he gave the impression of moving forward even when he stood still. He traveled constantly through the land, perhaps to 'compensate for his inability to walk unaided. He revolutionized the press conference and endeared himself to correspondents whose newspapers excoriated him. He enjoyed personal diplomacy, corresponding not only with his own ambassadors abroad but also with the heads of other states or governments. Like the first Roosevelt, he understood the need to correlate foreign policy with military capability. He, too, loved the sea and the ships that sailed it. Most important of all, he viewed the presidency as a place to exercise both political and moral leadership.

On taking office, Roosevelt did not institute a new deal in foreign policy. His immediate goals differed little from those of the Hoover administration. Although the depression was global in its

ramifications, he concentrated on domestic problems and gave priority to relief, recovery, and reform. The world, of course, did not stand still as he tried to build a new America. His first years saw the collapse of the Versailles settlement and the American compromise between traditional principles and Wilsonian precepts. So spectacular were Roosevelt's initial triumphs at home that we forget his many setbacks abroad. In July 1933 the World Economic Conference broke up in failure, partly because he refused to stabilize the dollar. In June 1934 the World Disarmament Conference reached a deadlock because no one could reconcile Germany's demand for rearmament with France's insistence on security. More revealing were his defeats on Capitol Hill where the Democrats enjoyed large majorities in both houses. In May 1933 he lost his bid for a discriminatory arms embargo designed to discourage revolution and aggression. In January 1935 he was beaten on the World Court Protocol. In August 1935 he signed a neutrality law he did not like. With many of his staunchest supporters on domestic matters disagreeing with him on foreign affairs, Roosevelt shrank from showdowns. Certainly he cannot be accused in these years of exceeding his constitutional authority or stretching the limits of the presidency in foreign affairs.

The real controversy over whether Franklin Roosevelt usurped the powers of Congress in foreign policy began as Europe careened toward war. The President was appalled by his inability to awaken the people to the dangers which, he felt, beset them. "It's a terrible thing," he said later, "to look over your shoulder when you are trying to lead - and to find no one there." He did try to secure a change in the existing neutrality laws, a change which would allow the executive discretion in applying the arms embargo, a discretion that might be used against the aggressors. Though he had wanted this discretion since 1933, and had sought it openly and by constitutional means, he was unsuccessful. Then the outbreak of war in September 1939 persuaded Congress to give him half a loaf.

With the fall of France Roosevelt took the first of several steps for which he has been severely criticized. This was the Destroyers-Bases Agreement of September 1940 by which the United States transferred to Britain fifty overage and decommissioned destroyers in exchange for ninetynine year leases on six Caribbean sites, suitable for naval and air bases, and the outright gift of two additional facilities in Bermuda and Newfoundland. Little fault could be found with the provisions. They amounted to the most advantageous acquisition for defense since the purchase of Louisiana. To be sure, the agreement was not consonant with traditional neutrality, but after the Nazi invasion of Holland most Americans realized that traditional concepts afforded no protection

for the neutrals. What bothered many citizens was the method used, an executive agreement instead of a treaty. The Senate had been bypassed. Why? Not because he feared publicity - the text was published immediately. Not because he feared defeat - he could have mustered a two-thirds majority eventually. Rather he feared delay, a long debate during which Germany might invade England. The tempo of war had quickened; the air age had made obsolete the leisurely processes established in 1787. Modern planes, Roosevelt had warned four months earlier, had eliminated oceans as defensive moats; modern bombers could hit the United States from Greenland in a six-hour flight.

The Lend-Lease Act of March 1941 was the next step in an unprecedented response to what Roosevelt believed were unprecedented dangers. Note the word "Act." Lend-Lease was a law, a statute passed by Congress. It may have been unneutral; by nineteenth century standards it was. It may have been unwise; I do not think it was. It may have delegated extraordinary powers to the president, and it did. But it was not usurpation by the executive. It was openly debated after full hearings in both houses; it was passed by substantial majorities. It conformed to the democratic process and was flawed only by premature assurances, implied rather than explicit, that American warships would not be needed to insure the safe delivery of Lend-Lease goods.

We come now to the climax of Roosevelt's prewar diplomacy - the undeclared naval war with Germany in the Atlantic and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Did the President exceed his powers? Did he so maneuver the situation that he robbed Congress of the right to decide whether war should be declared? There is much about his course in the Atlantic that may be criticized, even if you agree - as I do - with his basic assumption that American security required that Lend-Lease goods reach England. On occasion he was not candid, even devious. He seemed afraid to tell the people bluntly what must be done. In this connection Secretary of War Stimson, a Republican who had served the first Roosevelt, Taft, and Hoover, later expressed the opinion that in 1941 Theodore would have done a better job than Franklin. "TR's advantage," Stimson said in 1947, was "his natural boldness, his firm conviction that where he led, men would follow Franklin Roosevelt was not made that way. With unequalled political skill he could pave the way for any given specific step, but in so doing he was likely to tie his own hands for the future, using honeyed and consoling words that would return to plague him later."

On September 11, 1941, Roosevelt ordered all American warships to "shoot on sight" any Axis naval vessel encountered in waters which the United States deemed essential to its defense-

Fall, 1963

roughly the western half of the Atlantic. Five days later he put into effect an order, frequently canceled and long delayed, permitting belligerent and neutral merchant craft to join convoys destined for Iceland and escorted by the American navy. Both steps were taken publicly, but without congressional consent. Since the President was acting as commander-in-chief, such consent was not required, though he might have been wise to seek it. A month later Roosevelt did ask Congress to repeal certain outdated clauses in the neutrality laws, and by a close vote (close because of extraneous issues) that body went farther than he had requested. Paradoxically, in late 1941 Congress and the people would have opposed a flat declaration of war against Germany, yet a sizable majority favored a course that at any moment could precipitate full-scale hostilities. This confusion persisted until Japan struck in the Pacific.

The events leading to Pearl Harbor were diplomatic and military in character and thus, constitutionally, the concern of the executive. The deployment of ships and planes was the responsibility of the commander-in-chief; the dialogue with Tokyo to resolve Japanese-American differences fell to "the chief organ of the nation in its external relations." There was more secrecy surrounding developments in the Pacific than in the Atlantic, but then publicity is not customary during tense diplomatic negotiations or frantic military preparations. Certainly Congress could not be given the intercepts of secret Japanese dispatches which we were able to read after breaking the diplomatic code. The legislature could have acted, if it had wished, on perhaps the most decisive move in the long drama - the freezing of Japanese assets and the beginnings of an oil embargo. This step was taken by an executive order, but it was done openly and dealt with something within congressional jurisdiction. There was, however, no protest on Capitol Hill where a "get tough with Japan policy" was more popular than in the White House or the War and Navy Departments.

Roosevelt has often been accused of wanting to enter the European war through the backdoor of Asia. He is charged with provoking Japan to strike first (thus insuring united support at home) by presenting her with impossible demands. This premise and this charge I believe are false. Roosevelt had no desire to enlarge the war. His main aim was to help England contain and defeat Germany. America was unready to fight a two-front war. His military chiefs in November 1941 were begging for time, beseeching him to avoid a showdown, at least until April 1942 when they would have enough flying fortresses in the Philippines to make those islands safe from a Japanese invasion, or so they thought. The President concurred, but he also knew there were

concessions beyond which he could not go to avoid war and there was a deadline beyond which the Japanese would not talk lest the season for amphibious operations pass. One can legitimately argue that a more flexible American policy might have postponed the clash with Japan - I do not think anything could have eliminated it - but that is not the same as saying that the president usurped the powers of Congress and insured war by compelling Japan to fire the first shot.

Roosevelt has also been charged with exceeding his authority by promising England and the Netherlands to come to their aid in event of a Japanese attack in Asia. This assurance the President consistently refused to give, at least down to December 6 when any such promise could not possibly affect Japanese policy. He was, to be sure, worried lest Japan weaken Hitler's foes by invading Malaya and the East Indies. His military advisers told him that a Japanese conquest of parts of Southeast Asia would imperil our own security. The dilemma was what to do if Japan did so invade without attacking American soil. That was a tough one. On November 28 the President and his cabinet agreed that he must go before Congress and request authority to use force to defend certain non-American territory. He planned to do so on December 8 or 9. Obviously he never had to go because the attack on Pearl and the Philippines removed the necessity. But here Roosevelt recognized the limits of his power and was ready to request Congress to supplement them. This was not usurpation.

The question of blame for the military disaster at Pearl Harbor does not properly belong in a discussion of the powers of the president in foreign affairs; but since it continues to arouse controversy, I shall offer a few observations. Few Americans, it seems to me, save those under fire, showed to best advantage in that tragedy. The failure was universal. At every level, from the White House to the destroyer patrolling the harbor entrance, there were mistaken judgments and errors of omission. Not everyone was later judged by the same standards, but sympathy for those who were made the scapegoats must not lead us to accept their charges that a military defeat was staged in order to escape from a diplomatic impasse. Similarly, the refusal of officials in Washington to assume some of the blame must not cause us to conclude that they had a despicable plot to hide. There was no treason in high quarters in 1941, there is no unsolved mystery of Pearl Harbor. The true explanation of the debacle lies in the realm of human frailty; and since no O'1e saw the portent clearly at the time, it behooves a later generation not to be omniscient after the event.

Once the United States was at war, Roosevelt faced a different set of problems regarding his powers. In time of crisis presidents have always

stretched their authority - none more so than Lincoln and Wilson. The commander-in-chief acts differently in war than in peace. The line between military and diplomatic aims diminishes. Thus Roosevelt resorted to greater secrecy. He consulted Congress less. He relied more on the Joint Chiefs of Staff than on the State Department, more on personal emissaries like Harry Hopkins than on regularly accredited ministers. Often, not always, this was unwise. The air age made possible personal diplomacy - today we would call it summit diplomacy; and here the advantage offset the disadvantages. The precarious nature of the fighting forced him to make far-reaching decisions that could not be publicized. Stresses within the anti-Axis coalition compelled him to make broad agreements that affected the future peace. It was impossible to debate on Capitol Hill the meaning of unconditional surrender, the wisdom of cross-channel invasion, and the need for Russian participation against Japan. We often forget that the much criticized conferences at Casablanca, Quebec, Tehran, and Yalta were concerned primarily with winning the war. One may rightly argue that Roosevelt became too preoccupied with immediate, as against long-range goals; but it is not likely that close collaboration with Congress would have produced a different result. In the one area where legislative support was essential- membership in a postwar international organization - the President proceeded with full publicty to inform Congress and educate the people in a way that Wilson had never done in 1917 and 1918. The result was overwhelming support for adherence.

Some lessons can be learned from Roosevelt's wartime actions. There is no more difficult diplomacy than the diplomacy of a coalition, as we realize all too well today. The end of war is not victory on the battlefield. The fog of war envelops statesmen as well as generals. At several key points Roosevelt was the victim of faulty intelligence. On some occasions he carried secrecy to unnecessary extremes. This was particularly true at Yalta. A man with too much authority tends to lose humility and patience. Roosevelt's handling of sensitive Charles de Gaulle, his callousness toward a solution of the Polish question, his willingness to act for Chiang Kaishek on China's postwar boundaries all suggest that power demeans, if it does not actually corrupt. A parallel could be drawn with Wilson who, at the end of his career, seemed to lose his political touch and his knack of conciliation. Perhaps the first Roosevelt might have manifested the same tendency if, at the end of his administration, he had faced a comparable crisis.

With the passing of Franklin Roosevelt an inevitable reaction against the powers of the president set in. The Twenty-Second Amendment was one manifestation. The cluster of ill-digested

ideas associated with the proposed Bricker Amendment was another. I believe it is well that Bricker did not prevail; but some of his objectives, notably a curb on executive agreements and a reduction of secrecy in government, were an understandable response to the events of 1941 to 1945.

I like to think Bricker and his associates did not prevail because we know deep down inside that the United States cannot afford to hobble the powers of the president in foreign policy. As we pass from the air age to the nuclear age to the thermonuclear age, those powers must expand. And expand they have. There was Truman's heartrending decision in August 1945 to drop the first atomic bomb. There was his courageous and prompt decision in June 1950 to repel the North Korean invader. Yet what began as a police action that did not, at first, seem to require a formal declaration of war escalated into a bloody and frustrating conflict. And just as I think Truman was wise to respond as he did initially, I think he was unwise not' to seek, later, a legislative endorsement of what he had done. He could have gotten one easily.

Congress has been loath, of course, to surrender its prerogatives and accept a lesser role in foreign policymaking. It tried, unsuccessfully, to alter Truman's strategy of fighting a limited war and of simultaneously stationing more divisions in Europe. Its opposition has made recognition of Communist China a political impossibility. The more tactful and soothing Eisenhower recognized this fact when in 1955 and 1957 he sought prior congressional approval for any military move he might have to make in the Formosa Strait or the Middle East. Yet when a revolution in Iraq in July 1958 compelled him to act within hours, he merely told the leaders on Capitol Hill that the marines would land in Lebanon. And when Iraq's withdrawal from the Baghdad Pact threatened the existence of a shaky Middle East alliance, which Dulles had consistently refused to join, the Secretary then joined indirectly by concluding defensive agreements with Turkey, Iran, and Pakistan. And he did so by executive agreements, not by a treaty.

But we have gotten well beyond the two Roosevelts and what their careers tell us about the limits of the powers of the president in foreign affairs. I would like to conclude with an apt quotation from one or both of those facile phrasemakers; but in this case the appropriate sentiment was coined by a less gifted speaker and writer from Independence, Missouri. On the desk of Harry Truman in the White House there long stood a little white card describing the vast authority of the presidency in four awesome words - awesome in a day when all we hold dear can be destroyed in minutes. Those four words were: THE BUCK STOPS HERE.

By Daniel Johnson

THE

AND

parody (pare-di) n. (pl.parodies (-diz», (F'r.parodie ; L.parodia; Gr.paroidia, counter song para-, beside & oide, song), 1. literary or musical composition imitating the characteristic style of some other work or of a writer or composer. but treating a serious subject in a nonsensical manner, as in ridicule. 2. a poor or weak imitation. v.t. (parodied (-dtd). parodying), to make a parody of. - SYN. see caricature.

For Hannah Lyons qui n'aime pas T. S. Eliot

I. THE BURIAL OF THE INDIVIDUAL

June is the cruelest month, breeding Bachelors' degrees out of the dead campus, mixing

Commencement and job-seeking, stirring Dull brains with summer anxiety.

Winter quarter kept us warm, covering The University in forgetful snow, feeding Student life with dry lectures.

Summer surprised us, coming over Deering Meadow

With a shower of rain; we stopped in the Speech Annex

And went on in sunlight, into the Grill, 10 And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.

Je ne crois pas qu'elle est une vierge.

And when we were freshmen, staying at the dean's,

My master's, he took me out in his Rolls-Royce, And I was impressed. He said, Zelda, Zelda, hold on tight. And off we went.

In Lake Forest, there you feel important. I study, much of the night, and go to Daytona Beach in the winter.

What are the students that clutch, what grade averages grow

Out of this archaic system? Son of alum, 20

You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

A heap of graded blue-books, where fluorescent lamps flicker

And the grade report gives no solace, the instructor no assistance,

And the dry professor no sound of excitement. Only

There is shadow under this multi-colored rock (Come in under the shadow of this multi-colored rock),

And I will show you something different from either

Your pinmate at morning striding behind you

Or your pinmate at evening rising to meet you; I will show you fear in a handful of paper forms. 30 Plenus rimarum sum, hac atque mac effl,uo

"You gave me Shakespeare first a year ago; "They called me the Shakespeare girl."

-Yet when we came back, late, from Shakespeare Garden, Your cheeks glowing, and your hair mussed, I could not

Stop, and my advances failed, I was neither Satisfied nor dissatisfied, and I knew not why, 40 Looking toward the lake fill, the money. Quel noir.

Miss Yearly, famous Director of Women's Housing,

Has an infallible memory and Is known to be the most gung ho woman on the staff,

With a wicked pack of I.B.M. cards. Here, said she,

Is your card, the undergraduate on probation, (Those are F's that were his C's. Look!)

Here is Ann-Margret, the Girl of Hollywood, The girls of B-flicks.

