vol6-no3

I t

IN THIS ISSUE (;/wr/ps 11. Newman BUT THAT'S THE WAY THE AMERICAN PEOPLE LIKE TO DO Edith B. Farnsworth POEMS Carl W. Condit

ARCHITECTURE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY David Neelon. and Patricia Rabby POEMS

Gary Lee Blonstoti FUTURE TENSE

Russell L. Merritt THE INTERNAL MONOLOGUE IN BOOKS AND FILMS

Robert Lee Moore POEMS

Mary E. Henrikson VIRTUE IS NOT DEAD R.

Barry Farrell THE STUDENT AND THE UNIVERSITY UNDER COMMUNISM

Laurel Tether, Patricia Rabby, Mark Reinsberg, and

Vaughn Koumjian POEMS

TRI-QUARTERLY VOLUME

6

NUMBER

THREE

70¢

NORTHWESTERN

UNIVERSITY

SPRING,

1964

V'

•

Charles H. Newman But That's The Way The American

People Like To Do

3

Edith B. Farnsworth

9

Poems Carl W. Condit Architecture In The Nineteenth Century..

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

11

David N eelon and Patricia Rabby

19

Poems

Gary Lee Blonston Future Tense

21

.

Russell L. Merritt The Internal

Monologue

In Books And Films

25

Robert Lee Moore Poems

..........

.

30

Mary Henrikson Virtue Is Not Dead R.

38

Barry Farrell The Student And The University

THE TRI-QUARTERLY is a magazine de­ voted to fiction, poetry, and articles of

Under Communism

general interest, published in the fall, winter, and spring quarters at Northwestern Univer­ sity. Evanston, Illinois. Subscription rates: $2.00 yearly within the United States; $2.15, Canada; $2.25, foreign. Single copies will be sold locally for $.70. Contributions, cor­ respondence, and subscriptions should be

Laurel

41

Tether, Patricia Rabby,

Mark Reinsberg and Vaughn Koumjian

47

Poems

addressed to THE TRI-QUARTERLY, care the Northwestern University Press, 816

of

University Place, Evanston, Illinois. Contri­ butions unaccompanied by a self-addressed envelope and return postage will not be re­ turned. Except by invitation, contributors

Tri-Quarterly NORTHWESTERN

limited to persons who have some con­ nection with the University. Copyright, 1964,

by Northwestern University. All rights re­ are

Volume 6

SPRING. 1964

UNIVERSITY Number Three

served.

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

EDITORIAL BOARD: The editor is EDWARD B. HUNGERFORD. Senior members of the advisory board are Dean JAMES H. MC­ BURNEY 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: MARY

HENRIKSON, LINDA

BARRY G. BRISSMAN, GARY T. COLE,

O'RIORDAN, and FRED W. STEFFEN.

THE TRI-QUARTERLY is distributed by Northwestern Uni­ versity 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.

By Charles H. Newman

"But that's the way the american people like to do" "We are a 'WE', not because we hold

communion, but because our

contours

overlap" HERMANN BROCH

You

by his brilliance largely size, a stooped seven feet due to a pituitary as far ranging as his memory. He could fell a small town dolt with either a quip or He

always talk cute," Moult began, his mouth full, "say 'I guess,' take the end off adjec­ tives, say 'sort of' and ramble, but that doesn't fool anybody any more. Maybe you'll understand better if I tell you that I had a professor my first year at Purk who said we ought to get out and can

as

a

a

was

not withered

result of his

fist. And I have seen him many times in the Uni­

meet the Proletariat. The way he said it sounded

versity Post Office go through spectacular feats of coordination to retrieve his mail from a box, al­ lotted on purpose, certainly, in the row six inches

very much like my mother when she

spoke of the

off the floor. His face

although she'd just as soon that I stayed away from them. They were agreed in one respect however; that I couldn't handle them.

As I look back on it now, I think the professor's vested interest in me oddly stronger, so it's only fair to begin with him. Because he was frightened (as opposed to my mother who merely suffered) he provided me with a surer principle of selection.

He was born on an Iowa farm, the high table gossip went; one of those guys who read all night after the chores were done, standing up of course, "so's he could stamp 'is feet, keep warm." He still worked standing up when I knew him, at a stoolless accountant's desk, but I think more be­ cause of bad circulation than from habit. By the time he was twelve, so the story goes, he had read every single book in the village library, including the encyclopedias, mail order catalogs and train

His hair was

'common people,'

schedules.

Blessed

at

birth

with

an

incredible

memory, he could recite entire Robert Ingersoll lectures without a stutter. His spelling bees had the quality of a revival meeting. He could tell you today the time, destination, and second-class fare of every train that left Ames, Iowa, between 1913 and

1922.

