vol6-no2

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, 816 University Place, 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.

Charles Wolf, Laurence Elgin, Richard B. Sypher, Jesse D. Green, Harold Grutzmacher, Pierre

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. WILLIAM 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, MARY HENRIKSON, 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.

Richard M. Ralston

Richard M. Ralston, Director of Development at Roosevelt University, was a contributor to the first ond '0 several subsequent issues of The Tri-Quarterly. He received his undergraduate degree from Northwesfern in absentia in 1943 while serving in the U.S. Marine Corps. After the war he went to Inland Steel Company where he became Manager of Employee Communications. He spent a year in Europe studying altering conditions in the steel industry, including the advanced techniques for producing modern steels, and upon his return published a number of reports on his findings. His home is in Evanston.

The editors regard the story below as an especially notable one.

Winter, 1964

THE GIFT

The agent, so black he was indistinguishable from the night, gave me the stone in the doorway of the Taborite Brotherhood Church across the street from the housing project. Now I had fulfilled the most difficult part of my mission and it remained for me only to find her somewhere within the smoke and chaos of thousands of apartments piled one on top of the other and divided by cardboard partitions or worn-out blankets; a system of animal habitations where masses of people overwhelmed the capacity of the schools, police and fire department to serve them. Every building tottered or shot skyward on rigidly parallel streets, some of which ran through vast plains of used brick and rubbish to no destination, affording criminals the chance to strike swiftly and disappear behind the next pile of rubble to melt, like snow rabbits, into their natural surroundings. She lived in one of those places, either behind the ancient store front buildings or in the converted boulevard mansion, but when I reached the building I thought was hers and searched for

her name on the mailbox, I read every Smith, Jones, Tyler, Williams, Blackburn, Wright, Washington, and Jackson name but hers - all the familiar names of friends at home and in the coal regions of West Virginia, black and white, enemies, and comrades including those who had perished on the beaches and in the jungles, men with whom I had passed the long days and years abroad as the sea washed over the reefs and lay in saline pools as the equatorial sun evaporated the water leaving behind the virginal white salt sand.

I ran first up one street and down the next to find her and give her the stone, but I would either lose my way in unfamiliar surroundings or, reoriented, rush into some cur de sac with no further choice but to retrace my steps. Mter a while I had to rest and watched a wrecking crew ripping out the last wall of a vintage brownstone house while the shadows of rats washed across the bricks and slid into the crevices of broken concrete and ancient plaster lath. The signs from the night clubs winked their neon messages to me.

She used to meet me in the wintertime, standing against the gray wall of the department store in the alley, a splash of color in her red wool coat with the flared skirt and the blue scarf which she wore wrapped around her upturned collar. I would arrive breathless from hurrying on the streets and through the hotel lobbies to elude my pursuers, taking a route so circuitous that it covered three times the brief distance between my office and the restaurant where she waited nearby. My heart would throb with exertion and with my eagerness to touch her hand and feel the warmth of her body that lingered in the lining of her coat which I always pressed briefly to my cheek after taking it from her in the restaurant to hang it in the cloak room.

Now I had finally obtained the bauble I thought she wanted and, ironically, I could not find her in this city of decay where the rot of dissolution filled the air like smog. I choked in clouds of ancient plaster dust that floated on the soft night air. I pressed on with speed born of my habitual effort to elude familiar inquiring faces and lose myself in the metropolitan crowd. I ventured into the darkest streets and struck a match now and then to find a street number or name in a vestibule where the heat and smell of cooking odors exhaled from the building like the fierce heat of a smelting furnace. Without noticing it, I suddenly found myself alone and temporarily marooned in a canyon between tall buildings where no one walked and human shadows formed dancing silhouettes behind the window shades. The canyon was 'arid and silent despite the congestion of thousands of desperate lives being lived behind the ecru window shades. It seemed that I walked for hours before I left the canyon and crossed an empty street into a vacant

lot. I stumbled across the rubbish, frightening a drunken man who cowered against a broken lintel from a recently destroyed house and on which the words "Wedgewood Arms" were carved. Mter walking beneath the black steel structure of the elevated railroad, I climbed over a board fence, crept through a back yard, keeping within the shadow of a brick wall, and after emerging into the street suddenly found myself in a blaze of tinkling colors, for I had reached the Street of Good Times, where idolatry and light beckoned the cold and melancholy stranger. Here were the predators, emboldened by drugs and alcohol, whose greetings to me as I passed them in the streets were full of latent violence and desperation. More of them stopped their singing and dancing when I stepped across the lurid threshold of one drinking place to find a momentary seat where I could gain a little rest and the stimulation to press on and find her.

I even looked for her face in the pink light coming from the atelier across the street where one of my friends painted pictures. It was above the House of Seven Pleasures and he made his living painting signs and tinting photographs which the proprietor placed in the windows below and bathed in multi-colored gelatin lights. I did not find her there, although I tried to make sure by opening a dressing room door where I found an onyx-colored nude model grinning as I interrupted her smoking break and the only greeting I received was a sigh and a tired, "So you found no Mona Lisa, man."

During my search I had kept my hand clamped tightly on the stone with such a relentless grip that it began to melt in my hand, seeping in graygreen droplets through my fingers. I judged that it would last two hours more, after which all chance of reclaiming her would vanish and once again I would be condemned by my age and inadequacy to unrelieved loneliness and an endless itinerary of unfulfilled promises to myself.

I stopped for a moment beneath a flickering street lamp and measured the size of the stone in the steam and fog which swirled and rolled up toward the light from the damp paving bricks. It had lost its original size, but it lay heavy and colorful, alive with different shades of crystalline green and black, and despite the fact that it seemed to be melting slowly in my fingers, I knew that as long as it remained, I might win her in exchange for it.

She would sit across from me in the darkened restaurant, a small quaint building with two stories that had been converted from an ancient livery barn. Once she wore a pendant which I had given her. It fell between the cleft in her breast and clicked against the edge of the table when she leaned forward to talk to me. It distracted me and my eyes danced to follow the fluttering gleam of silver light that it reflected. Her lips parted, re-

vealing her large generous mouth with strong white teeth which were, happily, irregular enough to make her more human and desirable than I had dared dream. "Go back to it and try to pick up where you left off. Yeah, and find out more about how they all live down there," she said in her Mississippi accent. She laughed heartily at the look of surprise on my face, for I was terrified of revisiting her birthplace where riflemen lurked in the underbrush and shot men like me for interfering with their "way of life."

Although she challenged me and implied a delicious reward for fulfilling her challenge, I was unable to rise to it, which made me melancholy when I was with her. Yet I enjoyed it because it added a dimension to my awareness of the commonplace, comparable to the darkness dodged in on a photographic print to reduce its wmecessary detail and enhance the impact of the image on the beholder with its simplicity.

She would not share my moods. She would meet me and hold my hand briefly, sometimes reaching across the table long enough to stroke my fingers, as though the gesture were an afterthought. It was the absence of sympathy in her that drove me to find something to offer her in the belief that the transfer of a gift would not only symbolize but formally seal our relationship.

"White writers don't last long there," she said. "They go back in the country and that's the last you ever hear of them. Nobody wants them poking around back in the Delta, askin' too many questions. They have a way of putting a stop to it, and they do."

"How do they do it?" I asked lamely, because I knew they killed such men. Yet I wanted her to say that maybe they gathered in such men to their bosoms and made them a part of their lives. The black hair above her pale forehead formed an ogival arch over her features and even when she blushed so easily at my attempt to guide the conversation into conspiratorial byways of intimacy, she was dark, strong, and as happy with me as without me. I once thought she betrayed concern and therefore love for me as a shadow crossed her eyes, but the expression passed as rapidly as the transient shadow and I looked upon her once again, cool and beyond the reach of intimacy.

In order to save as much of the stone as I could for her, I kept hurrying through the city. I rushed across the bridge over the river, searching in the rippling surface splashed with the silver reflections 'Of the lighted buildings, the sodden bodies of failures, floating head down and back up down stream toward the locks and intakes where the screens held them with the dying fish for the canting hooks of the dockmen.

I reached the wide sloping bank of the opposite side of the river. It was rank with dying weeds and strewn with broken bottles and refuse. Newspapers crisp with age as dry cereal told of his-

torical events and crumpled to dust in my hands as I tried to pick them and read the headlines. When I reached the crest of the bank, I saw in the distance a single house; tall, narrow and with a single light burning in the second floor window. Nothing stood about it, except a heap of unused sand, a gravel pit and a stark empty plain beyond it that billowed like an ocean and heaved up the house which seemed to rest on some beach, an incongruous shell of a place, marooned, like the houseboat of my dreams.

The stone had grown smaller and more insignificant in my hands by this time, yet the core of it remained, steadfastly refusing to run away in droplets like the sand of an hourglass which constantly renews itself as the hand of man turns it upside down.

As I approached the door, I read on it a sign that identified it as a Mission and which promised salvation for those "drenched in the blood of the lamb." Bits of wool were clinging to the sign and I knew that a stray sheep had rubbed itself against the door. I tried to raise the large bronze knocker cast in the form of a Janus, but it was too heavy for my cramped fingers and since I was certain I had reached her house, I turned the doorknob and walked in. Before the door was half opened a man's voice asked, "Who's there?" and I answered, "A friend of Stella."

"No Stella here," answered the voice, "so you get the hell outa here and go right on back where you came from."

"But I've got a present for Stella and I've come a long way to give it to her."

"What's it worth?" the voice asked.

"It's priceless," I said and instantly pushed open the door and found myself staring into a tenement dwelling at a shirtless Negro watching television with his back turned toward me while seven children seated around an oval table were served dinner by their mother as they watched television too. I walked hesitantly toward her and then stopped as the man motioned to us to keep quiet and move out of the room. She took my hand and led me upstairs where the light from a kerosene lantern was shining in the window and then, breathless and tired, and brushing a lock away from her forehead, she sat on the edge of her bed and asked me what I wanted. I presented the stone to her, still hoping that her acceptance 'Of it would express her total commitment to me. But she merely smiled, took the stone, turning it idly in her hand and then gave it back to me. She stood up and said, "So this is all you brought. You don't have much to give, do you?"

I followed her downstairs, past the man with his children and with only one lingering look at the beauty of her supple strength, fled into the night, rushing toward the river, so I could throw the only gift I had to give her into the silent water, a lousy colored stone.

Winter, 1964

Excerpt from a Biography of Henry Adams

The essay, printed here without footnotes, will form part of a chapter of the last volume of Ernest Samuels' biography of Henry Adams.

Samuels began his long study of Henry Adams in 1941. The first volume, The Young Henry Adams, was published by the Harvard Press in 1948; the second volume, Henry Adams: The Middle Years, appeared in 1958 and was awarded the Francis Parkman Prize, the Bancroft Prize, and was listed by Time Magazine as one of the ten best non-fictional books of the year. The final volume, Henry Adams: The Major Phase, is expected to be published in the fall of this year.

Professor Samuels came to Northwestern in 1942, and has taught primarily courses in American literature. He was born and educated in Chicago, receiving his graduate degrees from the University of Chicago.

By Ernest Samuels

II RETURN TO THE TWELFTH CENTURY

In the quiet interval in the life of Henry Adams that had followed the completion of the initial draft of the life of the poet George Cabot Lodge, and while the stir created by his distribution of A Letter to American Teachers of History prolonged for some months the reverberations of scientific speculation, a chance communication from a young assistant professor at Yale re-directed his thoughts to the poetic landscape of his treasured Chartres. Professor Frederick Bliss Luquiens, an expert in Romance scholarship who had been working on the Chanson de Roland, had just come upon the copy of the Chartres in the Yale library, one of the dozen or so university libraries to whom copies had originally been sent. The chapters on medieval French literature struck him as an incomparable essay, especially on the literary qualities of the Song of Roland. The technical virtuosity of these sections impressed the young scholar as all the more remarkable because Adams occupied no university chair. The only published record of his teaching of medieval history at Harvard lay buried in the long forgotten Essays in Anglo-Saxon Law. Delighted to discover a fellow devotee of the Roland, Luquiens sent Adams his Roland article and proposed to review the Chartres. Touched more than he might willingly admit, Adams warmly welcomed this new accession to the cult and wished him well in what he regarded as the impossible task of awakening the sensibilities of college students to the artistic side of the middle ages. The exchange thus opened was to run on for several years exploring the difficult problems of translation and of the sources of the Chansons, the younger scholar serving as the willing anvil on which Adams shaped his rather heterodox conjectures.

On the heels of Professor Luquiens' letter came one from his older colleague, Professor Albert S. Cook, a noted Old English scholar and longtime editor of the Yale Studies in English. Professor Cook's interest in Runic monuments had led him to the early French SCUlpture of the Chartres portals and the contemporary poetry. He too had chanced upon the Chartres and petitioned for a copy for more leisurely study, sending on a propitiatory offering of translations from Old English poetry, for in his case he knew of Adams's pioneer studies in Anglo-Saxon law of 1876. Adams had to confess that the sole remaining copy had been given to the well-known Gothic enthusiast, Ralph Adams Cram, to be presented to another university. The only recourse, even for himself, would therefore be to reprint the whole book, a "rather arduous and expensive job." Professor Cook's in-

quiry set Adams to re-thinking his peculiar role as a medievalist. He had come to regard himself, he said, ever since he left his Harvard post more than thirty years before as "emeritus, - a normal-school instructor, - a teacher of teachers, whose business was to help active teachers in doing their work; but not to load them with objections or instructions." As he saw it, "the world outside - the so-called modern world - can only pervert and degrade the conceptions of the primitive instinct of art and feeling, and our only chance is to accept the limited number of survivors - the one-in-a-thousand of born artists and poets - and to intensify the energy of feeling within that radiant centre." Cook pressed Adams to publish the volume or at least the long section on Chartres for use as a guide. Adams temporized by offering to reprint privately as many copies of the Chartres as Professor Cook might want. There the matter stood for a time while the letters went on to relish the esoteric pleasures of Anglo-Saxon poetry and the disputed symbolism of the portrait figures of the Chartres porches.

For some months there was no visible effect of this double stimulus. In fact he had found a new hobby that summer in Paris in the intervals of work on the Lodge memoir, reading up on CroMagnon man, his interest challenged by the work of his aristocratic friend Henri Hubert, who early in August was belatedly installed as conservator at the ethnological museum at St. Germain en Laye. He began to talk familiarly of Neanderthal skulls and paleolithic culture. Impatient with the niggardliness of French scientific societies and the lethargy of the government, Adams soon advanced funds himself to Hubert to probe the mysteries of the Dordogne Caves near Les Eyzies, making but one facetious condition - he was to receive a prehistoric baby in good condition. The interest in the remarkable caves had been greatly stimulated by the recent publication of a quarto volume of photographs of the prehistoric sculptures which also included drawings by Capitan Peyrony, and the Abbe Breuil, archaeologists with whom Hubert was closely associated.

Adams's annual hegira in the summer of 1910 had begun rather badly. He had left Washington "a sepulchre without much whitening" to find London and Paris equally irritating to his nerves, the political clamor and indecision equally stupefying, the blunders of his own Republican party in Washington matched by the clumsy expedients of European governments to allay the growing social unrest. His temper was worse than ever and at times Paris seemed uninhabitable, a nightmare of corrupt taste and aimless wrangling. Brief as his periods of solitude were, they seemed endless and he sometimes brooded glumly over his solitary chicken and pint of champagne at the Paillard in the Bois or under the frivolously gay paper lanterns of the Pavillon Royal where

Winter, 1964

the music softly ministered to his melancholy. Brooks broke in upon him briefly for an exchange of views, impatient as always with Henry's efforts to screen himself from harsh reality. Though Henry agreed with every criticism of the feebleness of American democracy and the medieval inefficiency of the free enterprise system, Brooks's ranting tirades against things as they were left him low and dispirited, lost in the muddled incoherence of existence. His life seemed "that of a black beetle," he told Berenson, "and I move from my desk to my dinner and back again without sight or sound of anything but other beetles, whom I prefer to kill."

But as always Paris had its compensations as he grudgingly admitted. Besides, even in his worst moods he never quite lost sight of the slightly comic aspect of his crotchety fault-finding. His intimates had long learned to discount the old cardinal's pose of mockery and he in turn grew more extravagant and sardonically facetious to keep up his credit. For the beautiful American women who spent their summer exile in the luxurious apartments in the vicinity of the Place de l'Etoile, at the head of the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne, he would often shed the role of grim prophet and let the poetic side of his nature speak, for he felt women's sensibility to be particularly responsive to the artistic in life. No contradiction troubled the inspired flow of his talk as he descanted to his rapt little audiences of the treasures of the long dead past. They were all devoted amateurs of the recherche du temps perdu, and Adams played his role of benevolent uncle with unflagging grace, sauntering out incessantly from his comfortable eyrie under the roof of Number 23 Avenue du Bois de Boulogne for frequent dinners with Mrs. Elizabeth Cameron, a pleasant walk down the broad tree-lined parkway to No. 88 where her salon drew the lions of the American set. Here Adams came and went with the freest intimacy. Where Elizabeth was, was a second home for him and he quietly ignored the persistent eddy of gossip that swirled on the outskirts of their little society. If Elizabeth depended upon him for understanding companionship and steadying counsel in her brilliant and rootless existence, he could count on her to help him keep at bay the neurotic black-browed double who continually waylaid his thought.

In the autumn of that year his Paris lease was not renewed, as the building was to be torn down to make way for a handsomer structure. He thankfully surrendered to Elizabeth's natural talent for management the job of moving his books, Ming potiches, water colors and his exquisite china to an apartment at No. 80 a few doors from her own apartment. Still beautiful at fifty-three, rather small of person, but even more the grande dame, Mrs. Cameron was now a fixture of the international society that fluttered about the Paris

Embassy. After Adams was comfortably settled, she and Edith Wharton turned their talents to fitting up Walter Berry's new apartment. For the most part life centered around the intimate dinner parties at Paillard's, which was now Adams's favorite restaurant, or a rendezvous with Berenson at Mrs. Wharton's in the rue de Varenne or at Mrs. Cameron's, for she too had gingerly capitulated to Berenson's worldly charm.

Berenson was omnipresent that season sporting his "bag" of artists (for the moment it was Bonnard) or notable clients like the affiuent Mrs. Potter Palmer. Being an art connoisseur as he remarked to Adams, "one does meet interesting people." His recurring bouts of ill health which often kept him in luxurious captivity at I Tatti gave a world-weary cast to his meditations. "Shocking as young as I am," he sighed, "and already so out of sorts with the house of life I smuggled into so expectantly at twenty." It was grist that Adams readily matched among his other friends ailing physically or like Edith Wharton tormented by the mental derangement of her husband. He had just learned of La Farge's "utterly sordid death in a Providence asylum, which reminds me," he told Berenson, "of my friend Clarence King's death in an Arizona tavern." As he ticked off the state of their mutual friends, he added, "Personally I think it is my duty to make more complaint than anyone else." His duty became more urgent when the first signs of serious trouble with his eyes appeared, which he humorously dismissed with the remark that it was not really the eyes "but the brain behind and the stomach below." The condition grew steadily worse during 1911 requiring the use of dark glasses until he was driven to keeping the blinds drawn all day and ventured forth only after dusk. The diagnosis, which he finally reported to Berenson, was "retinitis senilis," a condition that warranted little hilarity except of the macabre sort, for it presaged the progressive deterioration of vision.