Here is the man with three A's, and here the BMOC

And here is the introverted teacher, and this card,

Which is blank, is some system by which he grades exams,

50

Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find

The Coach hanged in effigy. Fear death by registration.

I see crowds of students, walking along the luke. Thank you. If you see dear Miss Campusquecn.

Tell her I bring the beer myself: One must be so careful these days.

Unreal University, 60

Under the constant jack-hammering of construction workers,

A crowd flowed across Sheridan Road, so many, I had not thought drinking had hung over so many.

Sighs, long and frequent, were exhaled, And each man fixed his eyes on a sweater. Flowed past Scott Hall and down University Place,

To where the Alpha Chi's kept the hours

With a muffled sound on the final stroke of two.

There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: "Beret!

"You who were with me in Phys. G! 70

"That brown-nosing you did last quarter in U.H. 304,

"Has it paid off? Will it raise your grade?

"Or did the final exam shoot you down?

"Oh keep the monitor far hence, that's friend to no student,

"Or with his eyes he'll catch you cheating again!

"You! professeur!-mon ami,-mon frere!"

II. A GAME OF CHEST

The Chair she sat in, like a hardwood box, Deadened the gluteus maximus, where the coffee cup

Balanced on a saucer marked with small chips

On which a reddish lipstick stain glared out 80

(Another hidden on the other side of the cup)

Doubled the danger of getting trench mouth

Reflecting unsanitary conditions in the kitchen as Her trembling lips rose to meet it, From a face made-up with expensive cosmetics; In containers of metal and paper

Uncovered, bubbled her strange poorly-mixed sodas,

Pepsi, phosphates, or secret Coke - gastric, barfy

And drowned the stomach in carbonation; stirred by the milk

That lay in waxed cartons, these assisted 90

In fattening the overweight co-ed, Flung their effects onto bathroom scales,

Disturbing the pattern of eating habits.

Large wall-to-wall carpets fed with dirt

Burned with cigarette stubs, framed by the pastel walls,

On which hung mirrors for self-indulgence. Above the antique mantel was displayed

As though anyone gave a damn

Fall, 1963

The metamorphosis of Pledges, by the barbarous Greek Life

So rudely forced; yet there the individual 100 F'Illed all the house with rebellious ideas

And still she demanded, and still the campus pursues,

"Join Join" to dirty ears.

And other withered stumps of college life

Were told upon the walls; verbose actives

Leaned there, leaning, speaking the room full.

Footsteps stumbled on the carpeted stair.

Under the lamplight, under the brush, her hair

Dangled in frizzy ends

Clumped into knots, then would be angrily washed.

"My nerves are shot tonight. Yes, shot. Stick around.

"Say something. Why don't you ever say anything. Huh?

"What are you thinking about? About sex? Again?

110

"I always know what you're thinking about. Sex."

I think we are in Fisk parking lot

Where the freshmen girls lose their virginity.

"What's that noise?"

A cop checking the lot.

"What the hell's that noise? What's the cop doing?"

Looking again looking.

120 "Do"

'You hear anything? Do you see anything? Don't you remember

"Anything?' I remember

Those are F's that were his C's.

"Are you whapped, or not? Isn't there anything on your mind?"

But

Come O-o-o-n-n Baby, Let's Do the TwistIt's so swingin'

So life-givin'

"Now what do I do? What do I do?

"Hell, I'll rush out as I am, and walk the street

130

"With my skirt off, like this. What are we going to do tomorrow?

"What do we always do?"

A hot bath at seven.

And if it rains, a closed car at eight.

And we'll playa game of chest,

Pressing hot bods and waiting for that damn cop with his flashlight.

When Judy's pinmate got de-pledged, I saidI didn't kid around, I told her straight, 140 COME ON, LET'S GO, GRILL'S CLOSED

Now that your father's coming out to see you, shape up,

He'll want to know what you did with that money he gave you

To buy books with. He did, I heard about it. You spent it all, Judy, better get some books, He said, damn it, I can't afford any more.

And I sure can't lend you any, I said, and think of your poor father, He's been with that company twenty years, he's hard up,

And if you don't explain about the money, there's others will, I said.

Is that so, she said. That's right, I said. 150 Then I'll know who told him, she said, and gave me a dirty look.

COME ON, LET'S GO, GRILL'S CLOSED

If you don't like it you can lump it, I said. Others can find ways if you can't.

But if Daddy cuts you off, it won't be because nobody wised him up.

You ought to be ashamed, I said, to be so selfish.

(And her only nineteen.)

I can't help it, she said, getting ticked-off, It's my childhood rearing, my parents' fault, she said.

(She's done this five times already, and nearly got caught last quarter.) 160

My analyst explained it to me; but I couldn't grasp it all.

You are a nurd, I said.

Well, if your father keeps bugging you, what the hell, I said,

What did you come to school for if you don't know how to handle money?

COME ON, LET'S GO, GRILL'S CLOSED

Well, that weekend Daddy showed up, they got smashed,

And the two of them forgot all about moneyCOME ON, LET'S GO, GRILL'S CLOSED COME ON, LET'S GO, GRILL'S CLOSED

See 'ya Bill. 'Nite Bob. 'Nite Sue. 'Nite. 170 Ciao. Ciao. 'Nite. 'Nite.

'Nite, guys, 'nite, babes, 'nite, 'nite.

III. THE SNOW JOB

The lake's pier is broken: the last remnants of beach

Are eroded and washed away. The wind Crosses the barren campus, cold. The students are home for the holidays.

Erode away, damn it, till I finish my bitching. The lake bears no beer cans, lecture notes, Used condoms, Daily Northwesterns, cigarette butts

Or other testimony of summer nights. The students are home for the holidays.

And their enemies, the members of the faculty - 180

At home, are grading final exams.

Behind Tech I sat down and cursed

Erode away, damn it, till I finish my bitching, Erode away, damn it, I'm almost through.

But behind me I hear the construction workers

The pounding of jack-hammers, and the fact of $3.90 an hour making them grin.

A maintenance man tramped across the lake-fill dirt

Dragging his snow shovel behind him

While I was busy trying to figure out the Liberal Arts Bulletin

On a winter afternoon round behind Deering Library

Thinking about my quarter on pro

And about the quarter before that.

White bodies naked in the back seats of cars

And crap shooting over in Garrett,

190

Shaken only by the dean's approach, year to year.

But behind me from time to time I hear

The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring

Students to parking lots in the spring.

Oh the moon shone bright on parking spaces

And on frenzied chases 200

They leave the cop with scattered traces

Et 0 ces voix d'etudumt», chantant chaque mai!

Study Study Study

Join join join join join join So rudely forc'd.

Ross Barnett

Unreal University

Under the constant jack-hammering of constructionmen

Mr. Lotsabucks, the Evanston merchant Cleanshaven, with a pocket full of twenties

T.t.s. Evanston: shaking my hand, Asked me in colloquial English

To luncheon at the Orrington

Followed by a sales pitch about obtaining new student customers.

At the purple hour, after the bells

Have rung to end classes for the day, when the student waits

Like the old man's car throbbing waiting, I class prophet, though nearsighted, throbbing between two girls,

Young man with hands seeking breasts, can see

210

At the purple hour, the evening hour that strives 220

Dormward, and brings the student home from classes,

The faculty typist home at quitting time, clears her breakfast, lights

Her gas range, and lays out food in Corning Ware

Out of the window perilously spread

Her underthings dry in the sun's last rays, On the hide-a-bed are piled (at night her stereo)

Stockings, girdle, Mad Magazines, chewing gum.

I class prophet, young man with eager hands

Saw this bit, and imagined the rest-

I too waited for the expected guest.

He, the young student horny, arrives,

A short cat in Speech, with hungry eyes, Some wiseass who thinks he's sharp

Like some of those longhair drama majors.

His timing is great, he figures, She's through eating, she's bored and easy, Tries to slip a hand into her dress

Which he does, though inaccurately.

Hot and bothered, he tries her; Fumbling hands are not discouraged; 240

His maleness requires a response, And makes the most of the offering.

(And I class prophet have been there

Right on this same hide-a-bed ; I who have sat outside deans' offices

And walked among the independents.)

Lays one last kiss on her, And stumbles down the apartment stairs

She turns and looks a moment in the glass, Quite aware of her departed lover; 250

Her brain allows one thought to pass; "Well I finally did it: I'm sorry it's over."

When a faculty typist resorts to students and Paces about her room again, alone, She smooths her hair with trembling hand, And calls his house mother on the phone.

"This jazz drifted by me upon the gutters" And along the sidewalk, up Foster Street. o University university, I can sometimes hear

Inside a public bar on Howard Street, 260

The swinging sound of a juke-box

And a chugging and a mugging from within Where seniors drink at midnight: where the walls

Of Talbott's hold

Unexpected knotty pine varnished and old.

The lake floats

Fish and bugs

The barges carry Rock to the lake-fill

White sails

Still

At Lee Street, look odd on tugs.

The barges carry

Tons of rock

Down Clark Street beach

Past the U.H. clock.

Wildcats go Wildcats win Miller and Doney

Beating doors

Their sterns were formed

In cushioned chairs

Purple and white

Their thinning hair

Repulsed the whores

Ticker tape

Counted out loud

The advance of shares

Ivory towers

Wildcats go

Wildcats win

"El trains and elm trees.

Chicago bore me. Madison and Fond du Lac

Undid me. In Madison I raised my knees

Fall,

On the floor of some eat's Cadillac."

"My feet are at Allison, and my tradition

Under my feet. After the affair

He laughed. He promised 'a new position.' I made no comment. What did I care?"

"With Indiana Sands.

300 I can get Nothing for nothing.

The terrible cost of filled-in lands. My adviser satisfies people who expect Nothing."

go go

To Columbus then we came

Fighting fighting fighting fighting

o Coach You won that game

o Coach You won

310 fighting

IV. DEATH BY REGISTRATION

Melvin the Music Major, registered on time, Forgot the time schedule, and the schedule cards

And the books and fees.

Pre-registration

Closed his courses in minutes. As he passed the guards

He counted his class cards once again

Entering the check-out area.

Grad or Undergrad

o you who stand in line and wind your watch, 320 Remember Melvin, who was once eager and on time as you.

V. WHAT THE W.e.T.U. SAID

After the spotlights white on surprised faces

After the snowball fights in the streets

After the panty raids in freshman places

The shouting and the jeering

Dormitory and apartment and renewal

Of sirens of police cars around familiar corners

He who was shouting is now running

We who were shouting are now leering

Though from a distance

Here is no beer but only Pepsi

Pepsi and no beer and the asphalt street

330

The asphalt street winding between the buildings

Which are buildings of Pepsi without beer

If there were beer we should stop and drink

Amongst the Pepsi one cannot stop or think

The town is dry and teetotallers are in the city council

If there were only beer amongst the Pepsi

Lousy building full of aldermen who will not vote

Here they always get my goat

There is not even action in the buildings

But long boring speeches without results

There is not even democracy in the buildings

But pale stupid faces grin and smile

From doors of expensive houses

If there were beer

340

And no Pepsi

If there were Pepsi

And also beer

And beer

A six-pack

A barrel among the Pepsi

If there were the sound of beer only

Not the W.C.T.U.

And church choirs singing But sound of beer from a tap

Where the student sings in the taverns

Slurp chug slurp chug chug chug chug

But there is no beer

Who's the clown who always walks with you? 360

When I'm around, there's only you and I together

But when I see you from a distance

There's always this clown walking with you

Talking dressed in a brown suit, tweed

I don't know whether an SAE or a Sigma Nu

- So who's that clown who always walks with you?

What is that noise coming from the lake

Hammer of handsome wages

Who are those book-toting broads swarming

From endless doors, stumbling on cracked sidewalks 370

Ringed by the frat men only

What is the university over the buildings

Student unions and humor magazines and riots in the purple air

Losing influence

Minnesota Iowa Purdue Michigan Wisconsin

Unreal

A co-ed drew her long black hair out tight

And played folk music on those strings

And cats with bearded faces in the purple light 380

Listened, and had their flings

And walked head uplifted down a well-lit street

And back in the dorms were showers

Dripping familiar leaks, that kept up for hours

And voices singing out of empty Teem machines and exhausted candy vendors.

In this dismal hole among the buildings

In the faint moonlight, the church choir is singing

Over on south campus, about the chapel

There is the new chapel, only the icon's home.

It has no purpose, and it's ugly besides, 390

Rich alums can harm everyone.

Only a liberal stood on the corner

Hear me hear me hear

In a show of spirit. Then an Evanston cop

Bringing a warrant

Courage was punished, and the apathetic students

Waited for graduation, while the discontented ones

Gathered together, over in the Hut.

The student body waited, sitting anxiously.

Then spoke the W.C.T.U. 400

DRY

Dry: what have we gained?

My friend, shaking my 1.0. card

The awful daring of a moment's rebellion

Which is short-lived and never effective

By this, and this only, we have existed

Which is not to be found in our commencement invitations

Or in year books censored by the beneficent administration

Or in dresser drawers opened by the house maid

In our vacated rooms 410

DRY

Drier: I have heard the counselor

Turn and go in the corridor and turn and go once only

We think of the counselor, each in his room

Thinking of the counselor, each confirms a room

Only at nightfall, aethereal rumours

Revive for a moment a broken Regulation

DRY

Driest: The old ladies responded Gaily, to the speaker expert with word and logic

The auditorium was quiet, your soul would have responded

Angrily, when challenged, opposing mightily

Their controlling hands

420

I sat upon the shore

Reading, with the lifeless campus behind me

Shall I at least set my courses in order?

Pearson Hall is falling down falling down falling down

Fata viam inveniunt

o Willie Willie

What if the homecoming queen is a lesbian! 430

These facts I have stored in my notebook.

Why then damn it all. The student senate is mad again.

Dry. Drier. Driest.

Shut up shut up shut up

NOTES ON THE VAST LAND

Not only the title, but the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism of the parody were suggested by T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922), the precursor of modern symbolic poetry, and one of the most powerful and magnificent poetic works ever created. Indeed, so deeply am I indebted, Mr. Eliot's poem will elucidate the difficulties of the parody much better than my notes can do; and I recommend it (apart from the great interest of the poem itself) to any who think such elucidation of the parody worth the trouble. The subject matter of the parody was chosen because of its relevancy to my present situation and, of course, that of Miss Hannah Linda Loretta Lyons, to whom it is dedicated. Although some may find reason to object to my bastardizations as well as my often (not really) unjustified pricks at the great helium-filled balloon of university administration, injury was not my purpose.

I am not retracting anything, but there are places in the work where distortion served my purposes much more readily than real situations would have.

I. The Burial of the Individual

31. Terence, Eunuchus, 1, ii. 25. "I am full uf cracks, I leak on every side."

49. One of many names appearing in university propaganda which is associated with the Great American Dream Dump in southern California.

68. A phenomenon which I have often observed firsthand.

74. Cf. any of several species of large, flesh-eating lizards of Africa, southern Asia, and Australia: so called from the notion that they warn of the presence of crocodiles (lecturers).

II. A Game of Chest

98. Some do.

100. Actually, this process is characterized by politeness and good manners.

115. A prevalent myth (?)

138. Cf. the game of chest in Johnson's Guide to EnLightened Living.

III.

The Snow Job

186. Estimated.

191. Winter quarter, 1960-61.

202. Cf. May Sing.

209. Cf. manager, Grabdo Dept. Store

211. Thanks to students.

218. Class prophet, to my knowledge, is not an official student office at N.U.

257. Overheard in the No Exit Cafe.

264. An excellent pub on Paulina St. Try the ribs.

V. What the W.C.T.U. Said

358. Cf. Talbott's, Hamilton's, The Candlelight, and others, esp. Wednesday and Friday nights.

402. 'Dry, drier, driest.' The fable of the meaning of Evanston is found in the liquor stores of Skokie.

428. Virgil, Aeneid, III, 395. "The Fates find a way."

434. Shut up. Repeated, as here, a formal ending to this parody.

POEMS

After graduating from DePauw University in 1959, where he studied psychology and sociology, Russell Warren Nystrom worked for two years in a psychiatric ward of a local hospital in order to fulfill - as a conscientious ob;ector - an alternative Service obligation. He is married, has three children, and has been taking courses in literature in Northwestern's Evening Divisions.