Spring, 1964

was

indented and his skin

shingly. ing in half-hearted ringlets. His mous.

more maroon

He walked with his

arms

than red, fall­

ears

were

motionless

enor­

and

stooped over, like a pajamaed child in the morn­ ing trying to conceal an erection. For that, we called him

Mr.

Pants.

The town

banker, as a matter of personal and professional pride, had seen Mr. Pants through the State University, where he had taken a degree in Romance Languages in two years, and then like

so

many Americans who see their future too

clearly, who feel themselves trapped on a gradi­ ent even though it is ascending, willfully broke the inevitability of his progress, tried to find out more. He held the usual jobs; he worked for a year on a Ford assembly line, washed dishes, managed a Y.M.C.A. locker room, boxed kanga­ roos at county fairs, punched cattle, sold encyclo­ pedias door to door, dug graves, edited a radical journal (suppressed in the mails), rode the rods for a time, drove a stock car, painted a mural for the dining room of a Panamanian Hotel, stoked boilers on a freighter; you know, the whole bit that qualifies you for dissent in this country, a book jacket full of occupations to document your 3

sensitivity. The whole world is easier to come by than any single part of it. Particularly if you have a

good memory.

Mr. Pants was not

Madrid, where several prominent American jour­ as

hurt by the Depression as

he was fascinated by it: the concept of failure

en­

gages us much more than the brute facts of failing

just as it is the idea of success and not its fruits

-

which compel us. For analysis, he chose Marxism,

•

admittedly, because it was quicker.

Marxism, he told us once, failed not because of any perversion of the system, but was doomed from the first, since it misunderstood the nature of capitalism. The thing that one learned in the thirties, was not particularly that the Soviets were corrupt, but that capitalism doesn't require prey

as

feudal

much

successive enemies! Without

as

had

to

nalists

hoarding food. Shocked by this, he

were

allowed himself to be goaded into a fight, subse­ quently breaking the arm of the largest and most

belligerent of the journalists who had to cancel trip to the front and stayed in Madrid for the duration. Each time the shelling began, this man would dash through the streets brandishing his damaged arm and crying "Falangiste! Falan­ giste!" in the brevity of which, no one knew if he were cheering or cursing them.

(His dispatches were later incorporated into the Alcapulco Note­ books.)

his

a

Mr.

be­

attack, Capitalism come unchallenged and irresponsible. The Com­ munists were not destroying capitalism; they were making possible its resurrection justify­ ing it at the very moment it had become impos­ structure

automatics with guttapercha handles and showed a hotel on the Via San Antonio in

up one night in

a

near

will remain nameless for

(mine, not his)

reasons

member

house

who

Pants,

curity

of my

fraternity. We had

secret

the ocean, and

once

a

-

sible.

Sociological investigation bored him after a time

se­

incidentally,

was,

year,

a

without

fail, he would come and tell us about his part in the Civil War.

There was neither nostalgia nor feigned dryness to his account. He just related what had happened about how difficult it was -

however, and around 1936 he went back farm to help. his return,

to

the

Things got better, but shortly after

on

a

foggy fall harvest evening, his

father fell into a reaper and died,

as

it were, with­

out even jamming the mechanism. His mother had

already died and his sisters married,

so

he went

to New York to work simultaneously on degrees in

law and medicine. ish Civil War

Unfortunately or no, the Span­

soon

cut those interests

recognized it immediately as worth fighting for, purchased

short. He of

affairs

a

state

a

pair of Beretta

These pages are from an unfinished novel by Charles Newman and

are

printed here at the invitation of the

editors.

"This is which

bi-valved narrative," Newman

explains, personalities are developed, not through plot or psychological prescience, but simply through the metaphors each finds useful. The characters, then, live only through the stories they tell on others."

Newman graduated summa cum laude from Yale in 1960 where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, won the W. Wilder Bellamy Prize for Scholarship, the Strong Prize for the best thesis in American History, and for two years was editor of the literary magazine Criterion.

The following year he studied philosophy at Balliol Col­ lege, Oxford. He has received both a Woodrow Wilson Teaching Fellowship and a Fulbright Grant. Presently he is an instructor in the English Department, teaching coma

"in

position.

He has recently been appointed editor

choose which outfit to fight with whether it was better to use good Soviet. arms with the labor to

-

union front or obsolescent

ites, things like that sion was

soon

-

arms

but,

with the Trotsky­

he said, all ten­ by a sniper's bullet

as

to be relieved

in the retreat from Toledo Alcazar! He

was

shot

through the windpipe, and saved himself by per­ forming a self-tracheotomy with his fountain pen.

He spent the duration in the hospital like the rest of them, writing gentle letters to the parents of those he had known in the Abraham Lincoln Bri­

gade, furious letters to Roosevelt, doing neck exer­ cises, and translating neglected Spanish poets.