Settled in his new apartment shortly after the first of December Adams put aside Cro-Magnon man with a certain relief and plunged once again into the mysteries of the Chartres SCUlpture, his interest now fully reawakened. He had a new ally in his friend Ward Thoron, whose scholarly interests had long been at war with his career as a Washington banker. Thoron pored over the Chartres archives for him to hunt out materials to set at rest some of the doubts awakened by the new school of medieval scholarship. Adams worried a little over the art and architecture, and even trembled for his theology as he thought of the new German tomes. As the new year opened he decided "to print surreptitiously a few more copies of the Chartres" in order to collate and correct the text. He was still adamant against turning it into "a text-book and guide-book." "I'll

burn Chartres itself," he told his collaborator, "before I degrade it to such a fate. Our cult is esoteric." He rapidly completed negotiations with his Baltimore printer, J. H. Furst & Company, immediately after reaching Washington on January 15, 1911. Five days later he had already sent forty-five pages to the printer for the resetting of the volume.

One of the most troublesome cruxes was the provenience of the famous Charlemagne window at Chartres. Adams was much taken with the strange anomaly of the window which recorded the secular Roland story as if Charlemagne were a wholly legitimate saint. In consequence the correspondence with Cook and Luquiens became delightfully recondite, technical, and speculative. Adams roamed with all his accustomed agile perceptiveness through the array of learned surmises and controversies in which Gaston Paris, Joseph Bedier and their German confreres pursued each other through the pages of Romania and other journals. Once more he was engrossed in a congenial task and relished every new enigma which Thoron's researches posed, as for example the dates of Vincent of Beauvais or of the window of La Belle Verrrere.

Back in Washington that winter he continued to sound the political climate, briskly moving among a half dozen notable houses where his raillery did little to lighten the gloom of Republican statesmen. The Democrats, as he said, had the "Republicans on the run" and prospects for a paroxysm like that of 1907 seemed luridly attractive. Weakened by the defection of Insurgents like LaFollette, Beveridge, and Norris, discredited by the crudities of Taft's Latin American policy and election and tariff scandals, the Grand Old Party slid downward, while such friends as Elihu Root and Henry Cabot Lodge grumbled helplessly over Taft's "big-fat-boyishness." Adams relieved his feelings with hyperbolical tirades to Berenson who had asked for further symptoms of "the running down of the cosmic clock and of the collapsing of its second hand (as it were) man." The symptoms, as Henry and Brooks saw them, made him look "forward with consternation to the possibilities of a pessimistic America. Pessimism without ideas - a sort of bankrupt trust - will be the most harrowing form of ennui the world has ever known."

Not all, however, was backstairs political gossip or angry inquests over Western civilization. Late in January he met another candidate for his court of nieces in wish, an elfin girl whose monologues were captivating Washington society. "I love Ruth Draper," he exclaimed. "She is a little genius and quite fascinates me." They soon became fast friends. For scholarly statesmanship he could count on calls by fellow historians Lord Bryce, the British ambassador, and Jean Jusserand, the French ambassador. Nonetheless, the

political anxieties of his displaced friends oppressed intellectual activity like a swamp gas and made him relish all the more the sanctuary of his library where he could lose himself in the minutiae of translations from the Old French and cultivate his garden of chansons.

The dead still rode fast, as he was wont to say, but he rode faster still, rather pleased that he could still head his procession. La Farge had recently gone and so had William James, the latter, in Adams's opinion, wrong-headedly optimistic to the end. To Henry James, who had returned to Washington Square where he hovered as a birdof-passage, Adams sent stoical admonition. Silence was best now that "about the only unity that American society in our time had to show" was gone - "Richardson and Saint Gaudens, LaFarge, Alex Agassiz, Clarence King, John Hay, and at last, your brother William It was beyond condolence. Henry James responded that for a time he had felt "the wild waters" close over him. In him also the sense was equally strong of the "felt contemporaneity, our so prolonged intercommunication of consciousness, so to speak - meaning by 'us' my beloved brother and you and I and the others of our so interesting generation He too felt "like a lone watcher of the dead."

Outliving one's contemporaries levied a progressive tax of obituary appraisal. Royal Cortissoz asked for memorabilia for a biography of LaFarge and got in reply a luminous vignette in which all that LaFarge had taught of nuance and color played over the remembered image of the dead artist. What he had said in the Education of the living artist he deepened and subtilized for a definitive portrait. LaFarge "like most considerable artists" chiefly worked intuitively. His art was in essence remote, 'unAmerican," and most intelligible in his stained glass "where his effects were strong and broad "He was a marvel to me in his contradictions. "Unlike most men he had no vices that I could detect, unless perhaps a tendency to morphine when in pain. He had one of the most perfectly balanced judgments that could ever exist Of course he was often severe, but his severity itself was shaded and toned. Yet he was not easy to live with, thus contradicting even his contradictions." He was really too complex for literary depiction. "In the portrait of LaFarge," he advised Cortissoz, "you must get not only color but also constant change and shifting of light, as in opals and moonstones and starsapphires, where the light is the object." The tenor of his repeated soundings at his own table or at friendly "houses" varied little as he turned from one correspondent to another. Musingly he looked across at the White House one March morning to reflect that it was just fifty years ago that he had "set out on that career of failure which took its start in the first great collapse of

Winter, 1964

society I ever witnessed." The succession of collapses had now prostrated all societies. Nonetheless, that journey to Liverpool had probably been his "biggest piece of luck." In the wreckage of careers and worlds there was also comfort in the fact that he had "always managed to have all the money I've wanted."

He carried over to Paris with him a preliminary set of page proofs of the new Chartres. Shortly after his arrival he talked of being reduced to "indexing as a literary pursuit." The lull proved temporary as Thoron's researches began to bear further fruit. By mid-summer he was in full cry again after a half-dozen intellectual rabbits, all elusive historical puzzles: "St. Augustine's views on Grace; St. Thomas Aquinas' view of Free Will; Darwin's ideas on Sexual Selection; Male's view of the Charlemagne window at Chartres and the Pseudo-Turpin of Rheims; the relative merits of a score of mss of the Pseudo-Turpin in the Bibliotheque Nationale and the Arsenal; the extinction of the Tertiary vertebrates and the action of the glaciers; the meaning of the paintings in the Cro-Magnon caverns, and of the carvings on ivory and stone of the same period." Each of these matters, he noted, had given him at least a week's reading. The extinction of species now seemed to him to present as many enigmas as the origin of species.

While Thoron helped check the architecture and glass of Chartres, Luquiens debated with him the linguistic provenience of medieval texts. He began to worry about the soundness of the theology of his book. On that he had lavished his intensest perceptions. It was true that one Catholic scholar Father Pardow had praised his exposition; but that was a half dozen years ago and new German tomes on Abelard and St. Thomas called for study. It was, as he said, "no slouch of an affair to go through a labyrinth like that" again. He hoped, in vain as it proved, to "pick up some good, strong denunciation of Brother Thomas from Duns Scotus whom I never looked into." By way of propitiation he had sent a copy of the original version to Bishop Thomas Shahan, rector of the Catholic University of America. "The poor man squirms," he wrote Mrs. Cameron, "for fear of getting into a scrape, and I expect to get in the Index." The good bishop received the book "like a red-hot poker" but he did not gratify Adams's expectation of ecclesiastical notoriety. The new materials on other aspects of medieval art were already taking him into paths leading away from the revision and his letters began to hint of large new projects. As a result the great triad of impressionistic chapters on medieval theology, stood in the reprinting without alteration.

The new apartment on the second floor at Number 88 was more spacious than the comfortable "garret" which he had quitted at Number 23; the long and narrow library with its eighteenth

century lacquered cabinets and Louis XV table did the office of chief living room in preference to either of the two adjoining salons. As his physical pace slowed his cerebral activity accelerated and from behind the massive table he darted his penetrating glance at his visitors to mark the effect of his iconoclastic pronouncements. One visitor, the historian Waldo Leland, remembered the querulous animation of Adams's talk that summer, his undiminished curiosity about the nature of history and its relation to physics and biology, and his scepticism of historical continuity. Energy could still flare up as of old so that after climbing four flights of stairs to return Leland's call he entered jauntily without a sign of breathlessness. Recalling a ride on a roller coaster at the St. Louis Exposition as the finest thing he had ever done in his life, he slapped his knee and proposed that they should plan at once to try the Paris variety. His chaffing irony was as astringent and elliptical as ever. He liked his Paris apartment, he said, because there was nothing between it and his house in Washington and what "he liked about his house in Washington was that there was nothing between that and the South Pole." Didn't the White House shut off "the view of the South Pole?" queried Leland. That was only an insignificant detail, Adams retorted. Told of the catastrophic destruction of manuscripts in the burning of the Albany capitol, he remarked that it was "one of the greatest steps in advance ever taken by historical studies in America."

As another year drew to a close Adams could not hide from himself nor from his intimates that the physical machine was sadly amiss. It had been a hot summer in Paris, "hot as hell or Washington," as he put it with Twainian vehemence, and he joked grimly of his fear of "suddenly sitting down on the floor, before the tea party, and babbling of my dolls," for he knew the savage tricks of hardening arteries. "All my senses are gone," he humorously complained, "and I can't move, because of rheumatics, lumbago, neurosis, and several fatal internal diseases." Most disquieting was the weakening of the center of vision in his eyes, the growing pressure of daylight that kept him within doors until evening. He finally set up a kitchen, cook, china, Louis XV sideboard and all to avoid, as he said, parading his white hairs in restaurants. He saw himself becoming a "benevolent, Franklinian, retiring, sage-colored paralytic." Edith Wharton reassured Berenson: "Poor Uncle Henry's eyes are bad but I gather it's gout and that ought to be curable or at least relievable. He is very cheerful, for Mrs. Cameron, Mrs. Winty Chanler and several of his other lesser loves are here. Moreover he has a cook and those dreary restaurant trips are over." In spite of infirmity Adams kept himself to the mark. His correspondence seemed scarcely to diminish in quantity or peppery vigor. Only the

marvelous precision of the handwriting betrayed the effort as the words grew perceptibly larger on the familiar notepaper.

Slowly he worried through the last pages of the revised Chartres as autumn gave way to winter and the windswept Bois grew cheerless. His brother Charles sent over a copy of his Studies, Military and Diplomatic, 1775-1865, leading Henry to look back elegiacally once more upon their generation: "I have always considered that Grant wrecked my own life, and the last hope or chance of putting society back to a reasonably high plane As I look back on our sixty years of conscious life, I have to search hard for a word of warm satisfaction Since the Civil War, I think we have produced not one figure that will be remembered a lifetime What is more curious, I think the figures have not existed If they had existed I should have attached myself to them for I needed them bad. As life has turned out, I am dying alone, without a twig to fall from We leave no followers, no school, no tradition." Early in January 1912, a few weeks after getting back to Washington, Adams sent off the corrected proof sheets of the new Chartres. He could now "clear out at five minutes notice and everyone will be the better," he chaffed Elizabeth. This time he spoke more prophetically than he knew. He had printed his last book.

In all of the long process of collating texts, correcting errors, tinkering with occasional passages, Adams was not inclined to make any serious concessions, even as he made room for authorities like Emile Male whom he had overlooked. Alerted by Thoron to Male's account of the disputed Charlemagne window, he admitted Male, but only up to a point. He refused to adopt his scepticism concerning the identification of certain statues on the north porch of Chartres. The popular legend, he said, was too pleasant to abandon for a scholarly doubt. Male troubled another favorite point of Adams that the popular religion found expression in the legendary windows. "I think Male lies when he says that Charlemagne was sainted by his Church," he wrote Thoren. "My recollection is that Charlemagne was never, and is not now recognized by the Church as a saint." On this point his recollection deceived him a little, for church historians had long held that by 1166 a noticeable cultus of Charlemagne had arisen in a period when canonization could be effected by the French hierarchy with little formality. Though not officially listed as a saint, he had long borne the title "Blessed" as having been "beatified." For the dates Adams told Thoron he would adhere as before to Enlart "and leave the load on him. As for the statuary, I must dodge the dispute as well as I can, and the same resource is all I can imagine for the glass." His evasion with respect to the statuary took the following form in the version:

Critics are doing their best to destroy the peculiar personal interest of this porch, but tourists and pilgrims may be excused for insisting on their traditional rights here, since the porch is singular, even in the thirteenth century, for belonging entirely to them and the royal family of France, subject only to the Virgin. True artists, turned critics, think also less of rules than of values, and no ignorant public can be trusted to join critics in losing temper judiciously over the date or correctness of a portrait until they knew something of its motives and merits.

He disposed of Male's cavils about Charlemagne in this fashion: "The thirteenth century knew more about religion and decoration than the twentieth century will ever learn. The windows were neither symbolic nor mystical, nor more religious than they intended to be."

A particular sore point to Adams was the bland assurance with which recent Catholic writers had altered the facts about the medieval worship of Mary to make them accord with official dogma. Of one work, which breathed "it's Jesuit genius in every line," Adams protested that the author "does not once-so far as I can discover-speak of the Virgin of Majesty, or touch upon our Virgin of Chartres. He speaks of her only as the Mother of God, who is at last translated to Heaven with a rank of Queen, very ill-defined, and chiefly nominal over the Apostles. When I get to Heaven and stand judgment before the Virgin, I am going to charge that damned Jesuit with this piece of cowardice, and insist that either he or I ought to go to Hell."

The new scholarship had begun to dissolve other landmarks as well. Adams had chosen to regard the Roland as contemporaneous with the eleventh century Mont-Saint-Michel though he was aware that scholars were sceptical about Wace's story that Taillefer had recited the poem on the way to the battle of Hastings. In fact it furnished one of the jocular notes of the Chartres: "To doubt the 'Chanson' is to call the very roll of Battle Abbey in question. The whole fabric of society totters; the British peerage turns pale." Now that Luquiens suggested the dubiousness of the dating, Adams countered, "I cannot make the Chanson so late," and adhered to the earlier authority, Petit de Julleville, in placing it "anterior to the First Crusade, whatever interpolations, here and there, may seem to suggest." Having built up his complex mosaic almost entirely from an immense patchwork of secondary sources, he was understandably reluctant to disturb the structure. Besides, the progress of linguistic science demanded a re-examination of the medieval manuscripts which was beyond even his great powers. He was also disinclined to alter his translations on the ground that "with us outsiders who study things historically and as sequences, our efforts to translate are only meant to give us a little more habit of thinking the thought of our period. We want to get at the atmosphere of the art, so we translate; but, once we feel at home there, we throwaway our scaffolding." He had already

Winter, 1964

given the justification of his method in the Chartres. "Translation is an evil sure to be full of gross blunders," but after all, it did not matter a straw whether we succeed," for "twelfth century art was not precise; still less 'precieuse,' like Moliere's famous seventeenthcentury prudes."

The revised volume considerably extended the circle of appreciative readers. "Think!" he exclaimed to Gaskell, "I've given away 150 copies! There's triumph!" He found that he would have to redouble his largesse to dispose of the remaining 350 copies which overflowed his study. Protesting that he "would rather put a few babies on sale" than let a commercial publisher market the book, he pressed Jameson into service again, sending off the new volume to nearly a score of additional libraries which he nominated. There was "special amusement" of course in sending copies to the principal women's colleges to unsettle the young Protestant women. He hoped also to distribute a half-dozen copies "judiciously" to some Catholic libraries "to irritate a priest or two by teaching his parishioners some dogma."

The total number of changes, apart from punctuation and typography, was surprisingly small and they were confined almost entirely to the series of chapters on Chartres, for only there in the great nave of his book did he find himself vulnerable. Of the thirty-odd changes, most were mere corrections of a date, the addition of brief supporting citations from Enlart, Male, Ottin, and Bartsch or the dropping of a phrase or two at one point and the insertion of a clarifying sentence at another. In a few instances he expanded a passage, enlarging for example on the spread of effeminate fashions in the days of William Rufus or adding eight pages giving the complicated historical associations of the windows of the choir.

The most significant addition, however, was his translation of all seven stanzas of Richard Coeurde-Lion's prison song which seemed now to sound the leit motif of his whole existence. He had attempted only the short concluding stanza in 1904, and had then characterized the Old French song as "one of the chief monuments of English literature."

The impish pleasantry was in keeping with his fanciful recreation of a Norman ancestry for himself and all English worthies and for his making the Chanson de Roland. a Norman poem. Would a "niece" cavil at such romantic liberties? Richard's "Prison Song" actually known only to specialists of French troubadour lyrics still floats in a sea of scholarly conjecture but the view it gave of that "splendid savage," Richard Coeur de Lion, whose personal bravery was as extravagant as his hideous brutalities, seemed more attractive than ever. Enough that tradition spoke of Richard as an English king, or at any

rate an Anglo-Norman whose English speaking descendants would one day take the name Plantagenet. Richard had in fact spent only six months of his ten-year reign in England. The poem sang not of the imperious Richard who massacred Jews and Saracens and humbled Saladin, but of the piteous suppliant held for a ransom in an Austrian prison. It was the gallant Richard of Gretry's opera tragically lamenting, "The universe has abandoned me!" that had roused chilling echoes of ancestral failures when Adams first heard it in Paris long ago. He had then remembered that his embittered grandfather, John Quincy, had also felt Richard's wild grief as if it were his own when he had heard the opera. In the rugged lines of the "Prison Song" Adams felt all the masculine energy of the Chanson de Roland, untouched by the courtly delicacy of the northern troubadours. For him the words were "a true cry of the heart."

Translating the version from the Langue d'oil which he found in his copy of Bartsch's Chrestomathie de l'ancien Francais, Adams wrestled with the rough syntax with a technical virtuosity that amazed his professorial correspondent. His scholarship may often have been cavalier, but where it touched his hobby he tracked the elusive quarry through the densest thicket. If "Richard's Prison Song" was once only a graceful jeu d'esprit of a French troubadour, Adams's version did indeed add it to English literature. As a song of betrayal and loss, of homesickness in a foreign land, it symbolized his sense of alienation even more poignantly at seventy-four than at sixty-six, when the Chartres was first issued. His universe too had abandoned him.

"No prisoner can tell honest thought Unless he speaks as one who suffers wrong; But for his comfort he may make a song

The added perspective gained from going over the ground again opened up for Adams a side of the Middle Ages that he had almost completely ignored in his book, the enormous social and economic transformation of Western Europe that took place in spite of the enormous expense in lives and treasure of the disastrous and unending warfare with the Mohammedan world. Now he was "struck with its inadequacy. When I think that it leaves out the Crusades and the whole of politics," he exclaimed, "I wonder how I made it stand up The time was boiling with energy." But stand up it had, for he had by the power of his art given reality to one of the great illusions of the time. In the tumultuous sweep of medieval history the cult of the Virgin had been only a minor incident. Brooks had undoubtedly been right in his estimation of the greater importance of monasticism in the rise of Western civilization. Paradoxically, it was Henry who had played fast and loose with the calculus of forces in his first version of the Dynamic Theory of history.

Theodore

When Ralph Mills, Jr. was a graduate student and instructor at Northwestern he contributed to the first issue of The Tri-Quarterly an article on the poetry of Theodore Roethke. Roethke was much pleased with Mills' critical evaluation -of his poetry, and the article was the beginning of a correspondence between them. Mills called on Roethke at his home and had long talks with him upon his visits to Chicago and to Evanstonthe last time only a few months before the poet's untimely death. This tribute to Roethke was written for The Tri-Quarterly at the invitation of the editor.

Mills is Associate Chairman of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. His monograph, Theodore Roethke, has recently been published by the University of Minnesota Press as part of its American Writers series.