I'M TERRIBLY SORRY

Under what marker that I have not seen Lies my dream in her disfigured reality

Her slender innocence called me from among the cattle Into this foreign land where I am lost and alone

Fall, 1963

Daniel F. Johnson, L.A. '63, was co-winner of this year's Faricy Award for poetry at Northwestern, and is now editing new novels published in paperback by Novel Books, Inc. in Chicago.

After attending high school in Evanston, where he was born, he ;oined the U.S. Navy and had two years of duty af/oat. He served on an ammunition ship and a tanker, touching at ports in Cuba, Scotland, England, France, Portugal, and Spain, and at Mediterranean ports in Italy, Sicily, Sardinia, Greece and Turkey - a good deal of traveling. His freshman year was at Kendal/ College, where he was named a member of Phi Theta Kappa, the National Junior College Scholastic Honorary Society.

His "The Vast Land" made a considerable stir in campus circles. He was invited to read it in several classes and copies of the manuscript have been in demand. The close parody of Eliot's "The WaSte Land" becomes, ingeniously, a satire on the various levels of collegiate life.

Red, orange and yellow sun spots

Burn still into my shuttered eyes

Though I am in a cluttered closet

Full of dinner jackets and moth balls

With my head upon a rubber boot

That jabs its buckle into my neck.

Yet I dare not scratch or stretch for fear Of tumbling off this pillow altogether

On to the dusty wood floor so far away.

I can not remember if the door is locked or If I am some fallen suit of winter underwear. I have forgotten all the cotton summer clothes

And can remember only these drab heavy wools

That hang long as my long covered hours that Drape over this precarious and stuffy vigil Imposed on me for my naked search into that sun.

Russell Warren Nystrom

THE BURNING CRIME

REBUTTAL

Go away in the woods somewhere gone away

Like Thoreau or like that Babbitt

You'll come back to me.

Go away in the woods somewhere gone away

I have plenty of frightened shoes

Scraping off their dirt on me.

Clean still the green somewhere gone away

You'll sell it all for Butchered meat and secret waste.

Though he is in the somewhere gone away

You'll come back to nest in Mother's sweating fat hand.

A DREAM FROM THE MEADOW

From

Where I know not came

A delicate yellow bird

Singing

Light

She manifest in song

And in her harmony

Color

Alone

She winged towards me

Completing this solitude of

Form

THE FATHERLAND LET FALLOW

what regret that dwells beneath the earth unspent ghosts that sense the grass's new lush the pregnant blossom's turning to common maturity that smells eventually of brown nuts and orange fluttering wind then disappears undercover to be the new ghost of Spring unrealized my name continues new but oh my miserable eyes that see too little not to hunger and see too much not to sleep

AND ON THE SEVENTH DAY

On the seventh day the factory rests

Near by an empty warehouse

And a lonely stranded box car

While the dust of six days settles slowly.

There are no people to color

The cyclone tan and grey stillness; There are no people except the three Who on the seventh day inherit the discarded world.

And the old man is the old man

Whom all have seen and smelled

And given a dime to make him go away

From all the driving plastic days before.

And the fat old woman has an old fat woman's Flowered and faded kerchief covering her head

And her eyes are bland and staring

Into a far preoccupation of tired vacancy.

Yet the boy would shuffle if he walked at all

Because his feet are lonely for the unknown sea

And his eyes are ever watching

For the stray cat that he does not miss,

Three parenthetical forms in a tableau

Listening to the slowing of the dust

They are always the same, the same three On an empty waiting seventh day street.

And still. And still again the remnant stench Of the factory fills the hollow warehouse

With a mild and useless desire to house The stranded traveler until yet another day.

WAITING IN A CLOSET ON A SLOW SUNDAY

Search search search search searching I am the stuffed full man

I have just eaten Shakespeare and Freud

Nor were they polite at table

We are the stuffed full men

Now with tight belly I play hide and seek With my children who never find

AN OCCASION FOR NEARNESS

It travels from an ancient depth up through the root searching for the small pore that flowers into one pregnant scent forcing song to open the throat of a waiting bird that startles up an insect fly from its dark habit and calls the worm to open the earth hole into fertility as my eyes open wet through the happy slime of this slippery joy.

Herbert Comess came to Northwestern in 1959 as Staff Photographer and his work has contributed substantially to The Tri-Quarterly. For this issue the editors invited him to show some of his independent work, and the pictures on these pages are the ones which he has chosen. He presents them without titles or comments since he believes that a photograph should stand as a separate statement. His favorite examples have not always been of University scenes or persons.

A native Chicagoan, he enlisted in the Air Force and served for four years as Information Specialist attached to t'he wing which had dropped the first atomic bomb and which, at the time of his service, kept its live atomic bombs in a building next to his office. The journal which he edited was called The Atomic Blast.

He was a philosophy major at Roosevelt University (B.A. '55), after graduation became a civilian photographer for scientic research for the U.S. Government, worked in New York on magazine photography (advertising), and was later aHached to the Commercial Division of United Press International.

BY HERBERT COMESS

photographs

by Barry G. Brissman

THE DEATH

Barry G. Brissman, whose liThe Pond" appeared in the spring issue of this magazine, holds the J. Scott Clark Scholarship, awarded for literary merit. He is interested in problems of style and craftsmanship. In the story below the shift in narrative person after the twenty year time gap is unorthodox but, as he explained to his classmates, lithe immediate intensity of the first person seemed right for the way I wanted to make Jonathan return after so many years./I

Brissman is a senior in the College of Liberal Arts, majoring in English and serving as an undergraduate editor of The Tri-Quarterly. His home is in Naperville, Illinois.

I.

and Lloyd was in the stall; at intervals a forkful of manure would appear out of the doorway and land on the back of the spreader. Boris leaned on the tractor wheel smoking cigars that were the same short stubby shape as himself.

"Nope, you're wrong," Boris said. "If ya' want people to remember you, slap 'em in the face. Yup, slap 'em in the face, and then ya' can bet they'll remember ya'."

The spreader was full and Lloyd came out of the stall shaking his head and looking at the floor as he walked. "Me, I'll get along with folks. Ya' ain't never dead long as someone remembers and thinks kindlymy brother al'us said that." The thin figure limped to the tractor and climbed on clumsily. Jonathan slid the doors open; amid the roar of the engine echoing off the walls the rig slowly passed out into the light snow, Lloyd perched atop the tractor like a sparrow. A minute later he was dead.

Somehow they all knew that eventually it would happen. In the first month he'd come to work he'd cut the four fingers off of his left hand while trimming firewood with a power saw. And he limped because once he'd turned his back on the bull. And there were all the little things. Lloyd himself always said he was unlucky - never complained about it, just mentioned it ruefully from time to time - and he never understood why. But the rest of them understood and weren't surprised when it finally happened that winter. The tractor slid into the ditch and turned over and crushed his chest.

They forgot about it pretty quick, but in the back of the mind it lingered, especially for those who'd been there and seen him all crushed out of shape under that tractor. Mostly it was what he had said, the words having barely died on his lips before he himself was dead: "Ya' ain't never

dead long as someone remembers and thinks kindly." In the back of the mind it lingered.

and Jeanie was beside him; after till' spring rain the scent of sweet clover carne to him as delicate and as deep as she was, the sweet clover that she always called her favorite smell. They walked along the dirt road that ran through the fields. Behind them the clump of farm buildings and trees loomed indistinct in the dusk; lights twinkled along the highway in the distance. It was their third year, and feeling her small hand in his, hearing her voice beside him, Jonathan knew that pretty soon, when he got the money, he would ask her. They walked slowly; the dirt road was soft underfoot.

"What about your brothers?" she asked.

"Oh, I don't know," Jonathan said. "When Arly graduates from high school this spring I suppose he'll stay here and help me do the farming. Pa can't ever work again with his heart like it is. Arly and I will take over the farm eventually, I suppose."

"Oh. And Ben?"

Jonathan shook his head. "He never cared for the farm. I don't think he'd be interested. He gets back in a month and he'll have to tell us then, when he's decided for sure. Pa always says Ben will never make a good farmer. I think Pa's right.

Jeanie lifted her eyes from the road and looked up at him. "You didn't used to get along with Ben too well the year just before he left, did you? Mavbe it's just as well he won't be working with you."

"Ben was awful wild," Jonathan said. "He never had any time for farming."

For a moment there was only silence, and then her voice came small and thin, hesitating. "Sometimes it's not so bad to be wild." Jonathan said nothing, but when she stopped walking he turned to her and waited. "I have something to tell you," she said. She bit her lip. "I think we should go out with other people."

Silence for a moment, then: "Is there someone else that you

"No, no one else, really. It's just I'm not sure. The love part."

"Oh." He tried to smile, put both hands on her shoulders and squeezed gently. "Okay," he said. His voice was a whisper. "I understand."

That was all. They turned around and walked back to the farm and Jonathan drove her back to town. Even along the road the warm wind whipping through the window brought the scent of sweet clover strong and clean.

and Arly was late getting home from school. Jonathan, working by the shop putting new cutters on the mower sickle, looked up when Arly walked over to him, and he saw Arly''« bloody

lip and bruised eye. "What happened to you?" he asked.

"Had a little trouble," Arly said.

"Looks like."

"Yeah, I was walking home passing in front of Toby's just as Bill Larson was coming out, and I bumped into him and knocked the beer can out of his hand. So he picked a fight I told him I was sorry and, well, I guess I lost mostly."

Jonathan dropped his wrench in the dirt and stood up, wiping the grease off his hands with a rag. He started walking towards the pick-up. "C'mon," he said.

"Now what you gonna' do, Jonathan? He was drunk." But Jonathan kept walking and Arly followed him, climbed into the pick-up beside him. Jonathan drove out of the yard fast and Arly started again. "I don't think you ought to make a thing of it, because he was drunk, after all, and I mean, it ain't his fault, really."

"Whose fault is it, yours?"

"No. Nobodys, I suppose. Maybe I'll be drunk sometime and do things and I'll want folks to make allowances. It ain't that I'm afraid of him."

"I know you ain't afraid, but he's thirty years old, and he ought'a know better. If he's drunk, he got himself that way."

"Well, I wouldn't make an enemy over it," Arly said slowly. "Seems we'd do best to forget it; he'd do the same, I think."

Jonathan kept his eyes on the road. "I don't forgive him; it don't work that way."

They parked in front of the bank and got out. Jonathan was not much bigger than Arly about an inch taller, a little wider. "But he was harder and he was two years older. Larson's car was still parked in front of Toby's. Larson was leaning on the fender. A beer can was in _his hand. It happened fast. Jonathan said, "Larson!" (the man turning and looking at him dumbly, Jonathan nodding toward Arly) "You cut my brother up like that?"

Larson set his beer can down on the hood of the car and straightened up his hulking body. "Yeah," he said. "He bumped _"

But before he could finish Jonathan hit him, hit him hard in the face. He swung with the right arm; the left hung relaxed at his side. As Larson staggered back against the car Jonathan hit him again, then turned away and walked back to the pick-up without watching him slump to the pavement.

People were on the street as there always were about quitting time. They were standing talking, or walking along casually, or getting out of cars and going into the drugstore to buy the paper, or into the grocery store for a quart of milk But it happened fast and not many of them noticed. Jonathan and Arly got into the pick-up and drove off, the engine whining its metallic

whine as they turned into the stream of traffic on the highway, heading into the sun.

and Ben was home after two years; it was early Sunday morning in June. He looked strapping in his uniform as he came smiling up the front walk and leaned over and kissed Ma. There was something very human about Ben, something winning. Everyone felt it.

That morning he went to church with Ma. He'd traveled all night and the uniform was a little rumpled, but he insisted, and he went to church the way he always used to. Jonathan couldn't go because there were sixty acres of alfalfa to be cut. Ma was disappointed that his own brothers couldn't at least go to church with Ben and give thanks on the day he came home safe from the Army. So Arly went along to help keep the peace. Arly always kept the peace.

For about a week Ben just loafed, helped in the fields when he felt like it, slept when he felt like it. And he drove around and talked to the neighbors, leaning on a fencepost or a truck or a tractor, telling about women and guns, how he hated the guns and loved the women. "Who wants to be fighting when you can be loving, anyway?"that's what he always said, even before he went away to the Army. And now he was confirmed in the opinion. He didn't care much for the Army, that's what he said. And he told about the women not with braggadocio, rather with a kind of fondness, a kind of sensuousness that was his nature. Ben told everything as a joke. When he talked the men listened and laughed.

Finally the talking and the loafing wore thin, and he began to spend more time working in the field. For several days straight he helped them haul hay. Sometimes he'd straighten up and look across the flat land and say how this work sure beat digging trenches with a shovel. And then he'd heave a hay bale up to Arly who was standing on the load eight tiers high off the wagon bed; that was the signal for Jonathan, a game they played. He'd holler for Ben to stand back and watch a man do it, and then he would heave a bale.

Then the working wore thin too, and Ben started looking for a job in the city. It was a fifteen mile drive each way, and he spent the day there and came back at night. But he didn't find anything that suited. And there was a blond that began keeping him out till three and four in the morning, so he didn't get started the following day until nearly noon.

Jonathan got the first cutting of alfalfa in that month, and he plowed up a twenty acre piece of summer fallow that hadn't been done in the fall. Working alone far out in the fields he thought of Jeanie. He saw her in the cold brilliant mornings, in the black earth flowing before the plowshare, in the hawk turning slowly in a blue sky

- in everything that he found beautiful and clean and good. But most of all she was in the scent of the sweet clover. It was planted amongst the alfalfa, and there was a whole field of it just east of the house. It drifted through the sultry days and was carried on the evening breeze, intoxicating. Somehow he felt that, whatever happened, she would always be the same Jeanie, changeless as the land.

June passed. It was evening right after supper and Jonathan was by the gas tanks filling his tractor. Ben came across the lawn and through the hedge and out to him, dressed in white pants and a light blue shirt open at the collar. He put his hand on the fender and looked up at Jonathan. "Why don't you come in to town with me tonight? It's the Fourth of July, you know. Should be big doings."

The mosquitoes were coming out; Jonathan brushed his neck with his hand. "I really gotta' get the rest of that little piece up north baled. It's dry tonight, so it should go pretty good. Besides, 1 don't feel much like going out. Ask Arly."

Ben's upturned face was blurred in the halflight as he spoke. "He's got a date, so he's taking the pick-up by himself; hope his girl isn't fussy about what she rides in."

Jonathan grinned. "She's not. She's real nice. You met her?"

"No. 1 saw Jeanie in the drugstore the other day, though. And she's real nice. And beautiful; not like 1 remembered."

"I guess 1 told you about that," Jonathan said.

"Yeah. She asked about you."

"Oh ?"

Ben pulled a chunk of dried mud off the tire and grinned. "I don't think you have to worry, brother," he said. "She still loves you. Give her a little time and she'll show it."

Jonathan looked hard at the warm sincerity in the upturned face. "I hope you're right, Ben."

"You bet I'm right. Hey. Remember that time in high school Freddy Dunn made a crack about her and you laid into him and got your ears pinned back?"

"Yeah. And then you laid into Freddy Dunn and broke his nose, and old Mr. Jackson called up Pa and lectured him that his boys were the most violent he'd seen and uncontrollable and everything else."

Ben looked at his watch. "Well, let's go. Run in the house and grab a shower; 1 don't want to wait all night for ya'."

"Not tonight."

"For Pete's sake. Any other night you don't work, and on the Fourth of July you decide to work late. Snap out of it."

Jonathan pulled the hose out and screwed the gas cap back on. "What d'you plan on doing tonight?" he asked.

Ben shrugged, letting his hand slip from the fender and putting both hands in his pockets. "Just pick up something and have a little fun with her, I suppose."

"You trusting to liquor or charm tonight?"

"Well, if charm don't work, I got some stuff that'll knock the virtue out of a Sunday school teacher. Three bottles of it, in fact. Come along and I'll show you how an expert heats up cold country girls."

Jonathan smiled and dropped to the dirt on the other side of the tractor. "Not tonight," he said. And he walked to the front end and put a hand on the crank.