When he got back to the States, he found that the letters to the President had made him a security risk, and that, coupled with his injury, kept him out of the Great War he had anticipated and fought to prevent. He took a job as a male nurse during the day and worked the night shift in a munitions factory. He did this for four years, until Hiro­ shima, when he was among the first, in a long letter of denunciation to the New York Times, to protest the act. Later he was arrested for picket­ ing the White House during a national emergency, and spent the duration in a special detention camp in Vermont among Trotskyites, conscientious ob­ jectors, anarchists, a few Japanese truck garden­ ers, and a great many Nazi prisoners of war.

Nevertheless, in the aftermath, suspicion gave way

to

the

bull

market

-

he

was

set

free

and

found to his amazement that not only had his book

of The Tri-Quarterly to replace Mr. Hun­

of Spanish translations been awarded

gerford whose resignation, after six years

Library edition, but his letters to Roosevelt had

as

editor, goes into effect after this issue.

a

Modern

been clandestinely circulated by the Republican areas of anti-Catholic sen­

National Committee in

timent. He made use of several foundation fellow­

ships, took

a

position

at

some

progressive worn-

NORTHWESTERN

TRI-QUARTERLY

playing half-heartedly

saying nothing,

en's college in the East and then, at the height of

evening,

McCarthy scare, presented himself at Purk with an agonizingly long list of his past indiscre tions and dared them to hire him. Of COUriH' thl'Y

with broken autos and listening to the break and full of conversation. I remember picking them up;

the

assure

you,

they we-rt- always perfectly calm and affectionate, but there was nothing easy about them, they searched you out with their eyes and fingers­ it was like picking up a miniature concert pianist or physicist. His wife, Katrin, usually stood in a corner with her arms folded, smiling, her head cocked to one side, listening to her husband put

stances.

But

his students on. One time she evidently grew tired

did. Mr. Pants resisted trends for their own sake, but he knew too the come

must

be­

profundity,"

he

place where

one

irrational- and admit it.

"Irony always

saves

us

from

used to say to close our secret fraternity meeting; "to stand

firm

in the

middle is,

gentlemen,

the

most

difficult

of

I

because it is the most difficult, you must not con­

of this

fuse it with the most moral. It is easy to see what

some

is right; the difficulty is to attain the position from

alto.

which being right matters. That is something I never achieved. Morality without power is mean­

peared for a moment and returned with a home­ made single-string washtub bass viol, to provide a resonant continuo. Things like that were always happening at his place. The first few times I went, I remember having a terrible compulsion to see their bed, and on the pretext of going to

ingless, 'to reverse a political cliche (I assume you are aware it is a cliche), and quite possibly im­ moral as well. The choice always seems to be be­ tween morality and humanity. There are times when civilization itself needs defending; that's humanity. And other times when a single human or perhaps a single idea, must be protected from civilization itself. That's morality. If you ever, gentlemen, see an occasion where the two are combined; don't pass it up." meetings were good, but the best times were the Thursday evenings when he in­ vited a group of us up to his house for spaghetti.

It was a fantastic household. A duplex above a The

secret

garage on the outskirts of Purk. There were such

things as a special chair Mr. Pants had made for himself from seaman's rope and wrought iron, and when he sank into it, it sounded as if a mizzen mast was coming down out of the dark. He was also an amateur archaeologist, and along the length of his concrete block and pine plank book­ cases glittered hundreds of arrowheads, amulets, pestles, coprolites and rare quartzes. Once, when I was going through an old National Geographic in the stacks I came across a picture of him. He was on some expedition, Peru, I think, and the pic­ ture had been taken with him standing in an ex­ cavation to minimize his size in relation to the others clustered about him. His

name

was

in the

credits, although misspelled, but you knew it was him even though he had a sombrero pulled over his face by how tiny the pick hammer seemed in his hand. He dangled it between two fingers. Yet when I asked Mr. Pants about this, he denied ever having been to Peru.

-

-

Mr. Pants had married one of his graduate students, a full twenty years younger than himself, very Jewish, bowlegged, but beautiful like Egyp­ tian queens from the long neck up. She looked as if she had just come in from throwing marbles under the cop's horses' feet at the Haymarket.

They had two children when I last saw them, five-year-old-boy-twins, with sharp dark Semitic features and Iowan dispositions. They sat like Ro­ man wolves under his swollen legs the entire

Spring, 1964

ritual, brought out

a

balalaika, and sang

central European songs in a pure arching When she was through, Mr. Pants disap­

the bathroom I snuck into their bedroom. I

was

amazed to find only a bed of average size, not even a double, and realized that considering his bulk

and the

have

severity of his desires, she

slept literally

on

top of him

or

must

not at all.