AGENERAL and understandable confusion we have had about Theodore Roethke situates him squarely in the middle of the poetic generation of the 1940's. Indeed, much of the obvious evidence supports this view: his first book appeared in 1941, and John Ciardi included him in his by now famous anthology, Mid-Century American Poets (1950), which went a long way toward defining the generation of poets that emerged on the eve of, or during, World War II. But the truth of the matter is that Roethke, like Stanley Kunitz (born in 1905), who was not included in the anthology, and Richard Eberhart (born in 1904), who was, really stood, in age, outside the group of writers with whom he was linked in the minds of his audience. Thus the humor of Roethke's remark about himself, recently quoted by Kunitz in The New York Review of Books, that he was "the oldest younger poet" in America, is touched with a streak of Winter, 1964

bitter revelation. For there is no question that Roethke came to full maturity - a maturity which proved him to be one of the most magnificent lyric poets of his age - while he was still being associated with poets somewhat his junior in years who had not reached his level of development. Robert Lowell and Karl Shapiro, it seems to me, are just now arriving at the threshold of what should be the mature phase of their writing. As a result of this association, recognition was unduly tardy for Roethke, but when it did come, with The Waking (1953) and his collected poems, Words for the Wind (1958), it looked nearly unanimous. The first of these volumes won him the Pulitzer Prize; the second took the National Book Award and half a dozen others, large and small. But more than the awards was significant: he began to gain a host of imitators, and many serious youthful poets acknowledged his influence on their work. Moreover, his reputation as a teacher of poetry at the University of Washington was established as one of legendary genius.

Though the publication of Open House (1941) located him in the vanguard of the forties' poets, Roethke had been working for the entire preceding decade on the composition and arrangement of that book. Over twenty years afterwards, during the summer of 1962, he traveled from Seattle to Ann Arbor to receive, along with Robert Frost and the Mexican comedian Cantinfias, an honorary degree from the university where he had studied. On his return trip, we sat together between trains at a bar in the Union Station in Chicago, talking about, among other things, his early verse. Because I had asked to see some of his early poems before, Roethke took this occasion of our meeting to produce the November 1934 issue of American Poetry Journal, which contained a group of eight of his poems, not later reprinted, and a short but extremely perceptive note on him by his fellow poet, the late John Holmes. In his comments, Holmes discusses with

shrewd insight themes and interests already visible in Roethke's verse that would continue to occupy him in spite of stylistic change and imaginative growth for the next thirty years, and he finishes by saying that Roethke "has not yet collected a volume of his poems," as if it were something past due. Seven years went by before Open House was done and in print. But Roethke was correct in his restraint and his devotion; the poetry itself will bear out his judgment. We are reminded here of another fine but reluctant poet, Wallace Stevens, who once said that the publication of a book of poems was a "damn serious thing."

Open House must have been similar to a rite of passage for Roethke because it released him to greater creativity and to the beginning of bold and startlingly original work in the books that followed. From that point on, his art moved forward with ever-increasing range and with an intensity of vision hard to equal. At the time of his unexpected death from a heart attack last August, Roethke had completed a new and, I should guess, sizable collection of poems written after Words for the Wind. In 1960 Roethke sent me a set of carbons of the original version of that book. Most of these poems have since appeared in journals, magazines, and papers, but I think there must now be twice as many as I received in that typescript. This book will furnish additional testimony to the richness of Roethke's art, to the broad command of technique at his disposal, and to the depth of his perception.

Roethke's poetry, as his readers know, progressed through various phases from the formal to the experimental, though it was never limited solely to one or the other. His fascination with nature was a fascination with the process of life itself. From boyhood days in his father's famous Michigan greenhouses and the wooded acres surrounding them, he obtained first-hand knowledge of plants, flowers, trees, birds and animals which later provided a substantial part of the foundation for his poetic vision. He traced in his poems that process of life I have mentioned in the metamorphosis of the individual or human self and saw its manifold relationship with all created beings and things. A paragraph from the philosopher Jacques Maritain's Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry explains the poet's intuitive manner of knowing, in words very relevant to Roethke's practice.

.The poet does not know himself in the light of hls own essence. Since man perceives himself only through a repercussion of his knowledge of the world of things, and remains empty to himself if he does not fill himself with the universe, the poet knows himself only on the condition that things resound in him, and that in him at a single wakening, they and he come forth tc{gether out of sleep. In other words, the primary requirement of poetry, which is the obscure knowing, by the poet, of his own subjectivity, is insepar-

able from, is one with another requirement - the grasping, by the poet, of the objective reality of the outer and inner world: not by means of concepts and conceptual knowledge, but by means of an obscure knowledge which I shall describe as knowledge through affective union.

The early "greenhouse poems," the sequence of longer poems in The Lost Son and Praise to the End which explore psychic life, the love poems, the metaphysical lyrics, the "Meditations of an Old Woman," and the late Whitmanesque "North American Sequence" (including "The Rose," "The Far Field," "Meditation at Oyster River," etc.) are drawn together by this mode of knowledge and by a common concern with the evolution of the self.

The mysticism and the visionary quality evident in a number of Roethke's later poems seem to derive from experiences which came to him close to the end of his imaginative quest. These experiences, as found in the poetry, take two forms. The first is reminiscent of experiences familiar to us in Blake or Wordsworth and is a disclosure of the poet's communion with the fullness of being in the physical cosmos; it is usually characterized by his expression of ecstasy and joy at what he sees. The concluding stanzas of the poem "Praise to the End!" illustrate such a luminous moment:

Arch of air, my heart's original knock

I'm awake all over:

I've crawled from the mire, alert as a saint or a dog; I know the back-stream's joy, the stone's eternal pulseless longing, Felicity I cannot hoard.

My friend, the rat in the wall, brings me the clearest messages; I bask in the bower of change;

The plants wave me in, and the summer apples; My palm-sweat flashes gold; Many �stounds before, I lost my identity to a pebble; The minnows love me, and the humped and spitting creatures.

I believe! I believe!In the sparrow, happy on gravel; In the winter-wasp, pulsing its wings in the sunlight; I have been somewhere else; I remember the sea-faced uncles.

I ,hear, clearly, the heart of another singing, LIghter than bells, Softer than water.

Wherefore, 0 birds and small fish, surround me. Lave me, ultimate waters. The dark showed me a face.

My ghosts are all gay. The light becomes me.

The other form visionary experience takes is frequently enveloped in darkness and terror' it occurred more often in Roethke's poetry during the past few years. No doubt this second form of experience penetrates deeply into the poet's inner life and is a costly event. Flashes of illumination and inspiration, dreams of visionary dimension many times corresponded with periods of severe mental and physical suffering for the poet. Some

poems of this type treat age and increasing bodily disintegration as prefatory to spiritual experience. "In a Dark Time," which was published initially in the New Yorker and later was the subject of discussion by John Crowe Ransom, Babette Deutsch, Stanley Kunitz, and Roethke himself in New World Writing 19, is perhaps the best known of the recent visionary poems in this second category. Another, called "Infirmity," printed after his death (New Yorker, October 19, 1963), is both a statement of the conditions of mystical experience and a work arising from it. Yet we need not turn to poems as late as those to discover Roethke facing awesome trials of the spirit; the sequence poems of The Lost Son and Praise to the End provide enough examples, or to push on a little more, "The Exorcism" from Words for the Wind ventures across the boundaries of ordinary consciousness:

1 The gray sheep came. I ran, My body half in flame.

(Father of flowers, who Dares face the thing he is?)

As of pure being woke, The dust rose and spoke; A shape cried from a cloud, Cried to my flesh out loud.

(And yet I was not there, But down long corridors, My own, my secret lips

Babbling in urinals.)

2 In a dark wood I saw­

I saw my several selves Come running from the leaves, Lewd, tiny careless lives That scuttled under stones, Or broke, but would not go.

I turned upon my spine, I turned and turned again, A cold God-furious man

Writhing until the last Forms of his secret life Lay with the dross of death

I was myself, alone.

I broke from that low place Breathing a slower breath, Cold, in my own dead salt.

This truly amazing poem involves a descent into the self, but, more than that, it is an image of purgatory. Allen Tate has noted that Roethke wrote poems in which he foresaw his own death. "The Exorcism" does not go quite so far, yet it is a poem about the death of what is evil or undesirable in oneself. T. S. Eliot's "Ash Wednesday" is another such poem. The "dark wood" and the "low place" may be metaphors for the unconscious or the world of nightmarish dreams, but they also refer to the opening of Dante's Divine Comedy and to the grave, respectively. We remember that Dante starts his journey into Hell from a dark wood like this one, a journey which leads ultimately to his purgation and to the blessing of a Divine vision. The "low place"

is the grave in which the poet undergoes the exorcism described in the second part of the poem; there he leaves behind the "forms of his secret life," evidence of his agonizing struggle, and returns, exhausted but cleansed within, to the regions of ordinary reality. Though Roethke does not proceed to any direct experience of God here, we must not forget that transcendental awareness traditionally is based on this sort of harrowing preparation. The last stanza of the later poem "Infirmity" speaks of the difficulty of attaining to this higher plane of knowledge and appears to relate it finally with death. Elsewhere in the same poem, we are told that human efforts alone are insufficient, that "the eternal seeks, and finds, the temporal":

Things without hands take hands: there is no choiceEternity's not easily come by. When opposites come suddenly in place, I teach my eyes to hear, my ears to see How body from spirit slowly does unwind Until we are pure spirit at the end.

Once while I was visiting with Roethke at his house in Seattle, I casually picked up and glanced at a book lying on one of the living room tables. It was, as I recall, a volume by Suzuki on Zen Buddhism and Christianity. When he saw me looking at it, Roethke scoffed at the book, indicated that he knew nothing about it, and said in addition that I should not be misled by its presence into thinking he was interested in anything of that kind. Yet another time, in Chicago, I asked him point blank about the mystical elements in his later poems; he replied simply and forcefully, "I was there." I had no wish to pursue the topic further.

One might say, altering Roethke's words to fit our purpose, that the poems are there, too. They await the reading, the recognition, and the love which comprise the greatest and most enduring tribute any poet can receive. Roethke has long deserved this tribute - one of good readers as much as it is of critics and prize committees - for it is my belief that he has won a place among the best American poets of this, or any other, century:

I heard a dying man Say to his gathered kin, "My soul's hung out to dry, Like a fresh-salted skin; I doubt I'll use it again. "What's done is yet to come; The flesh deserts the bone, But a kiss widens the rose; I know, as the dying know, Eternity is Now.

"A man sees, as he dies, Death's possibilities; My heart sways with the world.

I am that final thing, A man learning to sing."

(From "The Dying Man, In Memoriam: W. B. YEATS")

Winter, 1964

A Parable of Death

By Richard E. Cheverton

We came across the highbridge. Down below the river went far away and at one end was the dam and then the sandbar below and the boats and then nothing but dirty brown water. The bridge rattled like old bones, and then we came to Muscatine and turned off and went up Front Street.

"It never changes," said Daddy. "This is where you went to kindergarten and got your tonsils out," he said to me. "Right here in this town

We turned up the bluff. We stopped in front of the apartment building and Daddy turned to me.

"I don't want you to say anything about this to Aunt May," he said.

"I won't," I said.

"And you mind."

"All right," I said.

We walked across the street and I looked up at the building and watched all the windows. I wanted to see Aunt May but I didn't want to see her. Grandma was there too, but I didn't care if I saw her

"You mind now," said Mother. But I thought about Aunt May and the way Daddy said the words when he put down the telephone and came back to the dinner table the Sunday before: he said, "Well, the doc knows now. It's for sure. There's nothing they can do "

"That's terrible," said Mother.

"Well, I guess we ought to go down there this weekend," said Daddy. "You can never tell how long she'll last in weather like this

We went into the apartment building and climbed the stairs: the floor moaned and I could hear sounds inside the walls, people whispering. We climed to the top and Grandma was standing at the landing.

"Hello Mary," said Daddy. Grandma bent down and kissed him. We went inside. I couldn't see Aunt May; she was in the living room.

"May," Daddy called.

Softly softly came the sound of the old rocking chair, and the floor whispered. I could not see her. "May," called Daddy.

"Yes," she answered. She came down the long narrow hallway and she was black against the windowlight. I could see the bones in her arms

and then the light was on her and I saw her face and the skin hanging empty and the old dress and Mother touched my arm for a moment and I could see Aunt May was dying, and it was for sure and she was dying all right, she was dying

"It was nice for you to come and see me," she said. Her voice came hollow, like the hush of wind in the cornfields at night.

"Well, let's sit down and have a talk," said Grandma, taking Aunt May'S hand, leading her down the hallway into the living room. Daddy went over to the front window and I followed. We looked out across the rooftops and far down the bluff. The river was dirty brown against the white houses. "That's the Mississippi," I said.

"I learned it in school

"Yes. That's the Mississippi He turned to Aunt May. "You got a nice view here."

"Yes," said Aunt May. "It's awful warm on days like this though."

The sun gleamed on the windowscreen and the blueflies buzzed against the window: "1 thought I saw Carl Fisher downtown when we drove up here," said Daddy.

"He's still around," said Grandma.

"Town doesn't change much," said Daddy.

"Got more Mexicans this year down at the cannery," said Aunt May. "They closed down the old button plant. Them new plastic ones came in and nobody bought the shell ones."

"I could see it coming," said Daddy. "They missed a good bet when they didn't go over to plastic down there. I told them they was missing a bet."

There was quiet.

"And the river bugs were so bad last week they had to sweep all the dead ones off the streets with the streetcleaner," said Aunt May.

"They oughta do something about that," said Daddy.

I left the room and walked down the hallway. Aunt May's voice buzzed far away behind me. Grandma was in the kitchen. "Well, Butchee, how're you doing?" she asked, looking up. She smiled suddenly.

"I'm OK."

"You look hungry. You want something? How about a peanut butter sandwich?"

I shrugged. "Here," she said, putting the plate down. I could hear Mother and Aunt May in the front room

"How are you doing in school?" asked Grandma. "Can I go outside?" I asked. "Sure," said Grandma. "I think that's best

I went out the back way and went out on the porch. Some of Grandma's things were drying on the line and they flapped in the wind, the arms of the old dresses reaching out for me I went downstairs. The sunlight came down hard and white and I dragged my feet in the dust. I threw little handfuls at the wall and pretended the smoky puffs were bullets spudding into the wall. The grass out back was almost dead, curled up stiff as barbed wire. I went out behind the toolhouse; at first I couldn't see in the shadows. Then something stirred in the corner under an old smashed cardboard box. I lifted one of the flaps: an old pigeon sat propped up on the box, his feet poking out from under his body. He shivered, and there was brown dust on his wings. He moved and raised his wings and half-turned his head. There were things running around on his face and they ran across his clotted eyelids. He half-turned his head and they ran in and out of the little caves in his beak and he half-turned his head

I ran out into the yard. Far above, I could hear Aunt May's voice. The dust hung in little spurts at my feet. Aunt May said words and I remembered Father putting down the telephone and Aunt May talked far away The shadow behind the toolshed was black, and I could not see. Aunt May called: "Butchee"; she called, "Butchee

I ran behind the toolshed. "Butchee," called Aunt May The old pigeon raised his head at the sound and its eyes flickered open for a moment and the things darted in and out. I moved the box with my foot and the bird shuddered. An old fence stake was leaning in the corner and I picked it up: the bird half-turned its head. "I've gotta," I thought. "I've gotta "Butchee," called Aunt May, "Butchee ." I dropped the stake and covered up the pigeon with a flap of the cardboard box and ran back upstairs.

They sat in the living room. "What you doing down there?" asked Aunt May.

"Nothing," I said. "1 wasn't doing anything." I shrugged, went out.

Aunt May came along behind. I went into the kitchen and took the plate and the sandwich. "What you got there?" she said.

"Peanut butter," I said.

"That's nice." She went out and 1 followed her and she went to the hall closet and the inside smelled warm and dry and there was the odor of moth balls and old coats. She came up close. Her skin was yellow and wrinkled and I could see the veins under the skin of her hands. She

reached inside, pulled out her shawl, went toward her room and I followed. The smell of dust and lilacs came floating back. She sat on the bed and looked at her face in the mirror. Slowly she pushed her hair into place: the light came in, cold and white, and gleamed in the pill bottles, neat in a row beside the bed. I turned my back.

"What is it, Butchee?" she asked.

"I don't know," 1 said.

"You can tell Aunt May."

"No, I can't."

"Sure you can," she said.

"They won't tell you and 1 can't tell you," 1 said.

She came and put her hand on my arm and it was cold and the palms were rimmed with callouses.

"You can tell me anything."

"No, 1 can't," 1 said. "I can't and they told me not to," 1 said.

She came close to me and put her hand on my shoulder. "You know," she whispered close to my ear. "You know, and you won't tell me but I know."

1 pulled away and went into the hall. Mother stood in the kitchen. "We've been looking for you," she said. Aunt May came out. She turned her head. Her face was large and black in the windowlight.

"I'm tired, Ginna," she said.

"Well, you left your shawl in the bedroom," said Mother. "I'll get it." Aunt May waited and then Mother came back and slipped it around her shoulders.

"Thank you," said Aunt May. Then she walked down the hallway. When she passed me she touched my face with her hand. Then she was gone, and her voice started in the living room. I went to the door. Downstairs the yard was bright and 1 saw where my feet had been in the dust. "Butchee," called Aunt May, "Butchee ." *

We went through town and across the highbridge and left the river behind. We reached the top of the bluffs at the other side and I looked back. The town was far away, caught in the hollow of the river's coiling. I thought about the river, and the way it cut the valley, and about the ocean and where the river ended. Mother sat in the front seat and was quiet. The wind whistled at the windows. "I think it's going to rain," said Daddy. "Look at those clouds over there." We drove down the bluffs and the river disappeared. It goes on and on, I thought, and then there is the ocean. It goes on and on and does not know our name.

II

The evening sunlight made rainbows in the cutglass teardrops hanging from the lamp.

I sat very quietly and heard Mother's voice and

Winter, 1964

she talked about Auntie and what they were going to do about the house and how the neighbor children were coming over the fence and trampling down all of Ed's roses. But now Ed was gone and so was Auntie. They had died.

"I think we'll go down to Keethsburg tomorrow," said Mother. Out on the front porch, the men sat and smoked in the darkness, their white shirts gone dim, the color of ashes.

"You go to bed now," Mother called.

Mter I had slipped under the covers and turned out the light, I moved over in the big double bed until I could feel the little hollow Uncle Ed had worn down. He had to be very careful, because if he turned over on his stomach his heart would stop beating (that is what Mother said) and so he always slept on his side. Outside, the men talked and the porch swing groaned back and forth, back and forth ("How high's the river this time of year?" Daddy asked Mr. Fowler, and Mr. Fowler didn't say anything for a long time. "Well," he said finally, "well, it's not too damn bad. Broke the levee up to Keokuk, raised holy hell "River's a funny thing," said Daddy. "I swam acrost it when I was a kid," he said. "Damn right?" asked Mr. Fowler. "Sure did," said Daddy. "Went from Pig Island over to the Illinois side. Swam it with my brother. More damn currents and stuff. Sawall kinds of crap

Richard E. Cheverton lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and loves to recreate in his stories and poems the moods and mysteries of the dune country along Lake Michigan. In the reminiscence published below, however, he reaches back into his early boyhood in Iowa for a child's first experience with death and its rituals. Cheverlon is a senior in the School of Journalism. Upon graduation he hopes to begin professional newspaper work and later to return to the University for advanced study. Summers he has worked for WOOD, TV and Radio Station in Grand Rapids. He is the editor of the Daily Northwestern.

out there even a big barrel floating down. Wisht I could have picked it up." "Might have been somebody pickled inside," said Mr. Fowler. And when the men laughed it sounded as soft as the buzz of locusts in the trees )

In the darkness, with the moonlight making patterns on the floor; in the darkness, with the ticking of an old clock on the bedside stand; in the dark, when the furniture became dead tree stumps: while next door, where my mother flipped the pages of a magazine with a dry rattle, in a bed with a white coverlet and pillows smelling faintly of sachet, Auntie had died. And now Auntie was waiting for us to come in the morning. Her face was smiling: a way she had never really been.