"All right," Ben said, "but I think it would do you good." He turned and walked off across the yard, his white pants rubbing shadowy whiteness into the darkness as he moved away. From far off in the town came a series of popping sounds, the first firecrackers. Jonathan whirled the crank; the engine roared.

The field took longer than he'd figured. Long after the fireworks from the town had ceased blazing and popping and spraying silver in the sky he was still gr.nding along in the darkness, the headlights making a streak down the field and the light on the fender shining backwards at the baler where the windrow of hay was swallowed up. And then finally the last foot of windrow had disappeared and it was eleven o'clock and Jonathan went home. His ears rang in the sudden silence when he shut off the engine and started across the yard in the direction of the house. When he got to the hedge he remembered he'd kept in the cow with the cut leg, and he turned back, his boots crunching softly in the dirt as he headed toward the barn to throw down some hay. The moon was down out of sight in the west already, and the buildings, the gas tanks, the hedge, the trees were all a single hazy shadow. He liked it that way, dark and quiet, like sleeping. The ladder was just inside the door; as he stepped inside he flicked on the aisle lights and the mow light simultaneously, and put his hand on the ladder and climbed.

Jeanie and Ben were there. For a fraction of an instant he was just startled, and then came the realization, like ice water sluicing over his heart and contracting it. Their white bodies glared beneath the dim bulb high overhead, and he saw them almost before he had stepped off the ladder. He smelled the liquor over the fragrance of the sweet clover and alfalfa. Two empty bottles lay alongside of where they lay. Ben was on his side now, looking at him. They were both looking at him, annoyance and a little fear in Ben's eyes, and only horror in hers.

A bale hook hung on the top of the ladder. Jonathan took it in his hand and moved toward them. Ben started to scramble and shouted, "For

God's sake, Jonathan, for God's sake don't And then Jonathan was standing over him, knowing he was going to kill. The back of the hook thudded dully on the crown of Ben's head, and Ben stopped trying to crawl away. The hook went up once more and came down hard on the temple.

Jonathan stood up, and for a moment before he turned away he looked at her. He was close to her now and he smelled the liquor on her breath above everything else. There was a strange kind of horror in her face, as from an awful realization - and there was more than the horror. When he dropped the hook soundlessly into the hay her face went into her hands. He heard the sobbing as he stumbled down the ladder and ran out of the barn.

He was running through the warm night, through the fields, toward nowhere really, but toward the tracks in the distance where the freight trains passed, he thought. There were tears in his eyes, and he ran insensible through the darkness. Only the smell of liquor and sweet clover lingered in his brain. And he ran and ran and ran

II.

It was a little after five when I left the city; the street lights were just going off; the sky was beginning to tum pink in the east. Once I was on the road it was as if I were leaving it all behind forever, like awakening from a dream and returning to life. Knowing that in two weeks I would be back again didn't change the feeling. The glass door bearing my name on the twentythird floor of the General Foundry and Manufacturing Building; the silent, thick-carpeted apartment with daily maid service - they were forgotten. That existence didn't matter, just as it had never mattered. I wanted to go home again. It was a long time since that summer night I had hopped a freight and disappeared from the valley, and now there were things that needed finding out. But mostly I wanted to feel the pain again, because the pain was better than nothing, and for twenty years I had felt nothing.

It was August. The driving was north and west, two lane highway all the way. Coffee at ten in a small town coffee shop, and lunch at a roadside cafe. Miles of heat-shimmering pavement. And then suddenly it was six o'clock and the sun was coming into the last stretch of sky and I was turning off of the highway. The old dirt road was graveled now, and as I turned onto it I could see in the distance the cluster of trees and the roofs of the barns peeking through them. A big drainage ditch cut its way through the half section, passing just south of the farm. It hadn't been there before. So even the land itself changedslowly, but it changed.

Fall, 1963

Sunlight slanted greenly over the fields and made the man on the tractor a black spot against the expanse of a flat world. He was cultivating long rows of soybeans. I stopped at the side of the road and walked through the ditch and into the field. The bean plants were high and bushy, wouldn't need cultivating any more after this, I thought. I waited at the end of the row, working a soybean stem in my teeth, listening to the popping of the engine grow louder. When he got next to me he stopped and idled down, and I saw shock write itself across his face. Abruptly he shut off the tractor. As the silence swept in around us he muttered, "Jonathan!"

I let the stem fall from my lips. "Hello, Arly. I thought it might be you; I hoped it would be; so I stopped."

"It's been a long time," he said slowly. "A long time," I agreed. "The folks, how are they?"

"Both dead; you didn't know?"

I shook my head. "I guessed, but I hadn't heard. There was no way to hear."

"N0," he said. "I guess not. Pa died the year after you left, Ma the year after that."

The shock passed and he became easy. He leaned forward and clasped his arms around the top part of the steering wheel, looking down at me. "How are you, Jonathan? You look like you're doin' okay." He nodded toward my Lincoln parked up on the road.

"Can't complain," I said. "And you. You working late these days? It's after six. You always used to be the first one back to the farm."

"I was just going in," he said. "The work is pretty much caught up. Crop looks real good this year, was good last year."

"This used to be alfalfa, didn't it?" I looked toward the farm. "And up there where the wheat is, east of the house, what happened to the alfalfa and sweet clover?"

Arly shrugged. "No more cattle, no more hay. I sold the herd ten years back. Come to think, I don't believe I've seen a sprig of sweet clover in the whole valley this year."

"I suppose you're married by now," I said, and I grinned at him.

He grinned back. "And three kids. Two boys and a girl."

"I'd like to meet them," I said. "I mean, just for a minute if I followed you into the yard and you said I was a salesman or something."

Arly didn't answer but looked away across the fields. And then he looked back to me, speaking gently, deliberately: "There is something you don't know," he said. "Jeanie is my wife."

I only stared blankly, feeling my pulse beating at my temples, feeling my hands go cold. And then I realized he was still talking; I heard his voice coming soft to my ears: and she was

pregnant and she needed me. They all treated her like dirt, the town and everybody, even her family; all except for me, because I guess I loved her just from hearing you talk about her. She's been a fine wife, all a man could ask."

I spoke slowly: "And your oldest is Ben's."

"Ben's son," he said, "and my son. He's twenty now. We were married twenty years ago."

"And you married a woman with another man's child.

"He was my brother."

"I murdered my brother," I said.

"We are different," he said. And whenever he spoke Arly was gentleness, the same as he had been as a boy.

The sounds of the evening began to drift to us - a mourning dove on the highline wire and crickets in the grass of the ditch. "Does she ever say anything about - about it?"

"No." He shook his head slowly. "At first there were times, well, when I think she thought about you - a kind of sadness about her - though she never said. But that was a long time ago. She has a family now. She's my wife. She has her life. You wouldn't want her to

"No," I said. "No, I wouldn't."

"I'm sorry it has to be this way," he said, "that we can't talk longer, and all."

"Who do the kids' look like?" I asked.

Arly scratched his whiskered chin. "The oldest looks like Ben and the other boy like her; I guess the girl takes after me. That's what they say."

"Ben's son and your son," I said. "And you have a boy and a girl." Arly was looking at me intently. I went on half to myself, knowing he already understood what I was saying. "So Ben isn't the one that's dead. And even now I don't regret, because it had to be that way, I suppose, because that's the way I am. I don't regret; mostly just envy you, and Ben too. Is there still talk about it, about the murder?"

Arly always spoke softly: "Go away from here, Jonathan. There are too many people to recognize you and remember. Don't make them. It's over. They've all forgotten about you."

"It's getting late," I said. "You better get home. She'll be waiting dinner for you."

I walked back to my car and drove away slowly; the warm night air breezed through the open windows. And over and over his last words repeated themselves to me: "They've all forgotten about you." In the rear view mirror I could see Arly's tractor pulling up onto the road far behind me.

At the corner I turned in order to go past the farm. I drove by it slowly and looked in through the trees and saw the familiar white buildings. A light was burning in the house, and as I passed I thought for a moment I smelled the odor of sweet clover, very faintly, as from someone else's field, far away.

They are in Love

by Linda O�Riordan

The two squibs below amused their author's classmates, and The TriQuarterly now prints them to add to its accumulating comment on collegiate life.

Linda O'Riordan, whose "Hyer Tesiker Ederim" appeared in last winter's issue, is an English major in the College of Liberal Arts, scholarship chairman of Pi Beta Phi, winner of the National League of American Penwomen Award at Northwestern, a member of the Symposium Committee, and an undergraduate editor of this magazine.

THE SOCIAL chairman stands up and taps her spoon against her water glass. "There will be a candle in the living room after dinner," she says. Shrill squeals follow her announcement. The girls try to guess who will blowout the candle. Joyce said that she and Henry had an argument last week. Maybe it was just a cover-up, so no one would suspect her. Dianne and Billy have been going together for only two weeks. A lavalier maybe, but not a pin. It's indecent to get pinned unless you've been going out with someone at least three weeks. After all, a pin is a permanent tie. When two people get pinned, you know they're in love.

After dinner the girls crowd upstairs and form the circle. Someone turns out the lights and the house mother starts the candle around the circle. The girls sing as the candle moves from one pair of hands to the next.

Peggy O'Connor pretends to blowout the candle. She is a senior, soon to be engaged, but she doesn't fool anyone. Everyone knows the first time around doesn't mean anything. The candle has to make the circle twice for a pinning and three times for an engagement. The one who blows it out is the lucky one with the cracker-jax prize of a pin or a ring. She's the one who is in love.

Fall, 1963

The candle starts on its second time around. Necks stretch and twist; the second row stands on tiptoe to see who the mighty exhaler is going to be.

"You'll love him, forever and ever, You'll always be his ." The song's sentimentality permeates the room like the odor from a bottle of cheap perfume.

Someone blows out the candle. It's JUdy. She and Stubby are pinned. Judy is mobbed. She cries and can't get the pin on. It's too high, now too low. She doesn't want help. There, that'll have to do.

While the girls are mobbing Judy, the. housemother turns the lights on and goes to her room. As she leaves the living room, she rubs her thumb along the gold ring on her left hand. She closes the door behind her.

"Judy, when's your serenade?"

"Oh, not for at least a month. The brothers wait until they're sure it's the real thing."

The questions continue, so do the squeals. Everyone is delighted that Judy and Stubby are in love. Judy has the pin to prove it.

Judy and Stubby are seen everywhere together. They look at each other adoringly. Her buzzer rings four times every day. She buys him cute

contemporary cards for no reason other than that she loves him. They have their serenade and everyone knows their love is the kind that lasts.

May comes and they celebrate their two month anniversary. Judy has just met Stubby's parents. They think Judy is nice. She thinks they are nice, too, but she does not like the way Stubby's father slurps when he drinks his soup. But she is in love with Stubby, so she will overlook his father's faults. Then Judy notices that Stubby also slurps his soup, but Judy is in love with Stubby so she will correct his faults.

Now Judy's eyes only shine most of the time. She and Stubby are still in love, but now it is a mature, a realistic love. Once they even discussed their religious differences. Judy decided she will convert someday.

Judy is nominated for sweetheart of Stubby's fraternity. She isn't chosen, but she says she doesn't mind because Stubby still loves her and that is all that matters anyway. Judy and Stubby are still going to be married a year from June.

A year from June seems a long way off to Judy. She wishes the time would go quickly, because she does not want to wait that long to become Mrs. Stubby. She realizes, however, that if the time goes quickly, Spring Quarter will soon be over, Stubby will graduate, and they'll be apart for the summer. She'll miss him. It will be a long summer. There is also next year. Judy hates the idea of having to face next year alone, but she loves Stubby, so she will endure it somehow. A year from June seems very far away.

Stubby graduates, and Judy and Stubby say

ATLAST Homecoming is over. The decorations have been taken down, and the last remnants of crepe paper put in the trash. The trash is gone, and so are the alumni. All that remain are bleary-eyed students, worn out from trying to inject spirit into something meaningless.

For the alumni, Homecoming lasts three days - three days of saccharine superlatives and heavy drinking, three days of "Remember when?" For the students, however, the three days set aside for enthusiasm only terminate a long period of useless activity.

goodbye for most of the summer. They write every day and see each other three times for a week each time. Then Judy goes back to schooJ and Stubby goes into the service. They have a weekend together before he leaves. Judy still has his pin. The ring will come at Christmas and the wedding in June. Before their final good-bye, they decide to date other peopJe while they are apart. They still love each other, of course, but Judy doesn't think it's fair to keep Stubby from dating, and Stubby certainly dislikes the thought of depriving Judy of some fun. Each one would be quite willing to stay home every night, but neither thinks it would be fair to ask the other one to.

Back at school, Judy wears the pin during rush week, then puts it in her top drawer. She'd hate to lose it. She writes Stubby every day. A week or so after school starts, Judy meets Hugh in one of her Political Science courses. They become friends. Hugh and Judy date - as friends. Judy writes Stubby every other day. Hugh gets friendlier. Judy writes Stubby once a week.

Stubby comes to see Judy for a weekend. Judy realizes she cannot stand the way he slurps soup. She gives his pin back. Judy and Hugh are still friends.

The following Monday, the Social Chairman makes an announcement. There will be a candle. The girls shriek as they crowd upstairs to the living room. They sing reverently as the candle goes around the circle. Judy blows it out. Judy and Hugh are pinned. They will be married a year from June. They are in love.

In my dormitory, the useless activity usually begins about three weeks before the official weekend, when the house president opens nominations for Homecoming Boat-building chairman. We always elect the Boat chairman, because this is an office of responsibility. and because no one ever volunteers. Who would want an office of responsibility which involves work, especially work without glory?

The election is always lively, for each girl hurries to put up someone, so that she herself won't be nominated. When the president is satisfied

that no scapegoat has been overlooked, she closes the nominations and calls for the vote. The voting must be by secret ballot to maintain (,Olllpatibility among the dormitory residents. If om' girl caught another voting for her, the results would be disastrous. Loud cheering always follows the announcement of the election results. An outsider might mistake this roar of enthusiasm for an expression of all-out support for the new chairman. Actually, each girl is cheering madly because she has escaped the office for another year.

The newly-elected chairman acknowledges the applause with a grimace of delight. She makes her first announcement. "Immediately after the house meeting, there will be an ideas meeting down in the living room. It won't take more than fifteen minutes," she promises, knowing that it will take at least a half an hour just to persuade people to come.

At the meeting, the girls must first contrive an elaborate pun to use as the title of the float. It does not matter that the pun has little connection with the Homecoming theme, for its primary purpose is to "snow the judges out of their minds."

Creating a pun is easy in comparison with the next task, designing the float. It is quite difficult to decide what to put on the platform. Boys, of course, can always create mechanical wonders with flashing eyes, wagging tails, and the like. For girls, the situation is not so simple. If someone in the dormitory happens to be pinned to a mechanical-minded genius who either is willing to explain mechanics to forty feeble-minded females, or better still, construct the entire float himself, girls, too, can have a mechanical wonder. Unless the dorm is so fortunate as to have access to one of these prize pin-mates, girls must be content with an assortment of stationary figures that look stupid or deformed, or both.

After the committee has contrived the pun and pigeonholed the pin-mate, the batallion of elementary education majors takes over. They write the float building instructions in simplified form. For some reason, girls find it impossible to understand the processes involved in building a float and to follow any directions accurately, even those written by elementary education majors. Yet these same girls never seem to have trouble with complicated knitting patterns. It must be that float-building skill is not considered to be part of the feminine image.

Once the preliminary preparations are complete, the work begins in earnest. Each girl conscientiously takes it upon herself to leave the work for everyone else to do. This united effort accounts for the air of enthusiasm permeating the dormitory. Spirited phrases drift down the halls, phrases such as, "Aw, I can't work now. I've got a midterm tomorrow." Obviously this is a lame excuse, for everyone knows it's a tradi-

tion to have Homecoming and midterms at the same time. What a well-rounded school we have! Academics and activities are working side by side It's too bad that the students aren't also working side by side.

The Homecoming advocates proclaim that this is a time which develops unity and comradeship. They maintain that working together for a common goal brings people closer together and establishes rapport among the workers. If any of this mythical rapport would result, it would have to develop the night before the parade, the time when everyone realizes that nothing is done. All the residents enthusiastically trudge downstairs to get the work over with. Forced and distasteful laboring does wonders for rapport. Perhaps the rapport is not so important after all. Perhaps the emphasis should be placed on individual sacrifice for the common good. Yes, the sense of self-sacrifice is just the thing for the self-appointed martyrs. They love it.