Now she was waiting.

In the morning Mother came and brushed my hair and I put on my good Sunday clothes. Father took my hand and we walked down the bluffs, down to Muscatine. We turned and went up Main Street and I could smell the river down behind the railroad station.

We went into Ikenhour's and Daddy stood beside me at the bar and the man behind the bar turned around and Daddy shook his hand.

"I'll be damned," said Ikenhour.

"Been a long time," said Daddy. "I'm working up on the Star, up in Minneapolis. It's a nice town."

"We got them beat by a mile," said Ikenhour. "Muscatine's got everthing."

"Sure thing," said Daddy.

"How come you're down here?" asked Ikenhour.

"May's funeral they're gonna have it today and ship her over to Keethsburg. All the Hills are over at Keethsburg."

Ikenhour shook his head. Then he glanced down at me.

"Who's this?" he asked.

"My son," said Daddy.

Ikenhour turned around and stubbed a cigar between his teeth. "You old enough for a place like this?" he asked. I nodded. "That's too bad," he said. He turned and put a mug full of orange pop on the bar. "That's too bad," he said, sliding the mug toward me

We left, and turned down Sycamore Street and stopped at Kenny's.

When Kenny got out of the barberchair he took my hand and shook it and smiled down. "Helluva kid you've got there," he said to my father. "You both need haircuts, business ain't so good." He laughed, but then the smile disappeared. "I still got them bones," he said to me. Daddy watched. Kenny took the black leather cup out of a cabinet and rolled the dice across a shelf. I remembered coming in for haircuts and Kenny would take out the cup and the dice would rattle like dried peas in a pod.

"Anyway," said Daddy. "How's Mel?" and Kenny sat down in the barberchair again and said that Mel got his own shop or something, anyway he wasn't here any more.

That's too bad, said Daddy.

Look, said Kenny, standing again. "Maybe you can get another one of those press cards you gave me a while back. The old one's out of date cops won't let me use it. I tried to get in to watch a fire and they kept me out. New one'd be just fine

"I'll see about it," said Daddy. We stepped outside. The sunlight was hard and bright against his face. The door closed with a hiss and I watched Kenny standing behind the window with the little red-striped column turning around and around, the stripes crawling up the sides

We went up to Courthouse Park and Daddy went up on the lawn and sat on one of the greenpainted benches looking out over Muscatine and the Mississippi and across Illinois and the new green hills rolling away

"You go up in the bell tower," said Daddy, "and you can see all the way to Davenport. I went up there once. I was just a kid." He stood and walked a little ways. "Well, you don't want to hear about any of that," he said finally. Then he glanced at his watch. "We'll just kill a little time." He sat on the grass and smoked. "We'll just sit here

He leaned back and cradled his head in his arms. "Funny thing," he said. I don't think he was talking to me. "Funny town funny little town. I grew up here, worked down at the button factory funny times we had

I stood behind an old Civil War cannon, sighting along the barrel. I wondered how it would sound, and the way the cannonball would arc out and the wavy lines of men run up the hill

"You wanna go?" asked Daddy.

I shook my head.

"Neither do I," he said, turning his head away. "You know," he said, "sometimes you feel almost the same, you know? When people die, people are born. That sounds pretty funny but when you were born I thought about it for just an instant and there was my life, and you couldn't do anything about that but you think about your life and it's stretching far far away like a long tunnel and the kid passes through, and you figure what it'll all come to, and how it'll all end and the way it'll be and everything you wish would happen and wish wouldn't and sometimes it doesn't make sense."

He looked at me for a moment. "Well," he said, "well, we gotta get out of here. Mom's gonna be mad enough as it is

We walked down Sycamore Street and our shadows stretched away in front of us.

Mother waited in front of the car.

"That was an awful thing to do," said Mother when she saw us.

"Oh, I don't know," said Daddy.

"Well, I do. It was an awful thing to do. I'll bet you hid down in some dimestore all morning some dive like Ikenhour's maybe."

"Ikenhour's," s aid Daddy.

"She was awfully nice to you back when you were a kid, and now you wouldn't even show up for her funeral. It was terrible. I can tell you that." She got into the car. "Come on," she said. "They're driving over to Keethsburg. We'll have to catch them on the road."

We drove back through town and across the high bridge and into Illinois. Then far away, like a black caterpillar, we saw the procession stopped by the roadside.

We stopped and Daddy and I walked past the other cars and the black wagon. Inside, I could see the black shape, hidden by flowers.

Mr. Fowler was standing with a man in overalls. An old rusted pick-up truck was parked a way down the road and a boy sat on the tailgate swinging his legs back and forth. Mr. Fowler nodded and the man turned and got into the truck and drove slowly away.

"Damndest thing," said Mr. Fowler finally. "Damndest thing. Fools dug the wrong hole. Never heard of anything like that before

"What can we do?" asked Daddy.

Mr. Fowler took out a cigar and puffed for a moment. "Guy said it'd be an hour or so," he said. "We can't just stay here

Daddy dabbed at his sweaty face with a handkerchief.

"Damndest thing," said Mr. Fowler.

"We might as well drive on," said Daddy, and we all got into the car. Inside, in the heat, the flowers had gone sour.

We passed a little roadside restaurant and Daddy said, "Pull in," and we parked the cars and the hearse in the parking lot and went inside.

The woman behind the counter looked out the window and then across the counter at us.

"Are you sure you have the right place?" she asked, leaning on her elbows and smiling.

"I'm sure," said Mr. Fowler.

The waitress said something to the cook, and he came to the window and glanced out and then went back into the kitchen. The waitress delivered the coffee and stood watching.

"Well," said Mr. Fowler, motioning toward the parking lot. "I don't think she would have liked this.

Daddy glanced at Mother and laughed. Mr. Fowler smiled.

"Hey," said Daddy to the waitress. "How many stiffs do you get in a place like this?"

The waitress sat and said nothing. "I guess it should be sad," she said finally. "Won't you have another cup of coffee?

Winter, 1964

"AM�RJCANI ST�AM

A Decade of Diversity"

Exactlyone hundred years ago, Courtney Dether, a seventeen year old printer's devil, sat patiently with his traveling companions on a stalled train. "The conductor kept cursing out the engineer," recalled Dether, years later. "Something about not being able to handle steam."

From this incidental dilemma developed the American Steam Handle Corporation, long dominant in steam power and recently an impressive giant striding delicately through a maze of diversification. Last year, ASH startled the industrial and academic worlds by its merger with Northnorthern University, a private institution of outstanding scholastic reputation. Once considered a poor investment by even the wildest speculators, Northnorthern is known to be returning definite profits to American Steam Handle - the school's first profits since its founding.

"With our recent Rose Bowl bid," commented Northnorthern Divisional manager, Rupert Endicott, "the university will enter the new year with a substantial dollar reserve."

American Steam Handle's fast moving President Rankin "Bolts" Figler is quick to agree. "We've put education into the profit picture," he insists. "And we intend to keep it there!"

It seems incredible that shortly following the war, American Steam Handle was nearly eradicated from the profit picture completely. Cortney Dether, III (the last Dether to serve at ASH's helm, a fact which Wall Street wits interpreted as ASH's being at the end of its Dether) had steered his corporation through the depression with conservative navigation. World War II incurred expansion and a fervid research and development program. "Steam is basic," the final Dether once insisted. It defies progress."

And then came the tragic morning in March of 1945 - a tragic end to the entire research and development program - as Dether and surrounding Air Corps officials stood mutely before the ghastly hissing remains of the once giant, twelve-engined American Steam Handle XB-37 bomber. "They were all my sons," murmured Dether to the genuinely sympathic board of inquiry which followed. But steam was already slipping badly behind.

By the third quarter of 1949, only the Copper Whistle Division showed any rise in a corporate sales curve which had now assumed a free fall of vertical intensity. A market analyst soon proved that tea kettle whistles were enjoying a brief popularity paralleling that of the newly introduced instant coffee products. Even during the nation's unequalled pre-holiday spending, steam locomotives steadily gave ground.

Dether yielded his gavel to Figler at the year's end. Long the young, brash advocate of diversification, Figler hammered through three mergers in his first year. At his first investor's meeting, Figler rejected a host of cat-calls as he stood his ground over the acquisition of Wemmler Corset Industries. "We've got to take up the slack!" he shouted at the most persistent hecklers. Within two years, Wemmler was definitely holding its own.

During the next few years, Figler contented himself and the stockholders with increasing dividends topped by a startling three-to-one split. Then, ten years ago, his dream of all-out diversification began anew. Investing in American Steam Handle, today, is nearly the equivalent of purchasing a completely balanced portfolio. ASH now supplies its own needs in every product division. Its synthetic rubber plants developed for Wemmler Corset are reputed to be the most advanced in the world; ASH taps electrical power from its own atomic power plant; dumps industrial wastes into its own river; and, with its acquisition of Northnorthern, now supplies itself with engineers and executives.

"It was a hell of a risk," Figler now admits. "I was serving on Northnorthern's Board of Trustees the year they nearly folded. When I realized that the school was supplying American industry with top engineering talent at a total loss, I knew there was a place here for modern business methods."

Few faculty members who survived this past year of American Steam Handle management can forget the breathtaking first hundred days of ASH control. Latin Professor Amos Est likes to recall the day pure training courses were separated from those purely educational. "I remember one poor woman who taught a course in

By Thomas W. Clark

HANDILE .:=:=,

'The Philosophy of Baking Bread,' he confided. "She later swallowed seventeen packages of brewers yeast. But she survived to see the course torn from the curriculum."

Figler banned knitting bags from the classroom, instituted a final year comprehensive exam (which nearly destroyed Northnorthern's system of coeducation), and completely revamped the university's admittance practices. "Our job is to produce graduates at a profit," he instructed the staff. "Figure out what it costs us to turn 'em out, load that sixty per cent, and get a sales force working!"

The effect was immediate and dramatic. Corporations which once spent considerable sums recruiting engineering talent by sending entire staffs to the universities of the nation, now listened in amazement to salesmen from Northnorthern. "Compare our boys with any outfit in the country! We're offering top quality and it costs you less!" On paper, the dollar savings were irrefutable.

Facuity salaries doubled; an employee profit plan emerged. The football team, long the doormat of the conference, was simply hired outright. This was made possible when Northnorthern corporate attorneys threatened to expose the "full ride" recruiting policies of any university which dared to raise a cry of "professionalism."

Today, Northnorthern receives more applications for admittance than the nation's three largest state universities combined. The market for its product steadily increases. "With new techniques in programming courses and the elimination of unnecessary requirements, we've shaved nearly two full years from our undergraduate process," claims Figler. "With greater demand in the market for advanced degree holders, we're determined to create master's candidates in a streamlined four year program." Tracing his forefinger over a PERT network, Figler delights in pointing to the elimination of summer vacations. "Once the raw material arrives at Northnorthern," he remarked in a recent interview, "it doesn't leave until it's a finished product." A quality control check of every tenth graduate insures that Northnorthern exceeds industry standards.

Winter, 1964

Current rumors suggest that American Steam Handle will soon acquire its own nation. Figler, recently returned from a rapid tour of South America, said but little to indicate the country of interest. "Tremendous possibilities, though," he claimed. "Tremendous need for a top nation."

For the present, he keeps a close eye on the Northnorthern operation. Statistical studies indicate the need for coeds to fill current demands in industrial positions. Figler views this with philosophical calm. "Just make sure our gals are attractive," he counsels. "With a little luck, 'P.R.' may even come up with some successful slogan about Northnorthern for its attractive young ladies."

When the editor asked Thomas W. Clark, a few weeks ago, for one of his elegant absurdities, he came up with this squib on corporations, universities, and related phenomena. Tri-Quarterly readers who go back as far as 1959 may remember his story about a university band, "Today's Line-Up." In recent years he has written a good many of the skits for the Waa-Mu Shows.

Clark was born in St. Louis, divided his high-schooling between Lima, Ohio, and Evanston, graduated from the School of Speech in 1955, and now lives with his family in Winnetka. After college he served for five years as a pilot in the U.S. Air Force, subsequently worked for the motion picture firm, Wilding, Inc., in Chicago, and is now a free-lance writer.

POEMS

Of the poets from whose work a selection appears below, Charles Wolf is an undergraduate, and Laurence Elgin a very recent graduate, having received his degree in the last summer session. Wolf, a Chicagoan, is majoring in the teaching of English. He's a musician and a connoisseur of railroading, as well as a poet. Elgin, whose home is in Chevy Chase, Maryland, is now attending the law school of George Washington University. Elgin started at Northwestern in the Technological Institute, then transferred to Liberal Arts as a composition major.

Two of our poets are members of the English Department. Richard B. Sypher, who first published in The TriQuarterly when he was an undergraduate, is now married, living in Evanston, and teaching as a graduate assistant. For his doctorate he will write on the poetry of the Romantic period. Jesse D. Green is a teaching assistant. He will take his doctorate at Northwestern writing on William Carlos Williams. He came here from Reed College (B.A. '51) and the University of California (M.A. '56).

Harold Grutzmacher and Pierre Long are both Northwestern graduates, the one with his doctorate in English, the other with two degrees from the School of Music. Grutzmacher, who has contributed before to The TriQuarterly, recently published a volume of his poetry. He teaches at Knox College and maintains close relationships with his colleagues here. Long is a literary agent and counsellor with his office in Chicago. He has published poems and articles in a number of journals and served on the staff of some of the principal summer writing workshops, both regional and collegiate.

THE SEVENTH DAY

In six days we fell in love

And on the seventh day we rested: I revisiting each spot remembering, Retracing priceless steps mumbling Between internal teardrops your name to the wind; You wetting a pillow tangibly remembering, Retracing with an inward eye mumbling

Something about integrity to the wall; We were apart, two selves piecing together

Frantically that which, together, We had known.

IN PRAISE OF FALCONS

When things fell apart the bird was glad To rejoin his kind, to breed again Recklessly, without a center; glad His elemental anarchy was mere.

I think he triumphed over us at once, Surpassed our noble attitudes and laws. Unhooded, spiraling above, he gave A wisdom wiser than a slouching beast Could give: the falcon did not slouch at all,

But whirled chaotically, descriptively Above, as if things fell apart by plan And he were chosen to redeem a race Which needed him. He truly symbolized The essence of mankind, its turbulence Emerging in its glory, for its time.

Let us give praise to falcons. We reduce Them to our wrists, but they admonish us That we will be reduced to fall apart In kind. And do we dare compete with them, Grave masters of the sport of life, alone?

HAIKU

Ice on windows melts except on halloween when it hardens in forms.

SYPHER

MEETING

We need not match our moods, my love, We need not laugh nor weep to be In harmony at once; and every time We meet.

We comprehend, we enter in and see, We learn the disharmonious maze Of moods, of feelings, once and every time We meet.

Falling alone in dank places in our souls We come to gripswe take our hands In hands and neither smile nor cry But make a curious harmony of both Our tears and laughter once and every time We meet.

SYPHER

SYPHER

SYPHER

ICARUS

Striving upward toward the sun, I yearn to grasp the flame that flares

Out the final secret of unity.

Melts with the heat of that holy ray Wings' wax binding, and bakes my clay

To a mocking, brittle imagery

Plunging seaward. Any man that dares This thing shall shatter, striking sea

To many pieces sinking into One.

AN AESCHYLEAN CHORUS UNWITTINGLY TURNS UPON ITS MAKER

Hurl from the heights the hammer of song

To strike upon the plain, Let the yield of the storm flash's might Resound and ring again,

Strike from the anvil the cloud darkened Cry of god-bearing pain. From the mountain metal let lightning Ring a crackling refrain,

Let the peak-daring ones create Tools for the flat terrain, In their pain-drawing hubris forge Wisdom's sounding rain.

TO AMERICAN WOMANHOOD LAMENTING THE DECEASE OF VALENTINO, JAMES DEAN, ET AL.

Oh women, shall you keen for Each and every showman

When he at last plays out his final scene?

For I tell you the chore Of living was his foeman, Did him to death in parts upon the screen.

ADMONITION

If, my child, sleep's terrors numb And rides unbidden the fear-laden horse, You can always suck your thumb.

In years to come when sharp remorse, Though you are older, strikes you dumb You will do it only symbolically, of course.

ON PASSING BY TRAIN THROUGH THE WISCONSIN COUNTRYSIDE IN EAHLY AUTUMN

The green Wisconsin countryside, with Tumbled farmlands rolling round, Quilt of fields that rise and fall Where furrows climb to foliaged mound, With rural paths that wind between And disappear into the wood, Vestigial crown upon the hill Where once primeval forest stood:

Subjected now to toiling man, The hummocked earth is harrowed land, Grooved by plow and cast with seed Beneath the farmer's calloused hand

It brings forth food to serve the race

That flashes by on shining rail, City bound on horse of iron

To fly like chaff before the flail.

ANOTHER HOUSE OF FRANKENSTEIN

We fear no strange, unnatural menaces Who daily live with monsters of our own Creation. We breed them by our efforts, Or by chance, and look for empty attics, Guest rooms, for more closet-space to hold them.

We push the hulks about, step over them Like pieces of Aunt Maud's old furniture. Each one we make more hideous than the last, And never stop to gaze upon our work. At last they fill each room, they overrun The house, we cannot walk where they are not.

They crowd us out like grasses choked by weeds, Then they are us, and we, outside, are who?

AN AUNT APPROACHES ETERNITY

Death's Angel is not always black. Disease, the dark and ugly prison-keeper Chained her soul and let it waste. Beyond the somber skull-set cup There looms a bright horizon-cloud. Release is there, release and peace.

The five a.m. phone-call is the death-call. Come, pay your last respects, She hasn't long to stay.

Prepare the silk-lined carven box For earth and ashes, darkest earthBut make the tombstone white, so it may serve

To mark the first step on the way.

Winter, 1964

ELGIN

ELGIN

ELGIN

ELGIN

ELGIN

WOLF

CRIPPLE

She smiles too long, too broadly As their strength-bound hands Move her from the taxicab Into the familiar wheelchair. She grasps and wrings the chair's steel arm And almost loses her smile, Another victim of her pain.

WOLF

OF HARVEST

It is a nature wise and cruel That sets the roseate-ripening plums Against the azure August's glass, Just overhead, and out of reach; That lets them drop into our hands So over-ripe, we cannot eat.

EARLY FALL

Ah, look! The sourwoods are turning red. (This with indescribable sadness in her voice.)

And soon I was carried from this last of summer.

Oh, hills, they rushed past, dazzling, numberlessRidge of fiery scarlet sumac strewn across And maple, her gold-glinting hair in the sunlight!

Leaves to the rest in the clay! And I home. They blush their protest to death! But I wait.

There will be snow, cold, to bury the world, Obliterate traces of summer past. Snow, too, will fall in my mind to cover My hope, dead, since my summer is over. Seasons and seasons, come all quickly and depart, Rapidly fleeing like the flight of goldfinches.

To what dead summer gone? Oh return and sorrow, my soul. For what lost purpose done? No, disturb not the dead, be still.

SLEEP

My long-legged boy curved round the loving back of sleep.

Why do the night's cupped hands agonizing bring so much less than enough for the day's thirst?

LIFE SIZE

A pet turtle one and one half inches in length with expressionless eyes scrapes incessantly up the side of his glass bowl, likewise to a wolf caged trotting fast along one short fence back and forth endlessly, in a single track each time jerking aside from his water bowl and at each end wheeling with a downward twist of the head and wintery eyes sweep past into the snow.

THE EASTER RABBIT

When I saw that damned white rabbit with two cats already dead of neglect, more fluff for baby doll -for Christsake

But summer and winter gone, humbly amid his hill and dale of turds lipping salads squats the weathered veteran.

PRODIGALITY

How you do burn it up, fat red peony of joy, decaying old bawd queening the table dropping your feathers and flabs of flesh in the melted summer butter till you're down to nothing but old yellow underwear, your seeds.

WOLF

THE FISHERMAN

On the filthy dock over the stink of rotten fish floating a fisherman with a blindman's smile in a white shirt and Sunday pants sat on a clean pail. He could fish for certain and flipped them off his hook with one hand.

GREEN

WOLF

GREEN

GREEN

GREEN

A NEW CONSTRUCTION

I should dream a new construction, Lose my halves or wholeness in an explosive Pinwheel of here and now, make Of forgetting a crucial system Of hope and bright salvation. I should even hear church bells And desire my stigmata-but All is turned inward and the birds Do not sing. I am ill

As with light nausea; the coffee cup And my hopeful hand do not conjoin By an inch and a quarter.

GRUTZMACHER

TO MY WIFE, SLEEPING

As you lie there, meshed in linen And smooth-lidded, I light The last cigarette of Sunday And watch smoke pulse

In the hall light.

The twenty-seventh cigarette Rakes my throat as I catalogue: Dog in, door locked, child covered. There is left only to burn, And join your sleeping.

You turn, and sleep becomes you, Smoothing the bitterness of consciousness. That bed has held our gropings, Has based my lust, your fury.

You sleep, time vanquished-time Of mornings I go and evenings return: Mornings when my mask repaired itself Into a smile for students, colleagues, And the twitch of cigarettes.

GRUTZMACHER

YOUNG MAN AT PIANO

Supple pivoted wrists

Supporting on hinges

The tensed fingers, Fingers

Telescoped over the contorted embouchure, Springing downward

On the exposed and gleaming teeth.

A flex and away from the soft grip of the bite

And the blue nail scratches a crimson glissando

Down the long white throating: The articulate, clangorous protest, A trumpeting cross-hatch of panicked tone fusions.

Winter, 1964

The heavy swing of the arms, A slap now, and a giant's pounding, A pummeling and a trammeling, A prod and an indelicate probing Punctured by a burst of howling Ripple of percussion, Tremor and convulsion, Reduced to a quiet pelting But caught up in a gurging surge And held up at high-level shrilling To carom down and away Frail whimper

Held on a veer of the diminuendo, Cooling into a stilling of hunger, Impersonal press of a finger to a molar.

NIGHT SOUNDS

Frogs maunder

In their gut-sunken Goo-awrp goo-awrp Under The screech owl's quavered puling, Crickets chitter chitter chitter

And a thousand little insects Fill the outside With their frictive zizzings,

The big linden Stirs

In a breath of wind, Its leaves rippling Making a sibilance Like the swish Of a silk skirt Or the gush Of a rush-of-rain.

A truck Begins Its slow grinding climb Up Diabolo Hill, Changes gears And goes into a lower droning, Beyond Comes the muffled pulse Of the surf, The push-and-pull Of the cobbles

Chafed and tugged, Swept up-and-back Up-and-back Up-and-back

Somewhere Thunder crawls along the sky

The night is unquiet And I hear the plaint of my tears In every sound.

LoNG

LoNG

"Swing low, sweet chariot Coming lor to carry me home -Negro Spiritual

JUBILEE

A CIVIL WAR NOVEL (an excerpt)

By Margaret Walker

Though Margaret Walker's graduate studies have been at the University of Iowa, at Yale and elsewhere on Rosenwald and Ford Foundation fellowships, her attachments to Northwestern are still very close. Her mother, father, and sister graduated from Northwestern, and it was here in her own undergraduate days (J 93 J35) that she began writing poetry and first conceived of a Civil War novel based on Negroes, traditions of whom had been handed down in her own family from slave days. Her first volume of poetry, For My People, was published by Yale University in J942, and she appeared with a number of symphony orchestras throughout the country, reading poems from it. Marriage, the raising of a family, and her responsibilities as a teacher at Livingstone College, West Virginia State College, and later at Jackson State College, permiHed her to write stories and poems only intermittently for publication. But now that the children are growing up - the oldest is already off to college - she has returned to the University of Iowa where, as part of the work for her dodorate in literature, she is completing the Civil War novel of which the pages below are a first chapter. Her publications are under her maiden name, as here. Her married surname is Alexander.

Death is a mystery that only the squinch owl knows

"May Liza, how come you so resless un oneasy? You must be resless in yoah mind."

"Ah is, Ah is. Dat ole screech owl is making me nervius."

"Wellum, taint no usen yoah gittin so upsot bout dat bird hollerin. Hit aint de sign of no woman nohow. Hit allus means a man."

"Hits de sign of death."

Grandpa Tom, the stable boy, and May Liza, Marster's upstairs house girl, were sitting on the steps of their cabins in the slave quarters. It was not yet dusk-dark. An early twilight hung over the valley, and along the creek bank fog rose. The hot spring day was ending with the promise of a long and miserable night. A hushed quiet hung over the Quarters. There were no children playing ring-games before the cabins. The hardened dirt-clay road, more like a narrow path before their doors, was full of people coming and going. Black men and women sat in their doorways smoking corn-cob pipes and chewing tobacco in silence. Out on the horizon a full moon was rising. All eyes were on the cabin of Sis Hetta where she lay on her death-bed sinking fast.

Inside Sis Hetta's cabin the night was sticky hot. A cloying, sweetish, almost sickening smell of cape jessamine, honeysuckle, and magnolias clung heavily to the humid night air. Caline, a middle-aged, brown-skinned woman with a head of crinkly brown hair tied in a knot on her neck and imposing eyes with an unruffled air of importance and dignity that one associated with house servants, stood beside the sick bed and fanned Sis Hetta with a large palmetto fan. Caline knew Hetta was dying. As soon as supper was over in the Big House, Caline had come to see what she could do. Aunt Sally, cook in the Big House, couldn't get away with Caline but she sent word, "Tell 'em ah'll be along terreckly." Fanning Sis Hetta in the hot night seemed all there was left to do, and so Caline kept fanning and thinking: Sis Hetta was a right young woman, younger than Caline, and she got all those younguns fast as she could breed them. Caline had no children. She had never known why. Maybe it was something Old Marster made them do to her when she was a young girl and first started working in the Big House. Maybe it was salt petre. Anyway Caline was glad. Slaves were better off like herself when they had no chilluns to be sold away, to die, and to keep on having till they killed you, like Hetta was dying now. Out on the Big Road, May Liza and Grandpa Tom could barely discern a man in the distance. As he drew nearer they could see he was riding a small child on his shoulders.

"Brothel' Zeke," breathed May Liza.

"Yeah," and Grandpa Tom took his pipe out of his mouth and spat.

"Dass Sis Hetta's las chile she had fuh Marster Zeke's ridin on his shoulder."

"How you know?"

"Ah heerd tell dey had sont clean ovah tuh Marster-s udder plantation kase Hetta wants tuh look at huh youngun."

"Be her las look, ah reckon."

"Yeah, ah reckon so."

Now in the tricky light of the half night they saw a figure whose long trailing skirts told them it was a woman. She was walking slowly at a short distance behind Brother Ezekiel.

"Mammy Sukey's coming too."

"You know she aint leavin dat gal outen her sight. Dass Marster's youngun dey gin her to raise.

"Marster doan keer nothin bout dat youngun. Mammy Sukey's got her kase Jake won't leave her be in peace wid him and Hetta. Say he pinch dat gal when she warn't nothin but a sucklin baby."

"Wellum, twarn't no usen dat. Jake knowed Hetta bin havin Marster's younguns long as dey kin remember."

"Reckon how he knowed?"

"When Marster gin Hetta to him, he knowed."

Hetta was twenty-nine years old, although this was a fact she could not verify. After having given birth to fifteen children, all single births, she was waiting for death in child-bed. Her thin bony fingers clutched nervously at the ragged quilt which covered her. Black as she had always been, her face and hands were now an ashy grey. Evidently her mind wandered back over happier and earlier days, for her quick beady eyes glittering with fever sometimes lighted up, and, although Hetta was nearly speechless, Caline fancied she heard the sick woman muttering words. Hetta was a woman who had never talked much.

Another black woman, small and birdlike in her movements, moved in and out of the cabin carrying china washbowls and pitchers of hot water; moving blood-soaked rags and clothing; watching the face of the sick woman whom she had fed laudanum to ease the pain of these last three days. Granny Ticey was deeply dejected. She moved to keep busy and occupy her mind. She had always been proud of her reputation of rarely losing her patients. Babies she lost, yes, but mothers seldom. She had been uneasy all week about Hetta. It wasn't the first time this heavy-breeding woman whose babies came too fast, tearing her flesh into shreds, had had a hard and complicated time. She had not liked either the looks or actions of Hetta and she had told both Jake and Marster, or at least she had tried to

Winter, 1964

communicate her fears to them. Of course it was true there wasn't anything too much she had to base her fears on. Hetta had been sick every day this last time. But in the end she barely left her bed. She was bloated and swollen almost beyond recognition. But Jake said nothing as usual, and Marster only laughed. Ten days ago when Granny Ticey had seen the moon dripping blood she knew it was an evil omen. When Jake called her and said Hetta's time had come she had not wanted to go because she knew nothing was right. But she went and she stayed, and now grim and wordless she watched the night lengthen its shadows outside Sis Hetta's door.

One thing Granny Ticey had done. When the baby was born dead, and Hetta started having terrible fits and hemorrhaging, she made Marster send for a doctor, but two days went by before the doctor came. Meanwhile Granny Ticey made tansy tea and bathed Hetta in hazel root, and used red shank. But it did no good. On the third day when the white doctor came he barely stayed ten minutes and he did not touch Hetta. Instead he spoke angrily to Granny Ticey:

"What do you want me to do, now that it's plain she's dying? You didn't get all that afterbirth. How many times do I have to tell you to get it all? Don't know why you had John to get me way out here for this unless it was just to make him spend money ovah your carelessness."

Granny Ticey said nothing. Her eyes were hard and angry in an otherwise impassive face. But she was thinking all she dared not say: How was he expecting me to get all of the rotten pieces after a dead baby? That's why I sent for him, so's he could get what I couldn't get. If he had come on when I sent for him instead of waiting till now Hetta might not be dying. No, I'll take that back. She was going to die anyway. She had to die sometime. The last two times were nothing but the goodness of God. I guess it's just her time.

When the doctor went away he must have told Marster that Hetta was dying. Early in the afternoon when dinner in the Big House was over, Marster came down to Retta's cabin. Granny Ticey was there alone with Hetta. Jack was in the fields. Marster was a tall blond man barely thirty-five years old. John Morris Dutton scarcely looked like the Master. He still looked like a boy to Granny Ticey, but a big husky boy whose sandy hair fell in his face and whose grey-blue eyes always twinkled in fun. He liked to hunt and fish, and he was always slapping a friend on the back in good fellowship and fun. He never seemed to take anything too seriously and his every other word was a swearing, cursing song. He was a rich man with two plantations and sixty slaves on this one. He was a young man with hot blood in his veins. He could eat and drink as much as he liked, sleep it off quickly, rise early ready to ride far and enjoy living. Now he came

down the path whistling, and only when his rangy form stooped to enter Hetta's cabin, and he saw the disapproving gravity in Granny Ticey's solemn eyes, did he hush, and ask, unnecessarily, "Where is she?"

Granny Ticey pointed behind the heavy quilt hanging from top to bottom of the cabin and separating the cooking corner of the fireplace and iron pots from the place where Hetta slept. Marse John pushed the quilt aside and stood over Hetta. A fetid odor made him sick for a moment, but he saw her eyes looking at him, and he called her name

"Hetta?"

"Yassir." Her voice was so weak and soft he bent lower over her.

"Hetta, do you know me?"

"Yassir, Marster, ah knows you." But her voice was only a whisper.

"How you feelin?"

"Po-ly, Marster, mighty po-ly."

"I'm sorry. Is there anything you want? Something I can do for you?"

"Nossah, Marster, nothin nobody kin do now. Hetta ain't long fuh dis world."

"Oh shut up! You're going to get well in a jiffy; be up and around in no time as usual. You just feel bad cause you've had a bad time."

"Nossah, dat ain't hit. Ahm dying, Marster, an ah knows hit. Jes one ting ah wants ."

"What's that?"

"Ah wants tuh see mah youngun, Vyry, foah ah dies.

"I'll sen fuh her. Now you lay still and get well. I'll be back to see you tomorrow." And he patted her hand and went outside. But when he went out he was not gay. He thought, "By God, she might be dying at that!"

And he began to think through the years when Hetta was a young girl and there was no thought then of her dying ever. His father gave him Hetta when he was still in his teens and she was barely more than a pickaninny. He remembered how she had looked growing up, long-legged like a wild colt and just that temperamental. She looked like some African queen from the Congo. She had a long thin neck and she held her head high. She must have imagined herself, he thought, in an African jungle among palms and waterfalls with gold rings coiled around her neck. Her small young breasts tilted up, and even her slight hips and little buttocks were set high on her body. When she moved lightly and they switched lazily and delicately, they titillated him and his furious excitement grew while watching her walk. It was all his father's fault. Anyway it was his father who taught him it was better for a young man of quality to learn life by breaking in a young nigger wench then it was for him to spoil a pure

white young virgin girl. And he had wanted Hetta, so his father gave her to him, and he had satisfied his lust with her. Because in the beginning that was all he had felt, a youthful lust. He still remembered her tears, and her frightened P)'t'S, and how she had pleaded to be left alone, but he had persisted until she had given in to him. And things went along like that for a good little while, until he began to think about getting married. At least his father thought about it first. His father kept pestering him to find a lovely young lady and make her his bride. It was time he assumed his responsibilities and settled down. So he went traveling and hunting for a wife. Between courting times he came back to Hetta. At home he took her as a matter of course, but when he went away he thought about her and he could see her and feel her and smell the musk-like odor of her body in his mind. Clean enough to bathe twice a day and quiet enough never to annoy him with chatter, she provided him with all the physical release he needed. Even when she began having babies it was no problem. He gave her Jake for a husband and that was that.

But finally he found a wife, a beautiful young lady of quality from a fine old family in Savannah. And he married Salina. He was sure that she was in love with him, and when she kissed him demurely and let him hold her hand he felt sure there was fire enough in this pretty brunette girl to excite him forever. There was an elaborate wedding. He still remembered the drinking, and Salina's mother crying because her daughter was leaving home for the first time and going into the backwoods of Georgia. He could still see Salina's father grasping his hand and getting all choked up, and begging him in a voice hoarse with drink as much as anything else, "Boy, take care of my little Salina." Salina wasn't little. She was a bigboned girl, tall, and inclined to get fat. And John Morris Dutton got all emotional himself. Incoherently he promised, no, vowed like a knight on a charger, to protect her with his life and to be good to her all the days of his life. Then they rode away in a buggy amidst a shower of rice, Salina laughing and crying, and John Morris Dutton just a bit tight.

They had a long journey, and a new house waiting, and he could understand why his wedding night was not a night of love, why she begged off with fatigue. What he never understood was why Salina acted outraged and shocked when he finally made love to her. She was pious and romantic and she locked her door most nights against him. When she finally became pregnant and suffered morning sickness, his hopes ended. He went back to Hetta.

Everything was the same for a long time after that. Salina made him understand that sex, to her mind, was only a necessary evil for the sake of procreation. When she had presented him with

a son and a daughter, she informed him that her further duty as a wife had ended. She simply would not, no, she simply could not go through all that suffering again. She did not want any more children, and consequently there was no morr- need for sex. At first he was stunned. He got drunk and got up nerve enough to tell her a few pointed facts, but not even his curse words prevailed over her tears. His next shock came when she found out about Hetta, She pitched a lovely tantrum then. She threw things at him, called him a beast, cried three days in a row, and even packed to go home to mother. But when he encouraged her to go, offered to pay all her expenses there and continue to provide for her after she got home, only leave his children with him, she relented. Although she never forgave him, she never left him. Miscegenation was no sin to Marse John. It was an accepted fact of his world. What he could not understand at first was where Salina had been given such romantic notions, and how had her loving parents kept the facts of life from her.

Now, Hetta was dying. He would miss her. Perhaps Salina will be pleased, he thought, except for the child. With a sudden jolt, he remembered Vyry.

Vyry was two years old. Mammy Sukey had been keeping her as she had kept all Marster's bastards till they were big enough to work. She and Brother Ezekiel had nearly a two-mile walk to bring Vyry to see her dying mother, Hetta, Brother Ezekiel was a powerfully built, stovepipe-black man. He was neither young nor old. He was the plantation preacher, at least among the slaves. He could read and write, but the white folks did not know this. Now as he came along with Vyry on his shoulders, and Mammy Sukey walking behind, he was humming a song-

"Soon one mawnin

Death came knockin at mah door."

When they got to Sis Hetta's cabin door Aunt Sally met them. She was still in her voluminous apron, had her head rag on, and she went inside with them.

Jake was sitting inside with a little black girl on his knees. Her eyes looked big as saucers in her thin face, and she had her thumb and two fingers in her mouth sucking on all three as hard as she could.

Granny 'I'icey, Aunt Sally, Brother Ezekiel with Vyry in his arms, and Mammy Sukey all stood around Retta's bed. Jake had not moved from his corner, but he sat where he could look behind the quilt. Granny Ticey spoke first.

"Retta! Hetta! Here's Brother Zeke with Vyry. He done brung yoah youngun to you."

But the sick woman seemed in a stupor and hard to arouse. Brother Ezekiel moved forward

Winter, 1964

while Aunt Sally and Caline stood on both sides of the bed, and while Granny Ticey propped Hetta's head higher the other two women lifted her up just as Brother Ezekiel held the child down over her. "Sis Hetta!" he spoke as though calling someone from afar, "Sis Hetta, heah is Vyry."

Mammy Sukey stood aside, a wizened old crone with a red rag on her head and her arms akimbo. Now the urgency in Brother Ezekiel's voice seemed to rouse the dying woman. Her eyes flickered and her lips moved. She put up her bony hands and fluttered them like a bird. A scarcely audible and muffled sound came from her lips. Then with great effort she spoke, raspy and indistinct, but clear enough for them to know she was saying, "Vyry?"

Brother Ezekiel held the child down close to the mother's face and said soothingly, "Hits yoah mama, Vyry, say hello to yoah Maw." The child spoke "Mama" and then she whimpered. Hetta fell back on her pillows and Ezekiel handed the child to Mammy Sukey who quickly took her outside into the night air.

After a moment Brother Ezekiel spoke again to the dying and exhausted woman. "Sis Hetta, ahm heah, Brother Zeke, hits me. Kin ah do somethin for you?"