The work continues all night. Practiced sighs of weariness puncture the friendless silence. The sun comes up.

"You guys." A whining voice interrupts the festive work. "You guys, what am I going to do? I've got classes this morning and I didn't roll my hair last night."

"Cut the classes, stupid."

"But you know how old man Blankley is about people who cut."

"You don't really believe all that garbage do you? He's only trying to scare you. Just feed him a bunch of bull and he won't know the difference. So what if you cut a class! What's more important anyhow? It'll sure look bad if we don't show with a float tonight. Where's your spirit, anyhow?"

"Okay, okay. I'm cutting it. I'm cutting it."

The product of tender loving care nears completion as the parade time approaches. The girls step back and look at their night's work proudly.

"Well, thank God that thing's finished."

After completing the float, they have just enough time to change their clothes before they plunge into the succession of Homecoming festivities. They oooh properly at the parade. They cheer properly at the game. They get properly drunk at the parties. They have proper hangovers the next morning. They follow the example set by the alumni; the alumni try to keep up with the students; and before anyone realizes it, Homecoming is over.

The float has been dismantled. The clean-up committee has finished its job. The alumni have left. Homecoming is really over. Just look around. Yes, look around, and you'll see that the results of all the preparation, the planning and the hard work are more often found in a trash can than in a trophy case.

-"�'�.

, Malcom S. McCollum

Malcolm S. McCollum was born in Evanston, went to school there, and now lives in Wilmette. At Northwestern he is a senior majoring in English. In his freshman year he was named to Phi Eta Sigma (Freshman Men's Scholastic Honorary Society). He has worked in a book store, a pet shop, plays the piano, trumpet, and saxophone, and writes poems, two of which appeared in the spring issue of The Tri-Quarterly.

BUG ESCHATOLOGY

2 bugs today: a gnat, smashed casually at level of my murderous eye - that's perjurous, however, for the eye was bland (and that's a lie, it was surprised to see death in the hand of me), was bland, I say, before it registered the gore of gnat-life on my handa gnat who can't demand a cause, now, for his death, a gnat void of gnat-breath;

2 bugs: the second, small, exuberant in crawl upon my bathroom floor, a bug small as the core of joy, crossing, bug-style, the white plateaus of tile and valleys of dark grout, backing, shunting without pattern but for bug whim, mindless of my too grim rumination, pricking same with point as stickingsharp as any knifethat primal thorn, his life. Inflated like a buoy I am, then, great with joy.

Were I an architect" contracted to erect a church, this, for the all: one wall; another wall. To further great elation this, for all decoration: on one wall, God Is Love; on one, God Is Not Love. Between, above, around this, space; beneath it, ground.

YOU AND I

Outside our kitchen, the autumn rain; Inside, ourselves being lazy; Both places, Saturday morning:

You were working one of those Puzzles, damn silly things, Poking your lower lip out When you got stuck. Wearing myoid blue sweatshirt And smoking too much:

I was reading, I said.

Mostly, I was watching The leaves falling under the rain, The rain its silver self, and my feet Propped up on the windowsill. You probably had caught me Looking foolish at some thoughtYou were grinning at me Once when I turned my head your way:

All morning we were separate And together and comfortable. I think we made love That afternoon; maybe not.

A 4-SQUARE, 4 BEAT, 4 BEAN SONNET FOR CARNIVORES

Lima beans are nearly green, Not round or square, but oval: A lima bean is never seen Attempting to be novel. (Lima beans.)

Smooth lima beans in succotash Complement corn's flavor: The yellow corn caught in the dish Returns the unsought favor. (To the lima beans.)

Lima beans, inside their jackets, Are all stuffed full of vitamins: One lima bean will cure your rickets; A meal of them will cure your sins. (0, lima beans.)

Yes, lima beans are lima beans Are good for you. Or so it seems. (To lima beans.)

Green tree, green tree, Stone and stone. Long time, long time. Bird's hollow bone.

1. Oh if I had A second head

I'd think three times as easy. I'd find a girl To love me true And long and fat and greasy. And if I had No eyes to speak I'd go a lot less crazy. The bitch I've got now, She's a peach, She's shanky-mean, and lazy.

2. Oh if I had

A high fine horse

I'd ride upon the pompous. I'd slant my cap Down on my eyes And gaucho up a rumpus. But I'll not have A little horse, I'd rather ride a grampus And deep six Seven manatees Down on a writ mandampus.

3. Please send an ounce Of mercury

So I can diagnose. Bend over, world, Put out your tongue, And take off all your clothes. It's very grave,

Husband at work, Children at school, Her breakfast dishes

To do or shirk, The wife, no fool For dreams or wishes, (Not even should They be of Spring, which, while it's sweet And mainly good, Has a brash ring And muddy feet)

Is given pause In her routine Of wash and rinse

To give applause

To an unseen, Unromantic prince -

Fall, 1963

SOME OF-IF, PRISON BLUES

Your fever's hot; I think you've caught Psychosis. You'd best go see A specialist; I can't find where your nose is.

4. 0 pellet, pill, And powder-man, Did you forget your snowbird? He ate an egg Two days ago, It roosted like a cowbird. It wasn't yellow, It was blue. It didn't taste like bluebird. If you don't have Some wings for me, I think I'll be a no-bird.

5. Oh if I had A window, I'd want a doorway soon. Good thing I've got no window. I'll sing a little tune:

Oh did you ever Hear it thunder When the clock said it was noon? Did you ever, Ever wonder How much man was in the moon?

Green tree, green tree, Stone and stone. Long time, long time. Bird's hollow bone.

Home

SMALL ENTERPRISE

Just a man, come With a jaunty bell To sharpen knives And figure the sum Of what's ill and well With the waiting wives.

The wheels of the cart That carries his gear Work an old device: Their turnings start The bell's career Of breaking the ice.

The wife at her sink Holds a smile suspended, As if some sign Had made her think Something had ended, Something malign.

His return each year Is unexpected. It would be no wonder Should he disappear: A man unprotected Goes easily under -

Just a scissors-grinder, No more or less, Come to remind her

Of a good surprise: The fragile success Of small enterprise.

ason stood on the bank of the brown Obion and watched Rev. Forbes dunk his younger sister into the crawling, muddy water and heard the congregation singing, their hands clasped in front of them Be of Sin (Mason heard his own voice) the double cure, Save from wrath and make me pure too slow, they always sing too slow and the dozen or so people standing waist deep in the water started for the bank with Rev. Forbes wading in front, his arms stretched out and the Holy Light of Salvation shining on his face and long hair with Mason at the same time wiping the sweat away and thinking about the water in his eyes and Rev. Forbes' strong, hard hand on the top of his head and the same somber faces staring out from the red bank in the name of the Father and Mason went down into the murky water blup and out slosh and of the Son blup the swirling quiet slosh and the Holy Ghost blup using the same water to baptize that John Pearl set his catfish lines in after ya shinny out on a tree hanging over the water, ya dip this here three-pronged hook into the chicken blood and let'er down easy, then allow ya line out slowly so's it'll drift down the river a'ways and bang! And behold Thee on Thy throne,

Rock of Ages, cleft for me, let me hide myself in Thee.

Mason picked his way through the people, heading down to where his Ma was fanning with a funeral home fan and Pa was holding his Bible up tight to his chest. He turned to look hard at Mason.

"You'd do best to stay close to your folks, boy. No good for ya to go traipsin' off into the woods. Better to stay where the Lord and me can keep ya out of trouble.

"Yes, Pa."

Mason again wiped at the sweat with his sleeve and studied the ground. Ma took Jo-Kay's hand and Mason took her by the other as she stepped onto the bank, the water running in brown stripes down the folds of her skirt.

"Well, Jo-Kay, now you're a proper church lady," Ma said wiping Jo-Kay's face with a cloth.

"Thar's no need to pamper the young'un to death a'cause she's in the hand of the Lord." Pa's hand went to Jo-Kay's shoulder. "And we'll 'spect ya to act like a decent Christian person ought to. All this fussin' 'round would set

"Brothers," Rev. Forbes said to the congregation, "we have witnessed a holy and beautiful thing here this afternoon and one which I hope

will encourage all of you to carry the word of Jesus with you today and everyday. We see before us the proof of God's love for his children when we look on the bright faces of those who have accepted the Lord Jesus Christ as their Saviour and been baptized. For only ye who believe and are baptized may enter into the kingdom of

Rev. Forbes continued his sermon for some ten minutes at which time he asked if any of the brothers of the church were moved to speak.

"Yes, Brother Gobbler?"

Mason's Pa stepped to the front of the group, a scowl on his face.

"I jest like to say that we all here need this time to try to set ourselves back on the right path of the Lord. 'Tuther day when I was in town, I seen several womenfolks of our own Corinth Church dressed up with fancy red and yeller geegaws and flowery things. I reckon we all know that these new-fangled notions may be alright for citified folks, but here in New Sidonia we don't take to it. Struttin' 'round like ladies of the world, apin' them magazine pictures, is not the way to God's Salvation and those that take to a lot of this new pack of nonsense that's going around will find theirselves in the lake of fire and brim-

By Gary T. Cole

stone when the Day of Judgement comes 'round and their name is called."

Gobbler King raised his hand to shade his eyes from the sun, which had just come from behind a summer heat cloud; he stared at the people. Rev. Forbes shuffied uneasily and the people leaned back, intimidated by the power of the words and their personal fear of the man standing before them.

"Me and some other of the Elders of the church have had a talk as to what ought to be done 'bout this. We have decided that much of this trouble is sproutin' from Mr. Niward, the school teacher from the New Methodist Church, the other side of Sharon. It's plain in my mind and the other Elders too that the young folks is bein' erupted by science teachin' and such. Now some of the ideas are even beginnin' to take holt of some of the older folks who ought to know better. The Devil moves in strange forms, Brothers. Ya never know if he's in the same room with ya. If we want to stop this kind of thing from bein' the damnation of us all, it's high time we put a stop to it right now. The other Elders and me, commencin' Monday, are stoppin' our children from goin' to this school and we aim to see if we can't get this school teacher's place retook by somebody that's a God fearing person. Far as my own Mason goes, he don't need no more schoolin' anyhow, but. the younger children haft to be learned to read the Bible and such. The Elders and me and Rev. Forbes is sure the rest of you will all keep your children home 'til another school teacher can be got."

"Amen," voices said in the group.

"Amen, Brother Gobbler," said Rev. Forbes stepping next to him and facing the people. "Tonight the Elders and I are going down to talk with Mr. Niward about his leaving the school. It's not right to have a Methodist teaching Baptist children anyway."

That evening after the hot ride home in the wagon, Pa saddled up the mare and rode off toward the church through the still evening to meet the others. After he passed out of sight over the wooden bridge across the bottom, Mason stopped splitting firewood, drew a bucket of water from the well, and set it on the porch. His mother was inside the kitchen scrubbing blackiron pots used for cooking dinner.

"Ma," Mason called through the screen door, "can I speak with you?"

"Why surely, Mason."

Mason entered the darkened kitchen and sat at the table waiting for her to finish. She hung a pot on the wall, dried her hands on her apron, and brought a kerosene lamp from the tub to the table. She turned the wick up, brightening her wrinkled throat and hands, and sat down. The shadows of the room were smaller and less men-

acing now.

"I know what you're thinking, Mason, but it ain't no use to fret yerself about it. Your Pa has decided that the school teacher is troublesome and so he's got the church all fixed up to get rid of him. Ther' ain't a thing that can stop him so you'd do best to jest stay clear of him."

"But Ma, that ain't fair. You know yourself that Mr. Niward is a good man. Besides, it ain't just that. It's him saying I've had enough schoolin'. Most other boys are gain' on farther than six grades nowadays. If he let me go just two more years 'til I'm sixteen."

"You know he won't, Mason."

"But I missed two years anyway with one sickness and another and "It ain't no use, Mason."

"He let John Pearl go 'til the eighth grade."

"Mason, don't talk 'bout John Pearl. You know your Pa don't like you to speak of him. Your Pa thinks it was book learnin' that led John Pearl to leave the family and never so much as write a line

Ma stopped oddly, looking at the shadows of the darkening room, a sudden whiteness in her face. She took Mason by the shoulders affectionately.

"Mason, please do what your Pa says and don't make him mad. You know how he is when he's mad. Be a good boy, for your Ma's sake."

Mason sat quietly thinking about John Pearl while his mother wiped her eyes and went out on the porch. The mention of John Pearl always troubled Mason. He was the finest brother a boy could have and yet two summers ago he packed up and left one day while Mason was at school, and was never heard from since. The last two years had been awful lonesome with only Jo-Kay to talk to. It wasn't like when John Pearl was there and they'd go giggin' frogs at night or

squirrel hunting early in the morning. Mason could see even now John Pearl sittin' under a tree patiently watching the branches for what seemed like hours. And finally, he'd snap that gun up and a squirrel would come tumblin' down. Then Mason would draw water while John Pearl skinned it and picked the buck shot out, the squirrel stuck between the two fingers of his left hand. He'd cut the middle three off with an axe when he was little and Mason was always amazed that John Pearl could do anything with those two fingers that Mason could do with five. Pa was always mad at John Pearl and whopped him awful sometimes, but John Pearl would do what he wanted anyway by trickin' Pa some way or another. Mason had often wished to go huntin' again, but he was afraid Pa would catch up with him. Pa said huntin' and fishin' was something to do when the work and Bible reading was over. But since John Pearl left, they never seemed to be quite over.

"Mason, you'd best lock up the hen house. There's been faxes snoopin' 'round here at night. I seen their tracks."

"Yes, Ma," Mason called out to the porch. Mason dropped the wooden latch on the already sleeping chickens and stood for a few moments watching the cattle stand, absently chewing their cuds as a light haze moved in at the departure of the setting sun. Crickets had set up a rhythmic scraping and a bob-white called her brood in somewhere in the milo field. The mosquitoes were whirling around Mason in the faint light of the black-blue sky and he fanned his straw hat at them and hurried to the house.

Jo-Kay and Mason read the chapters of the Bible that Pa had assigned for that day, the kerosene lamp on the one side and a small fire in the

Gary T. Cole was born in Chicago, took his first two years of college at Navy Pier, and is now a senior at Northwestern in the College of Liberal Arts, maioring in English. Writing and music divide his interest - he has studied piano a good many years. He intends to teach but will work for a time in the outside world before going to graduate school. Vacations he has worked for the Post Office, taken fishing trips into the deep woods of Ontario, and has spent a number of summers on a farm in Western Tennessee - a locale which has been reflected in his stories. Cole is an undergraduate editor of the Tri-Quarterly.

fireplace on the other. Ma sat in her rocker shelling peas for the next day's dinner. Then she sewed Mason's shirt before sending Jo-Kay and Mason up the ladder to the attic and the dovp (l'lIther beds.

Mason lay under the heavy yellow comforter his Aunt Opal had made for him, and as the clouds rolled over the low hills outside the attic window, blotting out the bright half-moon and stars, he thought about what his pa must be saying to the people. The Methodists wouldn't have the gumption to stand up against the Elders and Pa. They knew Pa's temper too well. Gobbler King was a name feared in Weakly County.

Mason remembered how Pa used to take him and John Pearl with him when he'd go loggin' back up on Beech Ridge after the crops was in and how he'd beaten a man down with a loggin' chain and would have killed him if the other men hadn't stopped him. Mason also remembered John Pearl out in back of the house sweatin' and bitin' his lip while Pa hit him on the back with a willow switch. Pa said a boy needed to be given the rod to help him stay on the path of the Lord.

Mason had been lucky though, because of being sick so much, Pa had never beat him up as much as he did John Pearl. But then John Pearl had stood up to P a more than Mason ever could.

The sound of a horse coming across the wooden bridge and up the road brought Mason out of his drowsiness. Then the creaking of the barn door and the screen door slamming downstairs and his Pa's voice mumbling up through the pine board floor. Mason lay still and listened, but couldn't hear the words. He waited, then pulled the comforter back, crept to the hole in the floor, and raised the trap door an inch or two. thar's goin' to be trouble I'm sure," his Pa's voice said. "Seems as if Mr. Niward don't rightly see why he should leave jest 'cause we Baptists want him to. He says thar's jest as many Methodists as Baptists in that school and that him and them New Methodists git along jest fine."