"Pray," she rasped, "pray."

He fell on his knees beside the bed and took her hand in his. The night was growing darker. Despite the full moon outside spilling light through the great oak and magnolia trees, inside Granny Ticey had lighted a large tallow candle. It flared up suddenly and eerie shadows searched the corners and crowded the room. Brother Ezekiel began to pray:

"Lawd, Gawd-a-mighty, you done tole us in yoah Word to seek an we shall fine; knock, an de door be open; ax, an hit shall be given whin yoah love come twinklin down. An Lawd, ternight we is a-seekin. Way down heah in dis heah rainwashed world, kneelin heah by dis heah bed of affiiction pain, yoah humble servant is a-knockin, an axin fub yoah lovin mussy, an yoah tender love. Dish heah sister is tiahed a-suffrin, Lawd, an she wants tub come on home. We ax you to roll down dat sweet chariot right heah by her bed, just lak you done for Lisby, sos she kin step in kinda easy lak an ride on home to glory. Gather her up in yoah bosom lak you done Father Abraham an gin her rest. She weak, Lawd, an she weary, but her eyes is a-fixin fuh to light on dem golden streets of glory an dem pearly gates of God. She beggin fuh to set at yoah welcome table an feast on milk an honey. She wantsta put on dem angel wings an wear dat crown an dem pretty little golden slippers. She done bin broke lak a staw in de win an she aint got no strenk, but she got de faith, Lawd, an she got de promise of yoah almighty Word. Lead hub through dis wil-

derness of sin an tribulations; gin her grace ter stan by de rivah of Jordan an cross her ovah tuh heah Gabe blow dat horn. She is done gwine from doah to doah, an she cant do no moah, take her home, Lawd Gawd, take her home."

And the sobbing women listening to him pray breathed fervent amens.

When Brother Ezekiel got up from his knees he put the hand of Sis Hetta on her cover. But she no longer seemed to hear what he was saying. Her eyes were fixed and staring above her, and her throat made raspy noises. Brother Ezekiel went outside and sat in the dampening night air. Caline got a dipper of well water and with a clean rag began to drop water in Hetta's mouth and moisten her throat. But the water trickled out of the side of her mouth and ran down her chin, and the noises in her throat grew more raspy.

Jake got up to lay his black baby on a pallet, and then with a terrible groan he walked outside where the friends of Hetta sat waiting for her to die.

A few yards from the cabin Granny Ticey had built a fire under a big black iron wash pot. Pine knots and hickory wood sputtered and burned with sudden spurts of bright flame, emitting an aromatic smoke and discouraging mosquitoes and even the lightning bugs. At odd intervals Granny Ticey threw something in the pot and something on the fire. Each time a hissing noise of water boiling over on the flames, and fresh knots catching fire flared up, the watchers were startled. When the flames flared they lighted the faces of the slaves sitting watch and when the pot boiled over they jumped in fear and suspense.

Jake did not feel sociable. He wanted to go off alone in the woods or work in the fields and not be here when Hetta died. Whenever her eyes closed in death, his fate would be sealed. Marster would have no further use for him and he would be sold. Maybe not right away, but sooner or later, it would happen after a while. What would they do with his helpless black child then?

Hetta had been a good wife to him. He remembered how she kicked and screamed first time he "knocked her up" and he remembered the bitter dry taste in his mouth when he realized she was Marster's woman. Marster had broke her in, and then "gin her to me." She kept the cabin clean and she cooked good greens and corn pone. She never went to the fields and she always smelled clean. She made him bathe every day when he came from the fields and she never showed him her nakedness, but she never refused him either. Often when he found her crying after Marster's visits while he, Jake, was in the fields he would get mad, but she never would talk except to keep him from doing foolish things. When their children were sold away and some babies never cried she would cry and grieve over their

helplessness. She was a sullen looking woman with a pouting lip who rarely smiled and almost never talked and who kept her hair wrapped in endless clean little rags. Once when she WIlR young and shapely she was proud and she wulked like she owned the earth. He felt somtirnes because she was Marster's woman that maybe she thought herself too good for him, but she never said so, and no, she never acted that way either. But maybe it was just an evil thought in his mind anyway.

Jake's path seldom crossed Marster's. He stayed out of his way as much as possible, but if by chance they ever came face to face, Marster laughed and slapped Jake's back and talked down to his slave, Jake, like he did to one of his good hound dogs. Jake hated Marster and despised himself and looked at Hetta and got mad and eviL But that was the end of it. He never dared say anything or do anything about it.

Now she was no longer young and slender and lovely. Her breasts were long and flabby; her belly always bloated and swollen whether she was big in family way or not; and her legs and thighs were now covered with large broken blood vessels that made it painful when she stood long or walked far. Only her black face was still the same, serene, dignified, sullen, and quiet by turns. Even her neck was changed and looked shorter. Her hair was still the same, and her hands and feet were still small, and she still believed in everything being spotlessly clean.

"Well, now she is dying, and they'll send me away. I guess in a way I ought to be glad. Guess in a way I am glad to get away from here. Marster's always said he'll get a fair price for a good stud like me."

Midnight came and thirteen people waited for death. The black pot boiled, and the full bright moon rode the clouds high in the heaven and straight up over their heads. The child, Vyry, stirred in the arms of her nurse, the old black crone, Mammy Sukey. Aunt Sally, sitting near Tom and May Liza, had made a place for her son, Sam, the carriage boy, to sit beside her. It was not a night for people to sleep easy. Every now and then the squinch owl hollered and the crackling fire would flare and the black pot boil. Aunt Sally kept wondering what would happen to the little girl, Vyry, not only now, but when she got too big for Mammy Sukey to keep her. Would Marster bring her in his house as he had done with all his other bastards? Even though they never lasted long in the Big House, what would Missy Salina say? Aunt Sally looked again at the child sleeping in Mammy Sukey's arms and thought how much she and the little Missy Lillian in the Big House looked alike. In her mind she thought, "They could pass for twins - same sandy hair, same grey-blue eyes, same milkwhite skin. One of them was Sis Hetta's child, and one of them

was Missy Salina's. But they were both Marse John's and there was no mistake about it. What was even more interesting they were near the same age. Granny Ticey had been granny for both and Hetta had wet nursed Miss Lillian just like her own Vyry. Big Missy Salina had been pleased as punch with their daughter's resemblance to her father until she learned about Hetta's child and a few weeks later had seen Vyry. Aunt Sally glanced up at the Big House, and, just as she had suspected, the light was still burning in Marse John's room. All the rest of the house was dark.

Sometime between three o'clock and dawn the night subtly began to change. Those who had been wakeful were now drugged with sleep, and those who had slept too long and hard were wakeful. Even before the first thread of light shot like a ribbon across the tenuous line where earth touched the sky, there was a stirring of sleeping people and animals in preparation for the coming of the morning. When it was four o'clock, getting up time for the field hands, the cocks began to crow loudly for day. In that changing hour Sis Hetta breathed her last and slipped quietly away. It was Granny Ticey who closed Hetta's eyes. In annoyance and chagrin, and partly in genuine sadness, pity, and grief, tears rolled down her wrinkled black cheeks. Her lips tight set, her eyes brimming, she pulled the coarse sack sheet over Hetta's face.

Outside the cabin the watchers were half asleep, half nodding, half dozing. Now the rasping noises had ceased, and in the long thick silence that followed they realized that Hetta was gone. The black pot was still and the white ashes were cold. In the growing daylight the moon's wan light was lustreless on the far horizon. Soon it would be time to bathe the dead body and prepare it for an early burial, but suddenly Granny Ticey gave a blood-curdling yell, startling all the watchers and making them all sit up wide awake. She ran out of the cabin into the dawning daylight. Gathering up all her ample skirts, coarse petticoats, and apron, she threw them over her head, showing her aged nakedness while covering her face, and thus she ran blindly and screaming down the road.

In less than a minute, the death wail went up out of every cabin in the Quarters, and Brother Ezekiel began the death chant:

"Soon one mawnin

Death come knockin at mah door

Soon one mawnin

Death come knockin at mah door.

Soon one mawnin

Death come knockin at mah door

Oh mah Lawd, Oh mah Lawd

What shall I do?"

Winter, 1964

FLEXAGONS first attracted my attention in the Scientific American Book of Mathematical Puzzles and Diversions. I constructed the simple Hexagons that were described in the article, and it occurred to me that these simple foldings could present a field of exploration that had been probed only enough to offer a few guides to further experimentation. Since the area of "flexigation" is fairly new, only about twenty years old, and since there are no basic mathematical principles behind it, there has been relatively little literature on the subject, and the recreational experimenter can engage in some light, original investigation.

The arrival of Hexagons as a curiosity into the mathematical world came quite by accident, due only to the difference in size between British and American looseleaf paper. In the fall of 1939, Arthur H. Stone, a British graduate student on a mathematics fellowship at Princeton University, had just trimmed an inch from his American binder paper to make it fit his English binder. Finding some time on his hands, he started to fold these strips in different ways, one way resulting in three folds that produced a hexagon. He joined the ends and discovered that by pinching two of the triangles together and pushing in on the common side of the two opposite triangles, the figure could be opened like a budding Hower to exhibit a previously unseen face (Fig. 1). He calculated that this same folding could be done with longer strips to produce Hexagons that could exhibit many more different faces. Fascinated with his new discovery, Stone showed his models all around the mathematics department, and soon a Hexagon committee was organized, composed of Bryant Tuckerman, a math graduate student; Richard Feynman, a physics graduate student; and John Tukey, a mathematics instructor. This group advanced a complete theory of Hexagons but it was never published, and the Second World War curtailed their activities.

Mter the war, Hexagons were generally regarded as curiosities, intriguing toys, and no one bothered to investigate them beyond the two simplest members of the Hexagon family, the trihexaflexagon and the hexahexaflexagon. Actually these two Hexagons are the simplest members of another simple family within the range of Hexagons, as will be seen later. There have been four or five paragraph-articles in mathematics journals concerning Hexagons, but only two works have grasped the scope of Hexagon theory: the first, a mathematically analytical approach by C. O. Oakley and R. J. Wisner in the March '57 issue of the American Mathematical Monthly; and the second, a practical approach by R. F. Wheeler in the February '58 issue of the Mathematical Gazette. In general, a Hexagon will be said to be "any figure which is formed from a plane strip of equilateral triangles by folding them into a hexagon

FLEXAIiONS

By Arnold L. Wagner, Jr.

and joining the ends, and which can be made to exhibit different visible colored or numbered faces according to the manner of folding." 1 This pructical definition will suffice for the present, and latvr a more precise mathematical definition will follow.

At this point it would be beneficial to acquaint oneself with the flexagon in Figure 1. The six triangles that make up the flexagon are called pats; and the number of layers that make up any pat determine the degree of that pat, a pat of degree one having one layer, a pat of degree two having two layers, and so on. By observing the position and degree of pats, the flexagon can be located in space and analyzed as to its various properties.

Theoretically any desired flexagon of n + 2 faces (where n is an integer greater than or equal to one) can be produced by folding a paralleledged, straight strip of paper that has been divided into equilateral triangles, or a strip that has been especially derived from a straight strip, as we shall see later. However, some of these folded hexagons will not be proper flexagons.

A proper flexagon is distinguished from an improper one by the fact that all of the pats of a proper Hexagon are constrained to lie in the plane of the flexagon no matter what face happens to be showing, while certain faces of improper Hexagons allow alternate pats to angle away from the plane of the face. It should be realized. that both proper and improper flexagons can be made to flex and exhibit all their faces, but that improper Hexagons require the loose triangles to be flipped 180° each time the opportunity presents itself, in order that all faces may be brought into view. Perhaps the character of improper flexagons will be made clearer by examining Figure 2.

An improper hexahexaflexagon for instance, will behave exactly like a trihexaflexagon except for its loose flaps. It takes only three actual pinches (and three flips of the loose pats) to present all six faces. Nevertheless, its folding strip was composed of the necessary 3n + 6 triangles and was given the required 3n twists in its construction; what makes it improper is that three of the 3n twists were in the wrong direction, in effect unwinding three twists.

As you have probably observed already, the accurate name for this family of topological figures is hexaflexagon, hexa- representing the fact that they all are, when completed, hexagonal in shape and composed. of six pats, flexa- referring to their property of folding and opening again to exhibit a new face, and -gon from the Greek word for angle. Within the class of hexaflexagons, one subfamily is distinguished from another by a prefix tri-, tetra-, penta-, etc., indicating the number of separate faces that the Hexagon is capable of exhibiting. And finally, within subfamilies, distinction can be made as to whether the Hexagon is proper or improper, as has just been discussed, and whether it is right or left handed, which will be discussed later.

From here on, a notational shorthand will be employed which will characterize a proper, righthanded flexagon as F where n is such that n + 2 is equal to the tri-, tetra-, penta-, or higher prefix. In f.act, the subscript n will always be used to identify things connected with the n + 2 fiexagon. Thus S" will be the strip from which the n + 2 fiexagon is folded, and M" will be the map (a graphical representation of the order of appearance of the 2n + 1 possible topological arrangements of triangles and faces) of the n + 2 fiexagon.

Two more fundamental ideas and the tool box is complete for investigating Hexagons. There are two operations that can be performed on any fiexagon which will bring about the exposing of a new face: the pinch, and the rotation. The pinch is accomplished by pinching the obverses of two adjacent triangles together, folding the flexagon away from you along their common side. Now follow the crease to the opposite side of the flexagon and push that corner down and toward the center. The flexagon may now be opened in the center like a buddmg fiower to exhibit a new face. If the flexagon cannot be opened at this point, unfold it, rotate it 60°, and pinch again; this time it will open. All rotations are only 60°. For convenience and consistency, regard the standard position of the flexagon as that which has a crease running in an east-west direction, and the standard pinch as that which pinches the obverses of the north-east and southeast triangles together before pushing in the west corner (See Figure 1).

The simplest true flexagon, F l' is constructed from a strip of nine equilateral triangles with a

Figure 2

lRoger F. Wheeler, "The Flexagon Family," MathematicaL Gazette, Vol. 42 (February, 1958), p.1. Winter, 1964

tenth triangle for gluing. That strip along the edge of the last page of this article fills the requirements; cut it out and fold along with me. The first step in constructing this flexagon is to place the strip in standard winding position, that is, with the base of the leftmost triangle toward you as in Figure 3a; and holding the strip in your left hand, wind the obverses of triangles six and seven together about their common side.s

This will yield a figure as in Figure 3b. Still holding the left end of the strip in your left hand, wind the whole assembly in your right hand about the common side of triangles three and four, and slip triangle one under triangle nine. If triangle ten is now folded down on top of triangle one and pasted, the construction will be complete.

F4 can be made in a very similar manner. It begins with a strip of eighteen triangles in standard winding position. Holding the leftmost triangle in the left hand, the strip is wound about the common sides of the second and third, fourth and fifth, sixth and seventh triangles, and so on down

Figure 3

the line until a strip which is identical with Sl results. Then this is wound in the manner of Sl' and F4 is produced.

It may now be observed that S must be composed of 3n + 6 triangles (plus one if the pasting tab is to be included) and must be given 3n twists in the same direction to result in a proper F The two cases that have been so far presented are part of a series of F such that n 3(2)x - 2 where x is any integer or zero. The members of this series are all easy to construct in that they

2 A wind will be said to be that motion of the right hand which follows the rotation of a wheel rolling toward the winder. Creasing the strip forward and back along each division will greatly facilitate winding.

are wound exactly as S4 was, over and over again until the strip reaches the configuration of Sl' and then the resulting strip is wound into FrI just as Sl was wound into Fl'

It is now of interest to design S for any n. In general, if there already exists S and one wishes to make S + 1, lay the strip in standard winding position and mark off every n + 2th triangle starting from the left. Now slice each of the marked triangles as if you were slicing the backing from a band-aid, and rotate the two slices away from each other about the side that was originally the base of the trlangle.e See Figure 4. If this scheme is followed accurately it will be observed that the strip this system produces for S4 will differ from the straight S4 that was described above in winding F4' This is not a mistake, but serves to bear out the fact that each F 11 for n greater than or equal to 4 can be wound from several different strips; F4 can be wound from three distinct strips, F6 from twelve, F7 from 27, F 8 from 82 and so on. But, although the

4

strips may have different shapes, they will always have the required 3n + 6 triangles. The strips which will wind into F4 can be seen in Figure 5.

The strips that are derived from this method are wound into flexagons by "undoing" the slices all the way back down the scale to Sl' which is then folded in the usual manner. By "undoing" is meant the winding together of the triangles that had been sliced apart.

Another method of construction, described in the article by Oakley and Wisner, involves wind-

3 The base of the triangle will be considered as that side which lies along the boundary of the paper.

Figure

&\/\ 7

Figure 5

ing each of the pats individually before moving on to the next pat. This method is somewhat more complicated and will only be mentioned in passing. However, in experimenting with higher order Hexagons, a handy rule to bear in mind is that the number of thicknesses of triangles in two adj acent pats in F" is equal to n + 2.

Now that the flexagons are constructed, we must label the faces in order that we can orient them and investigate their flexing properties. First, place the flexagon in standard flexing position, that is, with a crease running east-west, and label the six triangles 1, placing in addition the letters a, b, c at the vertices of the north triangle. Flex the flexagon and label the next face 2, again marking the vertices of the north triangle. Continue flexing the flexagon at the same spot until it will flex no more; then rotate it 60° and continue flexing. This pattern of flexing is known as a "Tuckerman Traverse" and will bring up all the faces of the flexagon in a systematic manner in the least possible number of pinches. As each new face appears, label it in the same manner as before. After 3n pinches all n + 2 faces will have been exposed and numbered, the traverse will have been completed, and the flexagon will have returned to the starting point.

It is interesting to note that when the flexagon is

unrolled and laid fiat, the numbers of the triangles will exhibit a threefold symmetry such as

123123 123123 123123 445566 445566 445566

for the face and obverse of an S4'

The next aspect of flexagon theory to be considered is the map, a graphic representation of the order of appearance of the 2n + 1 possible topological arrangements of flexagon F". The simplest map of all is that of F 1, consisting of a simple triangle with the labels of the three appearing faces at its vertices. The triangle is used to indioate the cyclic nature of the manipulation of F 1 ; as long as F 1 remains face up, any manipulation at all will only serve to advance it in one direction around the map.

In general, a map can be thought to exist of numerous triangles, each triangle representing a sub-cycle in the manipulation of the flexagon. See Figure 6. In fact, flexagon F" will have a map which consists of n cycles, finally showing how n is determined for any flexagon. By convention, the direction of advancement around a map is taken to be counterclockwise for a right-handed flexagon, and clockwise for a left-handed flexagon. The other rules for drawing a map are as follows:

1) For every pinch which does not involve a rotation, there will be a bend of 300 to the right in the path of the map.

2) For every pinch which does require a rotation, there will be a turn of 1200 to the left in the path of the map.

3) Take the flexagon through a Tuckerman Traverse and record the order of appearance of faces, marking the record of those that must be followed by a rotation with T.

4) With the list from step three in hand, notice that the faces followed by T usually occur in pairs. These pairs are the bases of the triangular sub-cycles and are positions of extreme isolation on the map. When the T is not part of a pair, it indicates a single point of extreme isolation.

S) Those faces not followed by T occur more than once in the course of the traverse and are located at the junctions of sub-cycles.

6) There can be no map in which a succession of cycles forms a closed ring (from Wheeler).