"Well maybe it's jest as well, Gobbler," Ma said. "He ain't really a bad man. It's jest that he's -"

"That'll be enough, woman. This is matter for the Elders of the church and we don't need talkin' with womenfolk to know what's to be done.

The lid was getting too heavy for Mason to hold so he gently raised it up and leaned it against the wall. Peering down through the soft, yellow light, he could see his Pa sitting facing the fireplace, his Ma still in the rocker holding some mending in her lap, but staring at Pa in a strange way.

"You won't be plannin' any kind of-"

"What we're plannin' isn't your worry. We aim to git this feller out of Sidonia and that's all."

The subject seemed closed as Pa lit his pipe and Ma resumed her sewing. Mason laid his cheek against the floor and tried to imagine what P'I might do to get Mr. Niward to leave.

"Gobbler?" Ma asked. "Don't you think we ought to try and find out where John Pearl has gone? After all, he is our son and heaven knows

Gobbler stood up quickly and Ma stopped talking.

"I thought 1 told ya neva' to speak to me of that boy agin! He's gone, that's all. He run off and left his Ma and Pa to go to the city somewheres in search of the Devil. Thar ain't no way to find him noway."

"Mason misses him so."

"Mason is a sight better off with John Pearl gone. Why, he was a 'gettin' jest like him 'afore he left. I'm glad John Pearl 'is gone. He weren't no count anyway with his fingers gone. Couldn't plow worth a-"

"Why, he made out right good, I thought."

Pa glared menacingly at Ma, who quickly stopped her defense.

"I'll have no more talk of John Pearl. Mason's forgot him, folks 'round here has mostly forgot. There ain't no need to look for him. John Pearl is gone for good."

Pa leaned toward the fireplace and knocked his pipe against the red clay brick. The ash and tiny bits of unburnt tobacco fell into the mouth of the fire. Mason, interested in what his Ma and Pa were saying, had leaned over a little more in an effort to see and hear everything that was going on. Pa laid his pipe on the mantel and turned around quickly enough to see Mason pull his head up from the dimly lit room.

"That you, Mason?" Pa asked.

Mason kneeled on the floor trying to get the courage to answer.

"I seen ya, boy. Come down from there."

Mason climbed down the ladder.

"What'er ya doin' there, Mason? Look at me. r say what were ya doin' there? Eavesdroppin'? Eavesdroppin' cn yer Ma and Pa? Speak up, boy.

Mason tried to talk, but the words wouldn't come as he looked into the orange fire mirrored in his Pa's eyes.

"Tell me ya warn't eavesdroppin'. That's a sin 1 didn't believe ya'd do to yer Pa and Ma."

Mason saw his Ma standing, the mending held tight in her white-knuckled hands.

"Why, the boy pro'bly only wanted a drink of water or somethin'. Isn't that right, Mason?"

"Be quiet, Tess. Let the boy speak for hisself."

Mason tried to push through the haze of the yellow light to grab something, anything for an excuse.

"Yeah, Pa. 1 wanted to git a drink."

"It weren't bad enough. Now ya lied to me too, boy. Step out to the back of the house."

"Oh, Gobbler. Don't.. The boy's been sick so _"

"Bein' sick ain't no excuse for sinnin'. The boy's got to be set right. If you can't set a boy straight in the path of the Lord, why then he might as well not even be in the Lord's sight. Step out back, boy."

Mason pushed through the screen door and stumbled through the black clouds of night to the pole fence along back. He laid his arms over it and waited and shook all over. Pa had never taken him out back before, but he had seen John Pearl there so many times he knew what was about to happen.

Mason looked across the black fields toward the ravine and for a moment thought he could see John Pearl waving to him, waving for him to follow, to run away. Mason squinted his eyes to try and see better. Yes, it was John Pearl. He'd always told Mason he'd take him away with him when the time came and they'd be happy, but then he'd left without a word. That had hurt Mason an awful lot, not even tellin' him. But he was back now to take him away.

Mason raised his arms off the fence, only to hear his Pa's steps behind him and feel his rough hand push him back across the cedar pole. As Mason looked out at the black field, he could see that John Pearl was gone.

"Pa I.

Mason turned his head around to see the orange fire was still in his Pa's eyes.

"Quiet, boy," his Pa said as he lifted Mason's nightshirt up.

Mason yelled at the first whack of the willow switch and again at the second, but then they blended together and he could only bite his lip and sweat.

And then he was back in the featherbed and Ma was salving the cuts. It had begun to rain and lightning dimmed the kerosene lamp as the glare flashed through the window. There was the steady hum of falling drops as they struck the tarpaper roof and slid toward the ground. Ma had been talking right along, but Mason only now began to understand what she was saying. your Pa has calmed down now so you jest get some rest and tomorrow things'Il look a lot better. You jest made him a whole lot madder than he was when ya started screaming for John Pearl to come and git ya and trying to run out across the field."

Mason tried to remember, but only the whacking and the orange fire would focus in his mind.

"Ya know I never told ya this before, but it was pro'bly for the better that John Pearl left when he did. He was gittin' big enough to fight back at Pa and I was afraid they were gonna git in a ter-

rible ruckus. Things got especially bad when John Pearl started seein' the Methodist preacher's daughter. Your Pa seen 'em together one day up by Hop-Inn. After that I knew your brother wouldn't last here much longer. If you'll jest do as your Pa says, why then there won't be no more gettin mad lind whippin' and we can

"Go way and leave me be, Ma. I don't want to talk or listen."

It was the most direct statement Mason had ever made to either of his parents, and he said it without any visible change in his expression. Ma hesitated for a moment, then took the lamp and climbed back down the ladder, closing the trapdoor as she went. Now all that was left was the pounding rain and occasional flickers of lightning. Mason decided he would leave home in the morning after his Pa started working in the field.

Mason slept lightly through the rain and the throbbing of the welts on his back. At last, the clanking sounds of breakfast brought him to consciousness. He pulled his pants on and peered out into the grey drizzle at the early morning. He could hear his Pa's voice and then the screen door slamming and could see his Pa heading out for the barn with his slicker on. Mason got some of his clothes laid out one on top of the other and put some things he thought he might need on top of the pile. Then he climbed down the ladder to where his mother was cleaning the dishes off the table.

"Mornin', Mason. How do you feel this mornin'?" Ma asked as she looked at his back. "Most of the swellin's gone down. Your Pa said to come and help him clean out the barn when ya finished your breakfast. Look's as if it's fixin' to rain all day.

While his Ma talked Mason shoved some biscuits into his pockets and then ate the eggs on his plate.

"You know, Mason, it was just a day like this when John Pearl left. It rained all day that day."

"Yes, Ma. I remember."

"Your Pa and him had almost come to blows that night before. I believe your Pa was glad John Pearl was leavin'. Your brother had a temper 'most like your Pa's."

Mason climbed back up to the attic, tied his clothes in a bundle, and fastened them with a belt. Then he put his slicker on and waited for a chance to sneak out. When he heard his mother go out on the back porch he slipped down the ladder and then headed toward the ravine, keeping the shed between him and the barn as far as he could.

The ground was soft and gave a little under each step. He hurried along at a trot until he got to the trees and brush that bordered the ravine on both sides. He pushed through the thick blackberry bushes until he came to the edge of the ravine where the ground dropped sharply down about thirty feet to a small creek not half filling

the bottom of the rocky creek bed. About fifty yards ahead lay a huge beech tree which had fallen over, spanning the forty feet ac-ross tho ravine.

It began to rain even harder as Mason reuclu-d the tree. Big Beech Tree was the only place to cross the ravine without going out to the road. John Pearl and Mason had often tried to find another way, but never had. You could slide down this side to the creek, but the other bank was impossible to climb because the creek had undercut a ledge of limestone which now rose out over the creek bed. It was raining so hard now that Mason decided to wait before trying to cross the slippery log.

He slid down the one slope, hoping to be able to crawl under the ledge and get out of the rain. Once on the bottom of the bed he picked his way across the shallow creek in a line almost directly underneath the log. Mason climbed over one last, large, yellow rock which sloped in under the ledge and ducked under the wet limestone into a dark cave which went down and into the bank. He lay on his side resting his cheek on his arm and wondering how he could go about finding John Pearl. Maybe he had gone to Memphis or maybe to Nashville. It was hard to guess which.

Mason moved his head slightly and felt flannel brush his face. He felt with his hand the sleeve of a shirt and then something hard in it. After fumbling with the buckle of the pack, he finally managed to pull a box of matches from within it. He struck a match and saw the smashed skull of a man.

His shaking hand dropped the match and he dropped two more before lighting another. The skeleton still had a red flannel shirt and blue overalls on although the clothes were in tatters. Mason noticed the brown boots much like his own. The skeleton was fully reclined and although the bones were apart, they still held the semblance of what was once a man. Another match and then Mason saw the left hand with only a thumb and little finger. It was John Pearl, and the match burned Mason's fingers. He lit another and another, staring in disbelief at the bones before him. Then he bowed his head against the sandy earth and cried.

In a few minutes he regained his senses, pulled some dry grass together, and lit it. The chalky, white bone almost seemed to move in the flickering light. Mason saw that the skull was smashed across the forehead. A thin crack ran toward the back of the head. He stared blankly at the shadows moving back and forth under that ledge as the fire burned down. As it went out the wind blew the wet spray of rain against the back of his neck and Mason clutched the black, sandy soil in his hands.

"That's why ya didn't come back for me, John Pearl. Who done this to ya?"

Even as he said this, words were in his head like burning spears thrust into his consciousness. ("John Pearl is gone for good. Ain't no need to look for him." "Ya Pa and him were gonna git into II terrible ruckus." "John Pearl is gone for good.")

The orange fire was in Mason's eyes as he scrambled out across the creek and up the bank and then out onto the muddy field. He reached the house, his breath coming in short, whistling gasps. Ma was there, but Mason didn't hear or feel her pulling at his shoulder. He thrust a cartridge into the gun, pushed through the house, and ran through the lot to the barn.

Mason hesitated only a second to push off the safety on the rifle before pulling the grey, rotting doors apart about a foot. Pa was pitching hay over into one of the stalls and didn't hear the doors open. Mason raised the gun and shot him about an inch behind the left ear. Ma was running across the lot, screaming for Mason to stop.

"He killed John Pearl, Ma. He beat him to death and hid him in the ravine. He killed him 'cause he wouldn't listen to him."

"Mason. Oh, Mason, what have you done?"

"I seen, Ma. I seen with my own eyes his broken skull. He's down there. It's him. He's only got two fingers on his hand."

"But Mason

"I got to git away, Ma. The Elders won't believe me. I got to run away now. I'll run away to where John Pearl was gonna go."

Ma was inside the stall now and Mason turned back into the rain and ran across the black soil, back along the ravine.

"I got to run from the Elders. They're just like Pa," he kept saying to himself as he started across Big Beech Tree.

Half way across, the trunk narrowed. Mason felt his feet slip on the wet bark. He held his hands out in an effort to balance himself and looked down at the ravine. Far below he could see the rock with its sharp cleft.

Waiting - just as it had waited for John Pearl on that other wet night.

Awareness came to him.

His feet slipped off the log and fell head-first, his skull striking the jagged edge of the rock. He rolled down under the sloping, yellow ledge to John Pearl, his blood trickling across his forehead and dropping to the black, sandy soil. Everyone knew it was dangerous to try to walk across Big Beech Tree when it was raining.

Rev. Forbes sprinkled soil on the caskets ("Ashes to ashes") the congregation singing ("Dust to dust"), their hands clasped in front of them - "Rock of Ages, cleft for me, Let me hide myself in Thee."

Fall, 1963

The Poetry of Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton was born November 9, 1928, in Newton, MassachuseHs, and grew up in Wellesley, where she aHended local schools. She has been married for fifteen years and has two daughters - Linda, nine, and Joyce, seven. She began writing five years ago. Her poetry has appeared in numerous periodicals and anthologies. Houghton Mimin Company has published two volumes of her work - To Bedlam and Part Way Bock and All My Pretty Ones. In 1958-59 she won the Audience poetry prize and in 1959 she held the Robert Frost Fellowship at Breadloaf, Vermont. She was awarded a grant as assistant scholar to the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study during 1961-62, and she won the Poetry prize in 1962. This year she was awarded the first traveling literary fellowship of the American Academy of Arts and Letters for a year's residence at the American Academy in Rome. When Poetry sent her a biographical form to fill out, she wrote under the heading of education "none" and under the heading of occupation she wrote "homebody."

The poetry of Anne Sexton expresses a number of symbolic themes which have been read as literal autobiography. Because her work is difficult, the biographical approach to the poems has been a temptation; but while there are elements of autobiography in it, the poetry cannot always be interpreted in this way. It seems more profitable to credit her with a degree of esthetic distance and to consider some of the recurrent themes that create relationships among the individual poems. What follows is intended to direct readers to the poems as poems rather than as memoirs.

There are no new seasons in hell, but the old ones from time to time toughen up new visitors who are able to describe in verse the climate of descent. Anne Sexton's hell is more like Dante's than like Milton's; her images clarify rather than veil the ineffable. "The Moss of His Skin," for example, is ostensibly a dramatic monologue, its voice started by a quotation from an article in a psychoanalytic journal. The quotation appears as epigraph to the poem:

Young girls in Arabia were often buried alive next to their dead fathers, apparently as sacrifice to the goddesses of the tribes.

But the form of the poem - the dramatic monologue - is a metaphor that reveals naked a personal fantasy:

·It was only important to smile and hold still, to lie down beside him and to rest awhile, to be folded up together as if we were silk, to sink from the eyes of mother and not to talk.

The black room took us like a cave or a mouth or an indoor belly. I held my breath and daddy was there,

All quotations from the poetry of Anne Sexton, with the exception of "Consorting With Angels," which appeared in the CarLeton Miscellany, ©Spring. 1963, are taken as indicated in the text from To Bedlam and Part Way Back (© Houghton Mifflin 1960) and An My Pretty Ones (© Houghton Mifflin 1962). with the permission of the poet and of Houghton Mifflin Company.

Beverly Fields

his thumbs, his fat skull, his teeth, his hair growing like a field or a shawl.

I lay by the moss of his skin until it grew strange. My sisters will never know that I fall out of myself and pretend that Allah will not see how I hold my daddy like an old stone tree.

The liebestod experience here is given more straightforwardly than even Antigone's; none of its elements is in doubt - the sense of sin, or tabu, that requires the grave as the most secret bed and also as punishment is directly produced in the four grave figures that establish sin (black), privacy (cave), annihilation (mouth), and the complex female need not only to share the father with the mother but also to share the mother with the father (an indoor belly).

Like all her poems, this one doubles its strength and clarity through sound. There is almost no rhyme except at the end, where see and tree reach a climax intensified by the intervening daddy, with its extra syllable that contributes to the syncopation of the last. two lines. The poem proceeds to this final syncopation from its beginning jump-rope rhythms, expressive of childhood, and through a meter that is struck almost exelusively with two beats to a line, expressive of this secret and disastrous coupling. Where three beats Occur in a line the mother is to be found, an extra yet necessary presence: "to sink from the eyes of mother"; her presence is implied strongly also in the trimeter lines that recognize

the need to hide from the sisters and from Allah, since all these censors refer psychologically to th« mothe-r, against whom the sin is after all cumrn itted:

My sisters will never know that I fall (Jut of myself and pretend that Allah will not see

It may be no more than coincidence that "The Moss of His Skin" occurs almost at dead center of Anne Sexton's first published volume, To Bedlam and Part Way Back; but it is possible to look before and after it to radiant elements in the large discourse of this book. The metaphorical use of the dramatic monologue makes four more poems, of which one, "Where I Live in This Honorable House of the Laurel Tree," speaks in a double-entendre of lament both for the cold pastoral, the death-in-life of poetry, and for the erotic paralysis that results from refusing courtship that is divine or otherwise tabu:

Beverly Fields is an instructor in the English Department.