"When the flexagon is folded flat, the six component triangles of the hexagon fall into two triads each consisting of alternate triangles of the hexagon. One of these triads may be of single thickness, in which case it is called a layer triad. The following results are true for any proper flexagon: The flexagon can be manipulated so that any specified triangle belongs to a layer triad. The hexagon will have a layer triad if and only if the number then exposed occurs at an isolated point of the flexagon's map. Hence there will be triangles marked x and y on face and obverse onlv if there is an isolated point on Mn marked x, (y)."4 How is the flexagon manipulated to traverse the map to these desired points?

The simplest method of manipulating the flexagon around a map is the Tuckerman Traverse, a process which will bring up all the faces of the flexagon in the order in which they appear on the map (because that is how the map was constructed). But it is also possible to shortcut parts of the map and take the most direct route between the position of the flexagon in its cycle and any other desired position. The first step in moving to a given position on the map is to determine the present location of the flexagon by noting what face is up, flexing it to another face, and locating the position on the map where these two faces are adjacent. If no such position can be found, the flexagon is on its back side and it should be flipped over to its front side and manipulated in this position until the learner becomes familiar with directional manipulation.

A series of pinches will produce motion along a path curving obliquely to the right. A rotation and

4 Wbeeler op. cit. p. 5.

Arnold L. Wagner, Jr. is a sophomore in the College of Liberal Arts where, in the integrated medical school program, he is preparing to follow the profession of his distinguished father. He was born in Honolulu, and now lives in Evanston, a member of Beta Theta Pi fraternity. He likes to go off on long automobile trips to the west coast, is fond of swimming, water skiing, and snow skiing, as well as working out - and seHing a fashion for - mathematical ingenuities such as those described in this article.

pinch will advance the flexagon acutely to the left. A reverse pinch, a pinch in which the northeast and south-east triangles are pinched toward the manipulator instead of away, and the bud is opened from the bottom rather than the top, will produce motion to the rear along a path curving obliquely to the right. And finally, a rotation with a reverse pinch will join two segments of the map in a straight line. The same considerations can be applied to the obverse of the flexagon if proper consideration is given to the fact that the standard direction for the obverse in traversing the map is clockwise, and consequently the results of all the operations indicated above will have to be reflected into their mirror images.

The handedness of flexagons has to do with the way that they are wound, not with the hand with which they are pinched, for a flexagon will produce the same order of faces in a Tuckerman Traverse no matter which hand it is flexed with. However, it will start its cycle in a different direction, for when the west end of the east-west axis is pinched instead of the east end, in effect a

rotation and pinch are being performed on the east end. This is true since the west end of the east-west axis belongs to the same triad as does the axis 60° removed from the east end; and ftexation along any of the axes of a triad will produce the same face.

When a ftexagon is wound with the right hand rolling toward the winder (as have been all Hexagons so far described) it will be right-handed; wound with the left rolling toward the winder, it will be left-handed. The handedness can be determined once the flexagon is constructed by manipulating it to a layer triad and observing the relation of the layer pat and the multilayer pat when flexing out of the layer triad. If the multi-

layer pat is located clockwise from the single layer pat, the Hexagon is right handed; if it is located counterclockwise from the layer pat, the flexagon is left-handed.

This concludes the introductory investigation of flexagons, and I think it has accomplished the initial purpose of providing a practice field for original experimentation; for except where otherwise indicated, the content of this article was developed through purposeful tinkering with all kinds of hexaflexagons, If you should desire to pursue the investigation of Hexagons further, there is a very complete mathematical analysis in the article by Oakley and Wisner, where, among other things, will be found the promised analytical definition of an abstract flexagon.

Face Obverse

Ia (4b)

2a (Ic)

3ar (2cr)

Ibr (3br)

2a (Lc) 4a (2b)

5ar (4cr)

2cr (5br) 4a (2b)

Ia (4b)

(Ic)

(2b) (4b) (6br) 6ar (Lbr) (4cr) 4a Ia 4cr 4cr (6br) Sal'

Ia (4b)

Map of a typical hexahexaflexagon, F 4'

Jerry Ziesmer

STAN LAUREL: Always With

Laughter

COMEDIANS?

They're all little boys at heart."

With that statement, the joy of still living in a boy's world on his seventy-third birthday sent the "Little One" into laughter which rocked his entire body. Stan Laurel's laughter begins with a chuckle, and before it runs out, his head tilts back and he snorts with glee, then he slaps his knee and with watery eyes, lets his mouth fall open and guffaws with a strong, rounded laugh complete with tears, head shaking, and a series of squeaky sounds part to gain breath and part to release, like a spouting volcano, the joy that has welled up within him. Stan Laurel, the little one, is at peace; he is laughing and creating laughter. In his seventy-third year to heaven, Stan Laurel is still the comedian, still the little boy from so many, many Laurel and Hardy films. Stan Laurel's life has always been the life of a little boy, laughing and creating laughter, imitating and being spanked, and always ending his films with a happy chuckle saying that everything is all right, always with laughter.

Stan Laurel, born Arthur Stanley Jefferson, began what was to become an international career in 1907 at the age of sixteen at Pickard's Museum in Glasgow, Scotland. Pickard's Museum was a combination side-show and penny arcade with a crudely built stage in one of the side-show tents. Here Mr. Pickard presented a number of variety acts including the "Boy Comedians." These young men presented a special kind of comedy now long out of date. They combined songs and dances with topical jokes of the day. For the most part, the "Boy Comedians" at Pickard's Museum only imitated the better known headliners of the London music halls. For Stan Laurel, the "Boy Comedians" were an exciting form of entertainment, and to be one of them was his dream.

After he watched the acts of such performers as Laddie Cliff, Boy Glen, and Nipper Lane, Stan Laurel paid a local musician to write an original song for him. With his song, nimble feet which knew the comic dances of the day, and a mind full of the jokes of his contemporaries, he prepared to make his stage debut.

He borrowed his father's pants and removed the lower half of each pant-leg; then he found a crooked umbrella, waistcoat, derby hat, cropped wig, and rouge for his nose. With these, Stan Laurel slid, slithered, and slumped to the middle of the stage in his carefully rehearsed comic dance. With his songs and jokes, his first stage appearance lasted for about eight minutes, and he left the stage to encouraging applause.

He now says of that first stage appearance, "The act was awful, but I finished strong and the applause was big. I guess they were applauding because they felt so sorry for me, but I didn't realize that at the time. I went backstage feeling like a king."

From that beginning Stan Laurel went into such productions as Sleeping Beauty (Stan played one of the seven dwarfs), Home From the Honeymoon, Alone in the World, and then in 1909, Mumming Birds, or by its American title, A Night in an English Music Hall. For both Stan Laurel and Charlie Chaplin, A Night in an English Music Hall was the primary training ground for their comic-mime. It was their ability as comic-mimes that enabled both Laurel and Chaplin to become two of the foremost comedians of the silent films. A Night in an English Music Hall offered little hope to the starving music hall comedians, but it did offer them the opportunity to experiment with comedy techniques in front of a live audience.

It was on the second American tour of A Night in an English Music Hall in 1913 that Laurel and Chaplin roomed together. Stan Laurel tells of the times he and Chaplin were so broke that while Laurel cooked bacon for breakfast on a gas heat-

Among the comic films of early vintage now very much in demand are those of Laurel and Hardy. From Beverley Hills, California, Jerry Ziesmer sends us a sketch of the career of Stan Laurel and a critical aHempt to find the basis, past and present, of the appeal of the famous comic pair. His account is a first-hand one, as he has made the acquaintance of Laurel and writes from notes on his conversations.

Ziesmer, now playing in TV for ABC, is remembered at Northwestern as one of the editorial staff of Profile and as an actor in many University Theater productions, including"Ah, Wilderness" and "King Lear." He received an Evanston Drama Club scholarship in 1959, and graduated from the School of Speech in 1961.

Winter, 1964

er, Chaplin waved towels about the room to drive out the bacon smell, hoping the hotel manager would not discover the boys were cooking in their rooms. One afternoon in New York as they were walking from their hotel to the theatre for a matinee performance, the boys found themselves in need of a public convenience. As they roamed the streets of New York looking for the typically English edifice, they consulted a policeman about their difficulty. He directed them to the nearest bar, where, with true British gallantry, they each downed a mug of beer before using the facilities of the bar.

When the tour reached Cincinnati, Charlie Chaplin received an offer from Mack Sennett for $125 per week and since that was a great deal higher than his touring salary, Chaplin left for Hollywood and eventual stardom.

Without Chaplin, the tour collapsed and Stan Laurel was stranded in Colorado Springs. Together with Ed Hurley, also a member of the stranded troupe, Stan wrote a vaudeville act known as The Three Comiques, later as Hurley, Stan and Wren, and still later as The Keystone Trio. This act parodied the Mack Sennett films of the day with Stan Laurel emerging as one of the early imitators of Chaplin. Just when it seemed that Stan Laurel had gained success on the Orpheum and Pantages Circuits, the act was forced to disband because of personal differences and once again he was left stranded.

Within months Stan Laurel had written a new act around The Three Comiques and called it The Stanley Jefferson Trio. About this time, Stan changed his name from Stanley Jefferson to Stan Laurel. There was no one big reason for this, but Stan recalled that there were thirteen letters in "Stan Jefferson" and that unlucky number in the years around 1916 was enough reason to become Stan Laurel.

With the act renamed Stan and Mae Laurel, Mae being the first name of a young Australian female vocalist who had joined the act, another swing around the vaudeville circuits was made, ending in 1917 at the old Hippodrome Theatre in Los Angeles. Here Adolph Ramish offered Laurel seventy-five dollars a week to make a two-reel film called Nuts in May. Ramish hired as the director for this film Bobby Williamson, who had just directed a young heavy by the name of Oliver Hardy in Florida.

In Nuts in May, Stan Laurel did not have any of the familiar mannerisms now associated with him. He appeared as a nice-looking young man, very swift in pantomime action, not unlike the Chaplin character of that day. That Laurel should resemble Chaplin is not surprising as they had both been schooled in English music halls and had spent the better part of two years together in A Night in an English Music Hall. Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel met at the premier of Nuts in May, and after the film the two

comedians had dinner. Chaplin expressed his interest in Laurel and told Stan of his own plans to form a motion picture studio. But after that night, he never heard from Charlie Chaplin again.

As Chaplin continued his Hollywood career, Laurel went back to the vaudeville circuits. In his own words, "It was a hell of a way to make a living." Vaudeville was not the same as musichall touring. In England, the performers were well paid and respected as artists. In America, the performers were poorly paid and had to do as many as eight and ten shows a day. Whenever there were a few people in a vaudeville theatre, whether they were merely eating their lunch, or waiting for a streetcar, the performers went on with their acts. In England, there were two shows a night and reserved seating at those.

While touring in vaudeville at the Santa Barbara theatre, Hal Roach wired Laurel and offered him a role in a movie series called Lonesome Luke. After making five films for Hal Roach, Laurel left to work with Larry Semon at Vitagraph Studios. After Vitagraph, Laurel worked in 1918 for "Broncho Billy" Anderson in a test film called Lucky Dog. It was a surprise to everyone, especially to Laurel, that Lucky Dog sold and the New York distributors desired more films. "Broncho Billy" Anderson began producing parodies of famous silent films with Stan Laurel as the star. Blood and Sand with Rudolph Valentino became Mud and Sand with Rubarb Vaselino played by Laurel. Robin Hood became Rob 'Em Good but later had to be retitled When Knights Were Cold because Billy Montana had already begun a film called Rob 'Em Good.

After a contract disagreement with Billy Anderson, Laurel left in 1926 to settle with Hal Roach as a comedy writer and director. Ironically, it was during this period that Oliver Hardy was hired by Hal Roach to play a role in a film, but Hardy was injured the day before the shooting was to begin. As his replacement, Roach used Stan Laurel. The film was Get 'Em Young and it was in this film that Laurel first used his now famous "cry."

During the middle and late 1920's, the Hal Roach Studios consisted of a stock company of film comedians. Though Laurel and Oliver Hardy were members, they made many films together before they became known as a comedy team. Finally, in late 1926, Leo McCarey directed the first Laurel and Hardy film, entitled Putting Pants on Philip. In this first Laurel and Hardy film, Stan Laurel did not resemble the little comic character he was to become. This film centered around Hardy trying to persuade his immigrant nephew, Laurel, to give up his Scottish kilts in favor of American pants. Putting Pants on Philip was the beginning of a partnership which was to run through eighty-nine films, three national tours and two international tours.

For Stan Laurel, the success meant the settled ground of Hollywood stardom after seventeen years of vaudeville and music hall touring. Prior to teaming with Oliver Hardy, Laurel had done seventy-three films. With Hal Roach and Oliver Hardy, Laurel finally had the opportunity to develop his comic genius into the film character loved around the world.

Many years ago in Peiping, China, a giant billboard depicting Laurel and Hardy covered one side of a three-story building. In China, Stan Laurel was symbolic of the common working man. Oliver Hardy was a symbol of the mandarin who may not have been as bright as the worker but who was able to rule by force. Today in every country in the world Laurel and Hardy are more popular than they were in the 1930's. Marshal Tito of Yugoslavia has a complete library of Laurel and Hardy films. In Europe during the early 1950's, Laurel and Hardy were besieged by their fans wherever they appeared. In this country a new generation has discovered the comedy of Laurel and Hardy through television. What is the appeal that surmounts the boundaries of time, language, and nationality?

The appeal of Laurel and Hardy is that through these two little boys, we see ourselves in relation to our world. We see in Laurel and Hardy two people who are not able to do successfully the simple tasks that most of us do daily. They can not go on a picnic without destroying two houses and one car, The Perfect Day, 1929. They can not row a boat across the lake without sinking an entire regatta, Men '0 War, 1929. They can not complete a simple task without severe and disastrous complications.

In The Music Box produced in 1932, the basic situation is very simple. Laurel and Hardy are the sole employees of The Laurel and Hardy Cartage Company and they have been hired to deliver a crated piano to a house. What could be simpler? As their horse-drawn delivery wagon stops at the correct address, the camera moves back to reveal that the house is perched on top of a gigantic hill. Leading up the hill to the house are approximately two hundred steps. Ollie gets out of the wagon and hoists the piano onto his back. Just as he is about to take the last corner of the piano off the wagon, the horse moves forward sending the piano crashing on top of Ollie. As the piano hits the sidewalk, a simple little tune is heard as a counterpoint to the frustration of Ollie. It appears as though the piano were laughing at the two little boys. Finally they push the very heavy piano up to the first level of the very narrow, terraced steps. After a short rest, they begin to raise the piano toward the second landing. A nurse with a baby carriage is then shown descending the steps. As Ollie and Stan try to move the piano to one side in order for the nurse to pass, the piano slides down the steps to the sidewalk below. Again the piano plays its laughing tune. When the nurse laughs at the boys,

Laurel kicks her. When the nurse slaps Laurel, Ollie laughs. The nurse then hits Ollie with the baby's bottle and tells them that she is going to call the police. Once again the boys lift the piano up the steps. Soon a policeman shouts to them from the sidewalk. Stan Laurel looks at Ollie and then Laurel descends the steps only to be told that the policeman wishes to speak with Ollie. As Ollie begins to walk down the steps, the piano seems to laugh and begins to bump-bump down the steps as though it were chasing Ollie. The frantic chase ends with Ollie tripping over the bottom step and the piano merrily riding over him into the street.

Once more the boys trudge up the hill with the piano. This time they are met by a German professor played by Billy Gilbert. The professor demands that they make room for him to pass on the narrow steps. Laurel then knocks off the professor's hat. As the hat rolls into the street, a truck runs over it. Billy Gilbert furiously shakes his fist at the boys and hurries down the steps.

Finally the boys get the piano to the top of the hill and after congratulating themselves, they ring the doorbell of the house. As they turn their back on the piano, it begins to shake and then turns itself around and slides toward the steps. Ollie turns in time to see the piano perched on the edge of the steps. As he rushes to catch the piano, it falls and drags Ollie all the way down the steps into the road beneath.

A title is then flashed on the screen informing us that a number of hours have passed. Now we see the boys back in front of the house with the piano. A mailman enters and after hearing of the boys' difficulties, asks them why they did not drive their wagon up to the house by the side road? After a long look between the boys, Ollie gives the piano a kick. Once again the piano is hoisted upon Ollie's back, and the boys begin the difficult descent to the bottom of the hill so that they can drive their wagon with the piano up the hill by the side road. After all, that is the proper way to deliver the piano, proper in the world of Laurel and Hardy.

The relationship between Laurel and Hardy is parallel to our relationship to our world. Stan Laurel has said, "Everybody is a little person, even the big people are little sometimes, and Laurel was the littlest of them all." Laurel is the epitome of the little guy; Hardy is the epitome of the big people who are less intelligent, yet who order the little people around. We do not become involved with the details of their personal lives; we do not ask what they had for breakfast or where they are going to sleep at night. Yet we do become interested and relate ourselves to what they do because we sympathize with their situations, as, for example, when we see them with shrewish wives such as Mae Busch as "Mrs. Laurel" in Blotto, 1930.

The key to why we laugh at them and not cry

Winter, 1964

with them is that we are never with them. We never become a part of their world; we never are concerned for their basic needs, such as food and shelter. We do laugh at them because we look at them in situations which represent human experiences. We laugh because they are far less able to handle the situation than we are, and their situation, though similar to ours, is far more complex. We are superior to them. The gigantic intensity of complications in which they become involved makes our situation a little less severe by comparison and a lot more understandable and bearable. Through viewing their experiences, we see ourselves a little more clearly.

Oliver Hardy is the dominant nit-wit, a frustrated little boy, the master of nothing. Hardy orders Laurel to do things that Ollie could never do. Ollie is the instigator. He must be the first through a doorway even though a pie-in-the-face awaits the first one through the door.

Laurel does not know right from wrong; he messes up everything he attempts, yet he never has any concern for the outcome, and we know that he will never really lose. He is Mr. Public being pushed around by everyone, yet he never gets discouraged. Laurel always bounces back like rubber. When he goes through an uncomfortable situation, the next time he meets the same situation he will go through it as uncomfortably as he did the first time. He never learns, but he is never bitter. Laurel is the bewildered little boy. He is the hero of the little people of the world because Laurel can do miraculous and unusual things that no one else can do.

A perfect example of one of these miraculous acts that only Laurel can do appears in the movie Fra Diavolo, 1933. In this film Stan Laurel plays a little game of coordination called "EarseyNosey." The point of the game is to clap your hands to your knees, then to hold your left ear with your right hand, and your nose with your left hand. Then to clap your knees with your hands and hold your right ear with your left hand and your nose with your right hand, etc., etc. No one in the film is able to do this task except Laurel. Ollie can not do it. Dennis King, a perfect physical specimen with every advantage of a Hollywood leading man, is helplessly a fool at playing "Earsey-Nosey." Laurel is the only person who can do it and he does it without effort. The common man has scored a point. Laurel is the better, and if Laurel is the better then so are

we. As Laurel triumphs, so does each of us.

Although each Laurel and Hardy film did have a director, it was Stan Laurel who supervised the direction and editing of the Laurel and Hardy sequences. Stan Laurel directed many films in which neither he nor Oliver Hardy appeared. One of these films, Wandering Papas, is still shown as an example of directorial comedy art. In this film, which starred Clyde Cook, it is easy to see the comic genius of Laurel in his perfect comic timing and his choice of the right comic gag for the right moment. His ingenuity as a director of the comic has stayed with him to this day. Now when he views one of his films on television, he mentions that he would gladly re-edit the films to space in the commercials, if they would not break up the comedy sequences on which he worked so hard when he originally made the films.

Whenever a young comedian asks Stan Laurel for advice, he is always told to perform in front of a live audience every chance he gets; to find out what is funny within himself and use that; to create a world around that which makes him funny and to stay always in that world.

In 1956 Stan Laurel had a stroke and when he regained his health, Oliver "Babe" Hardy was stricken with a heart condition. On August 7th 1957, Oliver Hardy, "The Fat One," died. Because of the death of his beloved partner, and because of his own failing health, Laurel retired after fifty years in the world of laughter.

Today Stan Laurel lives very comfortably in an apartment hotel in Santa Monica, California. His apartment overlooking the Pacific Ocean is a little boy's apartment. To this seventy-three years young little boy, a Christmas wreath and gold tree ornaments are happy decorations for the walls of his apartment. On every table are ashtrays, salt and pepper shakers, cups and saucers, and tiny china dolls which are all in the shape of Laurel and Hardy. On top of his television set is his only Oscar, presented to him in 1960 as "An honorary award for creative pioneering in the field of cinema comedy." On his desks are photographs of his beloved partner, Oliver "Babe" Hardy, some fan mail to be answered, and many mementoes from his long career in comedy. His greatest delight is still making others laugh.

Jerry Lewis, one of Stan Laurel's greatest admirers, has said of Laurel, "To me, Stan Laurel is the museum of the world of comedy."

Where Are You Going? 'D

What Are B

Doing.

Shirley (Stuckert) Zoeger

Marian Kearns never had been to a school reunion of any sort before, because they always seemed to take place when she was somehow indisposed, confined in childbed, or living at a Texas air base or visiting in-laws in Idaho. But when Wisconsin came to the Rose Bowl that year and she read in the Times that "All former students of the university are invited to the Wisconsin Alumni reception from four to six o'clock at the Biltmore Hotel," Marian persuaded her usually sedentary scientist husband to escort her there.

Driving into the city she said, almost apologetically, "I don't suppose there'll be a living soul that I know, but perhaps the spirit will be there, I mean, the way we felt. Everyone who goes knows what it means to have been at Madison. I mean

Carl shook his head. "It wasn't like that for us," he muttered in slow-paced guttural syllables. "I got in at twenty-two and it's all over by then, the rah-rah stuff, especially if you saw the War. Idaho was just a grind for me, and He stopped speaking abruptly, and although Winter, 1964

Marian waited patiently for further revelation of her taciturn mate's youth, it was not forthcoming. He was preoccupied as he turned from Laurel Canyon onto the Hollywood Freeway, and in the silence, to which she was quite accustomed, she began to wonder who might be at the reception from that other world, that lost country of youth, and whether they would recognize her with her dark hair so short (it had been a quarter of the way down her back during freshman year). Yet she believed she had kept her youth well. She was, in fact, one of those women who matured late and actually improved with age, whether like wine or cheese she did not care to decide. There were a few who used to think her naive and innocent whom she wished could see her now, with breasts full and firmed by suckling three children, a face unmarred because uncoverd by anything except lipstick on the wide smiling mouth, and eyes alert and young, yes, young yet, Marian felt certain, and they might think so, too, the old crowd, if any of them happened to be there today

It was a golden autumn, not even a year after

the War began, and no one they knew had died yet, much less gone away. That happened afterward, on into 1943, and to them it was all rather remote and unreal and actually not as catastrophic as the enforced departure of the cream of the football team, which was shipped to Michigan with the ASTP, Mark· Hoskins and Elroy Hirsch and Dave Schreiner included.

But that year! Few of them would live again through a finer fall than the fall of 1942. Each morning Marian awoke to see the rays of the orange autumn sun exploding the lake mists over Mendota's blue waves, beyond the yellowing elm leaves along the shore. And 'at noon the notes from the Carillon floated pleasantly on the moist south wind pleasant, everything was so warm and welcoming and pleasant, so sleepy, that Indian summer of soft somnolence in which their hopeful spirits seemed to float as buoyantly as the tones of the ringing bells.

Their dreams were limitless and long. They spent hours discussing them, becoming initiated into the endless bull sessions as an outlet from study, drifting into smoky clothes-clogged rooms in the dorm or under the hazy arches of the crowded Rathskeller or between cramped

Shirley (Stuckert) loeger, Journalism '46, lives in Woodland Hills, California. Before her marriage she had had a various experience as a ;ournalist - as society editor, reporter, feature writer, and photographer - in Texas City, Mexico City, and in her native city, Milwaukee. Her years at Northwestern came between studies at the University of Wisconsin and, as a graduate student, at the University of California at Los Angeles. Her narrative "Incident on the Czech Border" appeared in the FaJl (1962) issue of The Tri-Quarterly.

Mrs. loeger's story is fictitious, and she writes that no resemblance to persons either at Northwestern or Wisconsin was intended.

benches, munching bratwursts at the Cabin

Jim was going to Congress one day in no less a position than senator, and from there, who knew to what heights? He was of Greek ancestry, solid and muscular, with black curly hair, a laughing, glad-handing campus politico already the president of Student Board. One night he waited for Marian while she rewrote a feature at the Daily CardinaL office, sitting beside her in the slot and smoking with the editor, Adam Berg. Then he walked her home down the lake road, suddenly enveloping her in a burly bear hug and later in the week sending a dozen red roses which she distributed one by one to her best friends at the dorm.

For it was dark, intense Adam she desired, a rebel with glittering eyes and a ferret's swift movements. He was a junior from the sand country of the state, a neophyte writer who was going to be the literary successor to Thomas Wolfe. So he declaimed at the organizational meeting of the Thomas Wolfe Club, when each person present was asked to rise and describe the precise manner and moment of introduction to the chronicler of Old Catawba. When it came Marian's turn, she pronounced nervously, "Well, it was last summer on a bus in Milwaukee when I was riding to work in a defense plant that I noticed the man next to me reading a fat red edition of The Web and the Rock and so Adam assigned her to cover the group on her regular beat, as he deigned to walk with her later over the snowswept campus. It was a frigid winter night drenched in blue-white starlight, and between the Union at the bottom of Bascom Hill and Lincoln's seated figure at the top, he managed to take off Marian's head scarf because he "loved to see hair whipping in the wind"; to divulge that he detested his smalltown merchant father; and to ask her to spend a town night with him.

"What's that, a town night?" she cried above the thrashing of the ice-coated branches overhead.

"Oh, my God," he howled, "what's a town night? My God, I didn't know there were any of you left!" After he explained it to her and she stammered, aghast, that she couldn't do a thing like that, what would her family think, he clamped a bony hand over her trembling mouth and ordered, "Stop it. No more. The middle class! Oh, God. Do you know what you are? You're the kind of person who's going to read the books I'm going to write. But you'll never write any."

For the three days following Marian was quite ill, from a nasty throat infection brought on by having gone bareheaded, but moreso from the primal disillusionment which caused her almost to vomit during every meal.

"C'est La vie," Elspeth consoled her later, but Marian doubted that the short, stocky girl expressed sincere compassion. Fair-skinned, redhaired, cobalt-blue of eye, Elspeth was a selfadmitted lesbian. Marian had to look up the word, but she did so only after having become genuinely fond of the wit and zest expelled by the ambitious girl from the small town of Oconomowoc. Whatever shock she felt upon reading the definition of the adjective, therefore, was absorbed somewhat more easily.

"1 belong to people," Elspeth insisted, "and I'm going to serve a great cause." She studied sociology toward that end, and when The Fountainhead finally circulated on the dormitory floor she swore unending hatred for Ayn Rand and her castigation of social workers. She also worked hard all the while to overcome her natural inclinations; at last count she had offered herself, albeit unsuccessfully, to fourteen campus swains. Marian felt quite safe with Elspeth at all times, for the latter told one and all that it was the totally fragile and possibly empty-headed beauties to whom she was drawn.

Such as Darcy, for instance. This transient object of Elspeth's volatile desires was a San Francisco girl who never quite managed to fit her dark delicacy into the husky congregation of Germans and Scandinavians whose state she had chosen to investigate. She was an oliveskinned nymph of French lineage; in the shower room one noted the exquisite breasts and downy buttocks that drew Elspeth to her, along with a plaintive childlike whine and luminous black eyes. Her mother was a West Coast fashion designer who in the Twenties had hobnobbed with the Greenwich Village greats. Naturally, no one doubted that Darcy would go far, for through Mother, who twice a year attended New York openings and renewed her contacts, Daughter was assured a valid reading of whatever plays she created. In her sophomore spring, Darcy won a wealth of war bonds by claiming first prize in a one-act play contest. The following autumn her three-act drama based on memoirs of a California childhood actually was produced by the campus theater, and the resultant renown was too much for one of her competitors to accept.

Anders (he had a first name - Holver - but no one ever used it) was a slender, ascetic boy from Buttes des Morts and the art critic of the Cardinal. He was excessively antagonistic toward Darcy, or rather toward her premature, and from his viewpoint, unwarranted fame. The frail sandy-haired youth himself had an insatiate hunger for glory; he dwelt on achieving notoriety of some sort, and since he was able by a satirical pen to elicit incessant guffaws from readers of a biting column on campus artistic endeavors, Winter, 1964

he chose writing as his weapon. It was a difficult decision to embrace, for at heart he was a graphic artist. Covering the walls of Marian's room were his sketches and abstract water color designs which he bestowed upon her weekly, as he bestowed upon her whatever affection he was able to extend. Theirs was a placidly Platonic relationship, one in which Marian happily hid after the interchange with Adam.

Anders seemed to need her as a sister and fellow creative artist, for Marian (who was going to be a reporter and live near Rush Street in Chicago's Bohemia) had taken to writing short stories in an advanced composition class. She tried a number of vague pieces, studiously subtle, pointlessly indefinite, and before vacation Anders suggested that he give them to Adam for use in the Summer Cardinal. "Now be sure to tell Adam to be careful what he puts in," she advised absent-mindedly, dumping onto Ander's typing stand the entire semester's dossier, forgetful of its exact contents. Then, giggling and gossiping, they walked in a spring rain to the Chocolate Shop for Hot Swiss Milk sundaes.

A month later Anders had his revenge on Darcy, for among Marian's sketches had been one describing the dark girl's campus love affair with a handsome though sickly Business Administration major. True to her literary model, Marian had described the boy's malaise - which actually was arrested tuberculosis - with staunch elusiveness. Once published under a pseudonym, the story's inference was that Darcy's lover was quite desiccated with a loathsome social disease. No one who knew the girl's petulance or her party-party phraseology failed to identify the fictional counterpart which Marian presented, least of all Darcy, who screamed aloud in the Cardinal office (while pointing to the invented nom-deplume), "Who is this Cynthia Potter?" The injured playwright never again communicated with Marian, and for a while Marian refused all contact with Anders, too.

Yet by autumn she had transferred to the University of Chicago to be nearer her Mecca, and by Christmas she had met an admiring research chemist, and by June she was married and off to an army camp in Georgia. The spite of Anders, which after all had not been directed toward her, seemed paltry in comparison to the momentous change in her life and its future expectations. He continued to write her from time to time over the ensuing years, so that she could follow his progress toward a master's degree as he took course after course in art history, water color, critical writing, sculpture, oils, and ceramics, and for a long, long time she still imagined that he would create an innovation in American painting, an original style of artistic criticism, or something.

Marian and Carl parked the station wagon in the underground garage beneath Pershing Square and worked through after-theater crowds emerging from the Mormon Tabernacle choral rendition of "The Messiah." Clustered beneath the palms on each street corner were Midwestern football enthusiasts, most of them wearing red and white Badger buttons on winter coats left open to the cool, penetrating gray air of twilight. The youths hardly seemed old enough to be collegians; no one had looked that young when she had gone to the University at Madison, Marian thought. Then with a tremor of realization she accepted the statistic that these revelers probably had not been born when she started college. All of it, all she had loved so well and lost so soon, was now theirs, the younger generation's. As she preceded Carl into the side entrance of the Biltmore and down the vast length of carpeted gallery, she experienced a sudden fright, for she knew she was well into the older generation. The fact so unnerved her that she whispered, "I'll just duck into this powder room while you ask where the reception is," although she knew he detested being left alone in strange situations. Once inside, Marian hastily checked: no smeared lipstick, no shining nose, hair casually in place. Then nervousness or the long ride from the Valley compelled her to seek instant relief, but there were only pay toilets available, and she had not even the required nickel. "I came with my husband, you see, and I didn't know I'd need money," she told the sallow-faced attendant. "We're going to the Wisconsin reception and

"Here, honey," laughed a little old woman who had been subduing straggling grey curls before a mirror. "Take a nickel from a former Badger, class of 1920."

"Oh, are you from there?"

"Tomah."

"Oh, Tomah!" cried Marian, fitting the coin into a latch that read VACANT. "We used to stop there on our way up north when I was a child, and we'd eat in that old hotel with the big trees

"Yes, that's Tomah all right. Listen, 'fore you go to the reception, find that little room where Schlitz is handing out free stuff. I had so much beer my back teeth were swimmin', and I can't remember how to get back there now, you know?"

"I'll ask someone, and thanks for helping me out."

"Don't mention it, honey," she chuckled as Marian disappeared into a cubicle.

When she found him in the gallery, Marian asked Carl, "Find it?"

"In the Bowl, way down there."

"We ought to find the beer place first," she

whispered, repeating what the old woman had said.

"Sounds good. Let's ask that bellboy."

"Or no. Maybe we ought to go in first, so as not to miss anyone. I mean, I don't suppose I'll know anyone, but just in case there is

"It's your party," Carl complied, guiding her elbow-wise into a large chandeliered room where a crush of people bought drinks for ninety-five cents apiece between handshaking, shoulder-nobbing and queuing up to meet the president of the university, the alumni chairmen, a few professors emeriti and all their assorted wives. Marian and Carl paced through the line, then they wandered around the clusters of tables, and finally Marian sighed, "There's not a soul here I know. Not a single familiar face at all."

She looked so woebegone that Carl hugged her quickly. "Well, anyway, they're all wondering who you are, in that white dress. You're the best-looking female here."

"Oh, you," she smiled, and although his compliment pleased her vanity it also made her sad, for no one now would see, no one would know. "Let's go for those free vittles."

A gigantic and tawny wheel of Wisconsin cheese on a table in a cozy upstairs room, platters of smoked fish picked almost bone-clean, brown bottles of beer, smoke, thick smoke, and talk, talk, talk. Marian said, "This is how it used to be at the beer parties Saturday nights."

"Hey, now," grinned Carl after his fourth beer, "slice me a wedge of cheddar with that cleaver, gal, and let's nibble the fishtails together. This is more like it. I'm beginning to see what you mean by the Wisconsin spirit oooooooooops !

A girl with long, straight blond hair bumped his arm and collapsed weakly against him, giggling, "Lessing 'On Wisconsin,''' she gasped. "Okay, now, one, two, three "

Marian turned, smiling, to survey the noisy crowd for the third time. On the wall beside her she noticed a row of enlarged black and white photographs - Wisconsin football stars who had died in the War. One of them was Dave Schreiner, who had been killed on Iwo Jima in 1945. Her eyes filled with unaccountable tears, since she had never even seen him except from afar in the Camp Randall stadium as he charged a line of hefty adversaries. But she had not known that he was dead.

"Why are you crying?" asked someone beside her, and she answered, head averted to 'wipe her eyes, "Because I thought he was still alive, I guess. I didn't know he'd been dead all these years.

"We're aU dead, Marian, all gone from what we were back there."

Forgetful of her weeping, she turned to see a

solidly-built man without a hair on his gleaming round head. "Jim?" she whispered.

"You know, you're beautiful, Marian, more than you ever were back then."

"Oh, Jim," she sobbed, clutching his stubbyfingered hand. "Someone from the old days, after all!"

"1 know you're married, of course," he said. "Anders told us that."

"I have three children, and we live out in the Valley with a dog and goat and three ducks. What about you?"

"My wife stayed home, because she's sometimes unwell these days, so I flew out here alone for a short time. I'm a lawyer in Madison now. We have no children," he added.

"But whatever happened to Elspeth? Remember?" asked Marian, dabbing at her wet lids with a paper napkin.

"Lives in Ohio somewhere. Columbus, I guess it is. She never married, of course. Got tied up with some female boardinghouse keeper near the university, and helps her run the place."

"Well," Marian offered hastily, "Anders is in France as an exchange teacher in Grenoble this year. He's actually had a showing of his block prints and tiles, rather insignificant, but a step in the right direction, 1 suppose."

"Whatever happened to that history of Wisconsin artists he started long ago?"

Marian shrugged before grinning. "After what happened with Darcy, he wouldn't dare make a killing with that! I've been waiting for her Broadway debut yearly, by the way."

Jim shook his bald head negatively. "You know, I saw her yesterday? Found her listed in the alumni news and went to visit her. She's settled in a beach apartment with a beatnik-type husband and a new baby. Divorced her first husband." He pulled a small address book from his inside coat pocket. 'Here she is. Go look her up, Marian. She'd like it, 1 bet."

"Maybe. When I feel like having a door slammed in my face."

"All that was long ago. She's rather down and out, I think, and lonely. You might give it a try."

Marian sighed. "Perhaps I might." They smiled at each other, hands clasped, remembering. At last she asked, "And Adam?"

Jim thrust out his free hand, palm up. "Gone. Disappeared.

"For seventeen years or so I've watched the booklists, waiting for those epic works to dash us

from our complacency. He was so certain he'd write them.

"You know he went to India with an ambulance corps during the War, then to North Africa and later to Italy? Well, when he came back he married a ballet student and holed up in Greenwich Village. But he started drinking when the writing didn't sell, and she shoved him out into MacDougal Alley, so the tale goes."

"Sic transit gloria mundi."

"Except that he never had any."

"Do you, Jim?"

"Oh, I've a good Iaw practice back home with a junior partner, and we get all the best cases that come up in the University. It's a pretty fair life, except for - well, we're starting adoption attempts soon." Then he winked, "And have you reported your way around the globe?" She shook her head, mute. "I guess we're all pretty fair candidates for the Society of the Mutually Anonymous."

"Ah, Jim," Marian sighed quietly. "1m so glad to have seen you again. So glad."

'You know, of all the people I hoped to see someday you were first on the list." He leaned forward to kiss her cheek quickly.

Marian glanced around. "Now come meet my husband," she laughed, "before that blond Valkyrie bears him off on her shield."

Much later, at home, Marian tiptoed through a maze of games, stuffed animals and scattered shoes into the children's silent rooms. All three slept sprawled and oblivious in their beds; they did not awaken even when she hauled their drooping legs and arms back underneath the blankets. As she covered the eldest boy, it struck her as somewhat incredible that in a few years he would go off somewhere to college, to Reed or Berkeley or SC or Seattle. Soon it would be his turn, the time that came only once.

The night air pouring through the opened windows was damp. She went to draw over the draperies, and through the still-exposed window glass, high up in the black sky, shone a great bright star, hanging in suspension like a glowing orb of some tremendous portent. Yet perhaps it had died before anyone on earth had seen its light. Well, thought Marian, that happened often, even to people.

Closing the window slightly, she wondered whether, after all, she ought to visit Darcy at the beach. They might enjoy sharing their mutual anonymity.

Winter, 1964

816

University Place, Evanston, Illinois

NOMINATING THE PRESIDENT

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