A native Chicagoan, she has two degrees from Northwestern (B.A., '39, M.A., '58). She was appointed a teaching fellow at Northwestern in 1958, taught for two years at Lake Forest College, traveled in Europe, and returned to Northwestern in 1962 to teach and study for a Ph.D. degree, writing her dissertation on Coleridge. Married in 1940, she and her husband (who is a lawyer and business man) make their home in Evanston. They have two daughters in college, one at Northwestern, the other at Smith.

Mrs. Fields' article on the poetry of Anne Sexton is the thirteenth upon living American poets, written for The Tri-Quarterly at the invitation of the editor. The first ten of these were reprinted in 1962 in book form, Poets in Progress, by the Northwestern Press.

The air rings for you, for that astonishing rite of my breathing tent undone within your light. I only know how this untimely lust has tossed flesh at the wind forever and moved my fears toward the intimate Rome of the myth we crossed.

You gave me honor too soon, Apollo. There is no one left who understands how I wait here in my wooden legs and 0 my green green hands.

The tree of the father literally imprisons her here, in an ancient and durable symbol; and in another sense she is imprisoned in poetry, the shibboleth that promises to open the gates of the dead.

But a dead voice chants in another monologue, "Portrait of an Old Woman on the College Tavern Wall," with the na rcotic repetitiveness of a ballad, its refrain the voices of the living, about poets and about the locks on the gates of the dead that prevent the poets from really reaching the deep truth:

I only said how I want to be there and I would sing my songs with the liars and my lies with all the singers. And I WOUld, and I would but it's my hair in the hair wreath, my cup pinned to the tavern wall, my dusty face they sing beneath. Poets are sitting in my kitchen.

As in Donne, the dead voice asks a question whose answer is made impossible by another question:

Why do these poets lie?

Why do children get children and Did you hear what it said?

I only said how I want to be there, Oh, down at the tavern where the prophets are singing around their round table until they are still.

Poetry is a lying art undertaken perhaps in a witch's "kitchen," not only because of the nature of the poet, who is always aware of the lie behind the truth, but also because the city of the dead, the buried life, is closed, and because even the dead would lie if they could.

To lie or not, to publish or withold, is the concern of the fourth dramatic monologue in this volume. The "Unknown Girl in the Maternity Ward" speaks to her illegitimate infant, six days old. From the dramatic surface of the poem, however, a lyrical note thrusts up as the girl tells the infant that

Your lips are animals; you are fed with love. At first hunger is not wrong.

This is surely out of character; it knows too much; and it is a direction toward the undramatic pulse that beats sotto voce beneath the monologue where it is not difficult to detect the poet pinned sprawling to the wall:

The doctors are enamel. They want to know the facts. They guess about the man who left me, some pendulum soul, going the way men go and leave you full of child. But our case history stays blank. All I did was let you grow. Now we are here for all the ward to see.

I am a shelter of lies. Should I learn to speak again, ur hopeless in such sanity will I touch some face I recognize?

The decision is made at last, as involuntary and natural an act as when

I burst empty of you, letting you learn how the air is so.

the doctors return to scold me. I speak. It is you my silence harms. I should have known; I should have told them something to write down. My voice alarms my throat. "Name of father - none." I hold you and name you bastard in my arms. And now that's that. There is nothing more that I can say or lose.

Others have traded life before and could not speak. I tighten to refuse your owlmg eyes, my fragile visitor.

I touch your cheeks, like flowers. You bruise against me. We unlearn. I am a shore rocking you off. You break from me. I choose your only way, my small inheritor and hand you off, trembling the selves we lose. Go child, who is my sin and nothing more.

This is the poem that has led some to speculate whether or not Anne Sexton has had an illegitimate child - an interpretation that amuses her. Such error is not merely simple-minded, however; it is a response to the poet's trick of investing the experience of the other with her own emotional realities. What is primary in the poem is of course the experience of childbirth with its essential pain of separation; but here again, as in many of her poems, there is a double-entendre. The undramatic sotto voce appears to refer associatively to the long poem, "The Double Image," and to "For John, Who Begs Me Not to Enquire Further"; and its expresses precisely the problem that is called attention to in the epigraph to To Bedlam and Part Way Back. The epigraph is a quotation from a letter of Schopenhauer to Goethe:

It is the courage to make a clean breast of it in face of every question that makes the philosopher. He must be like Sophocles's Oedipus, who, seeking enlightenment concerning his terrible fate, pursues his indefatigable enquiry, even when he divines that appalling horror awaits him in the answer. But most of us carry in our heart the Jocasta who begs Oedipus for God's sake not to inquire further

This is an afterthought, of course, in the context of the volume; but it puts neatly the tension that motivates all the poems. A small composition history may be illuminating. After Anne Sexton had written the long poem "The Double Image" she showed it to her teacher John Holmes,

who was angry and dismayed to find her revealing so much of herself in her verse and attempted to prevent her publishing it. Her answer to him was "For John, Who Begs Me Not to Enquire Further"; but even here, in her rebuttal. his censorship appears to be the voice of her OWIl inner Jocasta. The poem begins in explanation, justification; and the attempted liberation of her Oedipus from her Jocasta is reinforced by means of free verse:

Not that it was beautiful, but that, in the end, there was a certain sense of order there; something worth learning in the narrow diary of my mind, in the commonplaces of the asylum where the cracked mirror of my own selfish death outstared me. And if I tried to give you something else, something outside of myself, you would not know that the worst of anyone can be, finally, an accident of hope.

The movement away from solipsism, the only possibility for a poet who works from the specific to the general, who does not stop at the moment of lyrical narcissism, begins the middle of the poem:

I tapped my own head; it was glass, an inverted bowl. It is a small thing to rage in your own bowl. At first it was private. Then it was more than myself; it was you, or your house or your kitchen.

The witch's kitchen again. But the poem ends with a return to the lyrical moment, enlarged, however, by the experience of reaching out, so that the final declarative sentence is twice qualified:

There ought to be something special for someone in this kind of hope. This is something I would never find in a lovelier place, my dear, although your fear is anyone's fear, like an invisible veil between us all and sometimes in private, my kitchen, your kitchen, my face, your face.

"My face, your face," Jocasta's face; it is the awareness of "my own selfish death" that sees more than one face in "the cracked mirror"cracked to reflect both sides of the overwhelming question whether or not to inquire, whether or not to express the results of inquiry.

Like the "Unknown Girl in the Maternity Ward," Anne Sexton makes her decision, but it is a difficult one. The double-entendre in "Unknown Girl," made in alternate rhyme to express its internal debate, and in "Where I Live in This Honorable House of the Laurel Tree," is her

manner of clarifying the difficulty by means of the metaphors of childbirth and mythology. Equivalence between childbirth and poem-making is by no means new, and neither is the fear of annihilation in poetry that is expressed in the metaphor of the tre«. Keats and Tennyson both felt such fear, and so did Frost and Eliot; Plato was impelled to exclude poets from his ideal republic, himself a poet; and it was Vergil, after all, who invented the metaphor of the golden bough.

Just how personally Anne Sexton pursues her fearful inquiry, however, is a matter of more conjecture than most of her readers are likely to understand. Where the lyric leaves off and the dramatic monologues takes up is frequently not clear. "For Johnny Pole on the Forgotten Beach," for example, looks like a lyric: its refrain, "Johnny, your dream moves summers/inside my mind," separates two sections of the poem that are concerned respectively with Johnny on the beach of a resort summer and with Johnny on a "beach of assault" in war, and the voice says that "He was my brother, my small Johnny brother, almost ten." But whose voice tells the truth? The poem's? Or Anne Sexton's, telling an interviewer "something to write down" - that she did not have a brother who was killed during the war?

The answer is irrelevant. The infernal journey requires what can probably be called vision, a state of heightened or intensified perception that can apprehend the nature of both the self and the other, separately as well as together, the kind of ego mobility that can slide freely between inner and outer reality.

One major literary device for attaining and expressing vision, in this sense, is synesthesia, as old as Saint John of Asia and as new as Rimbaud or as Anne Sexton. Her synesthetic figures radiate most frequently from the sense of hearing. In "Music Swims Back to Me," where the synesthesia is at its simplest, she presents the Proustian notion that "the song remembers more than 1." The sense of vertigo and of loss is heavy:

Wait Mister. Which way is home?

They turned the light out and the dark is moving in the corner.

There are no sign posts in this room, four ladies, over eighty, in diapers everyone of them.

La la la, Oh music swims back to me and I can feel the tune they played the night they left me in this private institution on a hill.

It is loss of the self that you feel here; and in an attempt to find it, the persona is impelled toward pathetic fallacy:

Imagine it. A radio playing and everyone here was crazy.

I liked it and danced in a circle. Music pours over the sense and in a funny way music sees more than I.

I mean it remembers better;

Fall, 1963

remembers the first night here. It was the strangled cold of November; even the stars were strapped in the sky.

"Stars strapped in the sky" conveys of course the sense of restraint -literal, physical restraint - "in this private institution"; vision here operates to merge the self consolingly with elements of the external world. The result, however, is not consoling, but suggests that the persona and the stars are fellow inmates in a prisonhouse, so that the poem moves, by implication, from the immediate, lyrical moment toward a larger statement about the nature of the universe.

Like the stars, the persona is strapped in, but paradoxically, since she remarks the lack of sign posts as if she were able to move like "the dark" itself:

They lock me in this chair at eight a.m. and there are no signs to tell the way, just the radio beating to itself and the song that remembers more than I. Oh la la la, this music swims back to me.

The night I came I danced in a circle and was not afraid.

Mister?

Paradise is lost here too, even though there is irony in the lost circle of dancing confidence where she may have felt preserved like the Old Testament prophets in a circle of flames or like anyone in any magic circle anywhere.

Another ironic paradise lost is evoked in "The Bells," where again sound stirs the memory and where the circle in "Music Swims Back to Me" becomes "three rings of danger":

Today the circus poster is scabbing off the concrete wall and the children have forgotten if they knew at all.

Father, do you remember?

Only the sound remains, the distant thump of the good elephants, the voice of the ancient lions and how the bells trembled for the flying man.

I, laughing, lifted to your high shoulder or small at the rough legs of strangers, was not afraid.

You held my hand and were instant to explain the three rings of danger.

There is no narcissism here, only the knowledge of the serpent in paradise, whose wo�ding nature is made evident by means of the Circus poster that is "scabbing off" - still .sca�bing off the hurt place which is referred to ironically as a "concrete wall." Here, as in "Music Swims Back to Me," the persona "was not afraid" - a phrase that is terrifying in context, since it is perfectly clear that there is in both situations a great deal to fear: in "Music Swims" the fear is of vertigo, restraint and loss of self; in "The Bells" the fear is of the father's courtship, which is tabu, and which also produces restraint, as the meta-

phorical paralysis of "Where 1 Live in This Honorable House of the Laurel Tree" makes plain.

The courtship, and the response to it, is one of the most vivid infernal events in the volume:

Oh see the naughty clown and the wild parade while love love love grew rings around me. This was the sound where it began; our breath pounding up to see the flying man breast out across the boarded sky and climb the air. I remember the color of music and how forever all the trembling bells of you were mine.

The word choice is designed to understate the elements of the liebestod experience that were seen so plain in "The Moss of His Skin," which, by the way, has a kind of tactile association with "the rough legs of strangers"; the reason behind the understatement is the awareness that for children experience has to be toned down in order to be acceptable to the adult world. Thus sin becomes only "naughty" in this poem, and is furthermore projected onto the other, the clown; and the "three rings of danger" which clearly refer to "love love/ love" which "grew rings around me" can be simply the literal circus rings. The divine lover, identified in "Where 1 Live" as Apollo, is here reduced to the childlike "flying man" - another instance of substituting one image for another: here it is a matter of displacing the divine, or tabu, attribute of the father onto the trapeze artist - and even the need for the mother is timidly expressed in a verb as the flying man is seen to "breast out across the boarded sky" so that the undifferentiated, or hermaphroditic, love object, left over from childhood, is only vaguely indicated, as it is in dreams.

The excitement and suspense (and fear) shared with the father take on an erotic color at the point where the two have only one breath: "our breath pounding up to see"; and it is preparatory to this moment of climax that the perception becomes synesthetic, as music becomes a place"This was the sound where it began" - and then afterward becomes visual- "1 remember the color of music." The equation of the flying man, or divine lover, with the father is firmly established at the conclusion, which reverts to the image of "the bells" that "trembled for the flying man" and which makes the bells the father in liquid consonants and murmuring alliteration that evoke the sense of touch: "all the trembling bells of you/ were mine."

The bells recur in "Said the Poet to the Analyst" :

My business is words. Words are like labels, or coins, or better, like swarming bees.

I confess I am only broken by the sources of things; as if words were counted like dead bees in the attic,

unbuckled from their yellow eyes and their dry wings.

bl t pick I must always forget how one word IS a eo. out another, to manner an�ther, until I have got something I might have said but did not.

Your business is watching my words. Bu� I admit nothing. I work with my best, .for Instance, when I can write my praise for a nickel ma�hine, that one night in Nevada: telling how the magic jackpot came clacking three bells out, over the lucky screen.

But if you should say this is something It IS not, then I grow weak, remembering how my hands felt funny and ridiculous and crowded with all the believing money.

Two major preoccupations - truth and the father - come together here when the persona, after saying flatly that "1/ admit nothing," does make an admission in her memory of "how my hands felt funny/and ridiculous and crowded with all/ the believing money." The admission appears to be that the money is the father's lo�e, since it is the result of hitting the jackpot with "three bells." The technique of substitution is at work again here, in the displacement of the attitude of "believing," in the sense of "credulous," from the persona to the money itself, a displacement that operates to strengthen the association of the money with the father's love by suggesting that this literal paternal love believed itself innocent. The displacement also permits the persona to draw back from her own credulousness, to disavow it, as if to say that she had known all along what the analyst had said about her narrative, "that this is something it is not."

The first stanza of the poem prepares the way for the second, in the admission that "Words are like labels / or coins" and in the afterthought that a better simile i� "bees" which have been "unbuckled" from everything that gave them life in general and from their seeing eyes in particular. There is life behind words too, or separate from them which the words cannot always see; and in the 'second stanza there is the knowledge that there is life behind or separate from things and events, life that words, things, events, can only "pick out" or "manner." The lirriitations of poetry here are almost as strong as they are in "Portrait of an Old Woman on the College Tavern Wall."

The image of the bees recalls the first poem in this volume "You Doctor Martin," where a mental hospital is refe;red to as a "summer hotel":

You Doctor Martin, walk from breakfast to madness. Late August, I speed through the antiseptic tunnel where the moving dead still talk of pushing their bones against the thrust of cure. And I am queen of this summer hotel or the laughing bee on a stalk of death. We stand in broken lines and wait while they unlock

1963

the door and count us at the frozen gates of dinner. The shibboleth is spoken and we move to gravy in our smock of smiles. We chew in rows, our plates scratch and whine like chalk in school. There are no knives for cutting your throat.

Again the bee is an alternate image, a second thought, chosen perhaps because it can sting like words or like a fatal woman; and it leads to the first of a series of chilling anticlimaxes in the poem. Following the Dantean image of the dead who do not know they are in hell, an image expressed in sexual terms, the "laughing bee on a stalk" suggests pollination, but this expectation is sharply defeated in the next stanza by the qualifying words, "of death," until you recognize that what is given here is another form of the liebestod. If there is any doubt that this "summer hotel" is really hell itself, it is dispelled "while they unlock/the door and count us at the frozen gates"; but again an anticlimax is presented, this time to insist on the ordinariness of hell: the "frozen gates" open only to "dinner." Juxtaposed with the childhood reference to "school," the statement that "There are no knives" is not surprising until you get to the coda: "for cutting your throat."

Various images from childhood pattern through this poem: besides "chalk" and "school" there is "our smock," and in a subsequent stanza the persona remarks, "What large children we are/ here," in the same way that she later observes in "Music Swims Back to Me" that there are in the room with her "four ladies, over eighty'; in diapers everyone of them." The mood of infantile regression among the patients is conveyed not only through such explicit images, however; the rhyme scheme is designed to resemble the repetition of the abc's.

To Bedlam and Part Way Back is not wholly separated from Anne Sexton's second volume, All My Pretty Ones. For one thing, both the title and the epigraph to the second volume celebrate mourning; and part two of To Bedlam and Part Way Back, consisting of "For John, Who Begs Me Not to Enquire Further," "The Double Image," and "The Division of Parts," is a kind of bridge, between the controlling theme of the first volume as expressed in its epigraph and in "For John" and the controlling theme of the second volume, as set out in its epigraph, a quotation from a letter of Franz Kafka to Oskar Pollak: the books we need are the kind that act upon us like a misfortune, that make us suffer like the death of someone we love more than ourselves, that makes us feel as though we were on the verge of suicide, or lost in a forest remote from all human habitation - a book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us.

In the first volume, immediately following the apologia of "For John, Who Begs Me Not to

Enquire Further," mourning begins freely with "The Double Image," a long poem in five sections which attempts to get behind words to the life they represent. Addressed to her second daughter, Joyce, who is now seven, these stanzas set out the essential counters for the grave game of being a woman. The fearful inquiry that has been conducted in the volume up to this point now picks up the vague suggestions of the mother that have appeared thus far and turns the whole flood of its light upon her. The poem reads like a personal history; its title, "The Double Image," is ostensibly concerned with a pair of portraits hanging in the family home - one of the persona, the other of her mother:

In north light, my smile is held in place, the shadow marks my bone. What could I have been dreaming as I sat there, all of me waiting in the eyes, the zone of the smile, the young face, the foxes' snare.

In south light, her smile is held in place, her cheeks wilting like a dry orchid; my mocking mirror, my overthrown love, my first image

The artist caught us at the turning; we smiled in our canvas home before we chose our foreknown separate ways.

It is the mother who is being mourned here; the poem is written after her death:

You call me mother and I remember my mother again, somewhere in greater Boston, dying.

But the object of mourning is not so simple as that; the mother is after all "my mocking mirror," and in All My Pretty Ones there is a poem called "The Housewife" which ends with the statement that

A woman is her mother. That's the main thing.

The mourning then is not only for the mother, but for the self as well, that self "who chose two times/ to kill myself." John Holmes's angry criticism of this poem before publication may have been in response to the narcissism which does break through, not only in the mirror imagery but also in the form of this strange mourning for the self. In advance of her own death she foresees it in the mother's "cheeks wilting like a dry/ orchid; my mocking mirror." It is as if she were psychically dead and believed like Guido da Montefeltro that no one could return from hell to judge her. In a sense she is right, of course, since no one who makes the descent with this poem can say that he has seen someone else's damnation and not his own.

"The Double Image" refers not only to the two portraits, to the cave of the mirror, that double woman who stares at herself,

but also to the double woman whose other part is her daughter. The mother's portrait is

A cave of a mirror placed on the south wall; matching smile, matching contour. And you resembled me; unacquainted with my face, you wore it.

The double image is really a triple image, made up of the persona, the mother, and the daughter; the triptych becomes visible at the end of the poem:

I didn't want a boy, only a girl, already loved, already loud in the house of herself. We named you Joy.

I, who was never quite sure about being a girl. needed another life, another image to remind me. And this was my worst guilt; you could not cure nor soothe it. I made you to find me.

The ending, unlike the endings of the other poems, seems to be its weakest part, perhaps because it is a "believing" confession that intends to disarm the charge of narcissism while it tells only half the truth. Much more immediately valid is the account of the circumstances that led to the first suicide attempt:

I. had said your nickname the mewling months when you first came; until a fever rattled in your throat and I moved like a pantomime above your head. Ugly angels spoke to me. The blame, I heard them say, was mine. They tattled like green witches in my head, letting doom leak like a broken faucet; as if doom had flooded my belly and filled your bassinet, an old debt I must assume.

This sounds like the truth the Greeks knew; it rattles the chain that binds the feelings for the mother to the feelings for the infant daugher, for one thing. And for another, it brings up, in the penultimate line, the possibility that a woman, like Leda, whose belly is flooded by a divine lover, may be responsible for unanticipated disasters.

The same kind of truth, historical or not, creates two statements about the mother:

On the first of September she looked at me and said I gave her cancer. They carved her sweet hills out and still I couldn't answer.

On the other peak of the liebestod triangle is the mother, the "overthrown/ love" of an earlier stanza in two senses: the ambiguity brings together the mother as "first image" or first love, "overthrown" by subsequent love for the father, and also the mother as discard, as also-ran, usurped, "overthrown" by the persona in rivalry for the father. The sense of victory over the mother is expressed also in another poem, still uncollected, called "Consorting With Angels":

There were still men who sat at my table, circled around the bowl I offered up. The bowl was filled with purple grapes and the flies hovered in for the scent and even my father came with his white bone.

It is this kind of knowledge that makes her say "I couldn't answer." Given the remark that "a woman is her mother" and the admission to Joyce that "I made you to find me," it is fairly clear that "The Double Image" repeats the tension in "For John," but in a new way. Now there are again two faces, and the "mocking mirror" of "The Double Image" is like the "cracked mirror" of "For John"; it reflects two aspects of the persona, but this time they are the persona as mother and as daughter. Seen in the light of this poem, the tension between the inner Oedipus and the inner Jocasta in "For John" looks like an elaboration of what appear to be the essentially undramatic conflicts that underlie "The Double Image.

This poem clarifies the volume's controlling theme, which is the hesitation between the truth and the lie; it is always the mother who is the censor, wherever she may appear, whether in "The Double Image," in "For John," in "The Moss of His Skin," or in the reference to Jocasta in the epigraph.

But the poem also looks forward, in its mourning, to the theme of the second volume; and the anticipation reaches a crescendo in the last poem in To Bedlam and Part Way Back. Called "The Division of Parts," this poem continues to mourn, but from beneath a surface of feeling failure that recalls the erotic paralysis of "Where I Live in This Honorable House of the Laurel Tree." Unlike Hamlet, who probably protested too much as he leaped into Ophelia's grave, the persona here acknowledges her material inheritance with discomfort and proclaims that Time, that rearranger of estates, equips me with your garments, but not with grief.

And yet the title of the second volume is All My Pretty Ones, the quotation from Macbeth amplified on the title page into the fuller speech of Macduff:

All my pretty ones?

Did you say all? 0 hell-kite! All? What! all my pretty chickens and their dam At one fell swoop? I cannot but remember such things were, That were most precious to me.

What is not reproduced on the title page is Macduff's conclusion that

Sinful Macduff, They were all struck for thee. Naught that I am, Not for their own demerits, but for mine, Fell slaughter on their souls,

a conclusion that very likely impels the defensive protestations of lack of sentiment in "The Division Fall, 1963

of Parts" where, in a context of Easter imagery, the persona announces that

I have cast my lot and am one third thief of you, as she acknowledges herself to be one third of your daughters counting my bounty or I am a queen alone in the parlor still, eating the bread and honey.

Here again is the bee, although it is submerged in the choice of the word "honey"; and again it is an alternate choice, a second thought, as it was in "You, Doctor Martin," in "Music Swims Back to Me," and in "Said the Poet to the Analyst," so that it seems to be the result of further attempts to get behind words to life. What feelings the persona has that "Not for their own demerits, but for mine" her dead lie dead, appear to refer to an awareness of this role of "queen alone," like "a laughing bee upon a stalk/ of death." The bread and honey are poisonous because whoever kills a rival must die.

All My Pretty Ones begins with the first knowledge brought back from the descent into hell, in a poem called "The Truth the Dead Know," which recalls "Dover Beach." It is headed by a dedication:

For my mother, born March 1902, died March 1959 and my father, born February 1900, died June 1959.

Like the concluding poem of To Bedlam and Part Way Back, it is ostensibly a refusal to mourn; what it seizes instead of grief is the day of physical love:

Gone, I say and walk from church, refusing the stiff procession to the grave, letting the dead ride alone in the hearse. It is June. I am tired of being brave.

We drive to the Cape. I cultivate myself where the sun gutters from the sky, where the sea swings in like an iron gate and we touch. In another country people die.

My darling, the wind falls in like stones from the whitehearted water and when we touch we enter touch entirely. No one's alone. Men kill for this, or for as much.

And what of the dead? They lie without shoes in their stone boats. They are more like stone than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.

But here again responsibility for death, although it is explicitly denied, is implicit in the line "In another country people die"; the overtones that Browning, Eliot, and Hemingway have given to the fairly neutral Marlowe original of this notion ring loud in the poem, especially as the line follows immediately another literary allusionthe simile of the "iron gate," which refers directly to Marvell's "iron gates of life" in "To His Coy Mistress," another poem about the value of love in the face of death. As in Marvell, however,

the overriding emphasis is on the confrontation of death, which alone gives love whatever value it has. The elements of the Liebestod experience are shifted about here; death is now not effect but cause.

"The Truth the Dead Know" is nothingness, annihilation, refusal "to be blessed"; and it is repeated in several poems in AU My Pretty Ones. The short poem "Young" ends as the crickets ticked together and I, in my brand new body, which was not a woman's yet, told the stars my questions and thought God could really see the heat and the painted light, elbows, knees, dreams, good night.

And "The Fortress," a long poem addressed to the poet's elder daughter, Linda, observes that We laugh and we touch. I promise you love. Time will not take away that, echoing "The Double Image," addressed to Joyce, which also fastens onto the day, in lieu of anything further:

I say today believed in itself, or else it fell.

Today, my small child, Joyce, love your self's self where it lives. There is no special God to refer to.

"From the Garden" expresses the same theme, simply, like Wordsworth's "The Tables Turned":

Come, my beloved, consider the lilies. We are of little faith. We talk too much. Put your mouthful of words away and come with me to watch the lilies open in such a field, growing there like yachts, slowly steering their petals without nurses or clocks. Let us consider the view: a house where white clouds decorate the muddy halls. Oh, put away your good words and your bad words. Spit out your words like stones! Come here! Come here! Come eat my pleasant fruits.

There are several attempts in All My Pretty Ones to get beyond the day to a robust religious experience, but they all end either by emphasizing, as a Rouault painting does, the terrible ordinariness of Christ's suffering on the cross, or by invoking a daydream miracle so fanciful as to deny entirely the possibility of mystery. Part two of this volume has its own epigraph:

I want no pallid humanitarianism - If Christ be not God, I want none of him; I will hack my way through existence alone Guardini.

Two crucifixions appear in this section. The first, "For God While Sleeping," is a lament in which the first stanza expresses nostalgia for the

absolute at the same time that it denies its possibility:

Sleeping in fever, I am unfit to know just who you are: hung up like a pig on exhibit, the delicate wrists, the beard drooling with vinegar; hooked to your own weight, jolting toward death under your nameplate.

The second crucifixion, "In the Deep Museum," is a dramatic monologue, beginning with the first awareness of imminent resurrection, in which again the commonplace nature of extreme suffering is emphasized:

My God, my God, what queer corner am I in? Didn't I die, blood running down the post, lungs gagging for air, die there for the sin of anyone, my sour mouth giving up the ghost? Surely my body is done? Surely I died? And yet, I know I'm here. What place is this? Cold and queer, I sting with life. I lied. Yes I lied. Or else in some damned cowardice my body would not give me up. I touch fine cloths with my hands and my cheeks are cold. If this is hell, then hell could not be much, neither as special nor as ugly as I was told.

Put beside "You, Doctor Martin," this poem illustrates brilliantly the poetic possibility that the metaphors of the madhouse and the crucifixion are interchangeable representations of hell; and put beside "The Double Image," it demonstrates also that abortive suicide and resurrection are imaginative experiences that spring from the same emotional root.

In part five of All My Pretty Ones, in "Letter Written on a Ferry While Crossing Long Island Sound,"

The sea is the face of Mary, without miracles or rage or unusual hope, grown rough and wrinkled with incurable age.

Longing for miracle, the persona observes four nuns and asks, Oh God, although I am very sad, could you please let these four nuns loosen from their leather boots and their wooden chairs to rise out over this greasy deck, out over this iron rail, nodding their pink heads to one side, flying four abreast in the old-fashioned side stroke; each mouth open and round, breathing together as fish do, singing without sound.

And improbably, the nuns sail forth as in a twodimensional pre-Renaissance Italian painting and They call back to us from the gauzy edge of paradise, good news, good news

The only real miracle in the poetry, however,

is the Christ-like immortality of parents, their reincarnation in the spirit and flesh of their offspring. In a poem that gives its title to the volume, "All My Pretty Ones," and is addressed to the dead father, the persona observes:

I hold a five-year diary that my mother kept for three years, telling all she does not say of your alcoholic tendency. You overslept, she writes. My God, father, each Christmas day with your blood, will I drink down your glass of wine?

Mother, father, and aborted child pay supernatural visits in a short poem called "Ghosts"; and in "Old Dwarf Heart" the mother and father appear again. The epigraph to this poem is a tribute to Saul Bellow, a quotation from Henderson the Rain King:

True. All too true. I have never been at home in life. All my decay has taken place upon a child.

Recalling the erotic paralysis of "Where I Live in This Honorable House of the Laurel Tree," the first stanza picks up the same theme and begins amplification:

When I lie down to love, old dwarf heart shakes her head. Like an imbecile she was born old.

Her eyes wobble as thirty-one thick folds of skin open to glare at me on my flickering bed. She knows the decay we're made of.

"Old Dwarf Heart" is the buried self, the recalcitrant child upon whom decay has taken place; "thirty-one thick folds" refer not only to the obvious erotic image but also to the age of this persistent child who,

At her best is all red muscle, humming in and out, cajoled by time. Where I go, she goes.

Reincarnation is explicitly given at the end of the poem:

Old ornament, old naked fist, even if I put on seventy coats I could not cover you mother, father, I'm made of.

The last poem in All My Pretty Ones is written in the form of a journal addressed to "Dearest"; it begins with a reference to the dead:

It is snowing, grotesquely snowing, upon the small faces of the dead.

Those dear loudmouths gone for over a year, buried side by side like little wrens.

Appropriately, this final poem picks up the major themes of the volume: mourning, the attempt to reach consolation through religion and through love, and the mystery of family relationships that are as durable as a life after death, their consequences in the individual felt as the effect of doom or of contagion. The first volume is echoed here too, as it has been in many other places; the "stone tree" of "The Moss of His Skin" appears here compared to a crucifix:

Only the tree has quietness in it; quiet as the crucifix, pounded out years ago like a handmade shoe.

Predestined pain is in that simile; the inferno of these poems is an ancient place, older and truer than any "gauzy edge of paradise." And the possibility of paradise is made to appear weak indeed, in a stanza where it is referred to in an anticlimax that is heavily outweighed by what goes before it:

Just yesterday, twenty-eight men aboard a damaged radar tower foundered down seventy mi es off the coast. Immediately their hearts slammed shut.

The storm would not cough them up. Today they are whispering over Sonar. Small voice, what do you say?

Aside from going down, the awful wrench, the pulleys and hooks and the black tongue

What are your headquarters?

Are they kind?

The tree, however, is not only doom as represented by the ancestor; it is also poetry, as it was in "Where I Live in This Honorable House of the Laurel Tree," "quiet as the crucifix" - we return here to the cold pastoral, the death-in-life of poetry-, "pounded out years ago/ like a handmade shoe." The reference to craft and the reference to antiquity both suggest poetry as a kind of Yeatsean continuum, a witch's kitchen like the kitchens in "Portrait of an Old Woman on the College Tavern Wall" and in "For John Who Begs Me not to Enquire Further."

The poem ends, as the volume does, with another double-entendre that expresses, as it does in "In the Deep Museum," both nostalgia for and denial of absolute love:

Dearest, where are your letters?

The mailman is an impostor. He is actually my grandfather. He floats far off in the storm with his nicotine mustache and a bagful of nickels. His legs stumble through baskets of eyelashes. Like all the dead he picks up his disguise, shakes it off and slowly pulls down the shade, fading out like an old movie. Now he is gone as you are gone.

But he belongs to me like lost baggage.

So much for hope; but fear remains. Older than the mother and the father, the ancestor here is "actually my grandfather"; and if he has carried off with him the promise of "a bagful of nickels" (to feed the slot machine with the hope of ringing up three bells?), he has not been able to break the chain of contagion that binds the generations. The luggage may be lost, but the persona still holds the check; and hanging around her neck are all the keys.

Fall, 1963