The

simplicity of the thing made a great impres­

sion

on

me

at the time.

I mentioned once, dissuaded me from

offhand, that the thing which going into teaching was the homeliness of general faculty wives. Katrin was his the time and he grabbed chair at passing her by the waist, spinning her around to face me.

"You find my wife homely, Mr. What's-your­

name?"

stammered, saying I didn't mean her; that, disconcerting. But fact, I found her quite both of them just stood there and stared at me, and in the end, I had to get up and kiss her.

Just once, lightly. It was the only way to get out of it. He was always putting you in positions I

in

.

.

.

like that, and yet he was never threatened. You see, he wanted us to go through the same experi­ ences he had. It was the only way to perpetuate, justify, empiricism. He had to populate that enor­ mous

The

memory. In

that, he was like my mother.

educator, like the entrepreneur,

wants

you

control you. His life was to build us up above our doubts upon his own fine aspira­ tions and sacrifices, knowing that we would in­ free

so

he

can

evitably construct our own private Soviet-Nazi pact, and betray ourselves. He personalized what otherwise we could have handled abstractly and saved ourselves. It is what American Progressive .Education is all about and why it is the most brutal in the world.

I

didn't

see

much of Mr.

years at Purk. His

care

effect. We withdrew confusions. I

for

more

Pants us

and

my

last few

had its calculated more

into

our

own

longer had the time for a pleas­ ant Thursday evening. He needed us, but it is to no

his credit that he never catered to

proteges.

5

The last time I

saw

him

was

during those first

seed for

one

set of

china, the people who almost

days of Their Revolution. There was a rally on the

always have to say hello.

steps of the library to raise money for refugees after it became apparent that we were ham­ strung. Mr. Pants had been asked to speak in

"They were mostly maids in the beginning," I said, "the ones I really knew."

For instance, I can remember lying on the checkerboard linoleum floor of a kitchen, looking up the legs of my grandmother's laundress. She washed, and 1 watched the mammoth pink Irish thighs caress eachother. If she moved, I followed her along the floor, pushing myself on my back like a grasshopper. She always wore sweat socks

lieu of the President of PUTk who had cancelled out

as

There

a

of

result

cancer

at

the last

moment.

bonfires in the street, and he stood the leaded windows casting his absurd

were

against

shadow up into the arches. He made a short quiet

quoted Burke you know, about" all that evil needs to triumph is that good men do nothing" and after that, fire buckets were passed for contributions. Then one of the singing groups broke out banjos, guitars, and started yelling the good old songs, "Which Side Are You On," "Row the Boat, Michael," "The speech

in

which he

-

-

Union Way," "This Land is My Land." Can you imagine that? It was fantastic! The same music, the same militance just flip-flopped;

gotten

everything!

I

couldn't

they had for­

believe

it.

Mr.

passed me in the crowd and I grabbed his He winked, stooped beneath an coat sleeve. arch, and disappeared into the rare book room.

Pants

.

and crepe soled sandals. I followed underneath her for hours at a time and I can't remember her

saying anything about it, or for that matter, seeing anything.

ever

my

When I was a little older, we moved to the sub­ urbs where

we

had

fine for

me

as

was

no

basement

the maid's

or

attic. That

could be ap­

room

on anyone of a number of pretexts; I hid among the whining gas meters listening to

proached

Lena entertaining friends. They would drive for two hours from South Chicago, enormous mort­

gaged autos, pick her up, go all the way back to the city, get her back in time to fix breakfast. She a lovely girl and a kind of genius. One night

was

caught fire and she just walked into

Incidentally, the money collected brought three Hunky refugees to Purk, fine high-cheekboned

her

apron

the

dining room

very brilliant guys, and one was taken into our secret fraternity for a night to tell how he had

My father tore a curtain down and rolled her up

pitched Molotov cocktails at tanks, and the rest.

those late

The last I heard of Mr. Pants was in

a

newspa­

clipping somebody forwarded to me. He evi­ dently had been passed up for tenure at Purk: and was out on the West Coast teaching at some big public university. He had caused quite an un­ precedented furor there by flunking an entire class for plagiarism. They had all used the same fraternity file or something. He hadn't under­ per

stood that it had been that way for years, that they knew exactly what they were doing. He

thought by catching them up, he could shame them. It was the same thing with us, you see. He believed we were scared because

Proletariat, when the truth ignoring by choice."

the

didn't know

we

was,

we

did

our

in

it.

In the

ablaze and asked to be put out. when

summer,

dates,

she

returned

I used to climb out

on

from

the roof

and listen to the Buicks and Mercuries and De­ ease her back. I watched the parked cars through the pneumatic summer night. And in the morning, at breakfast, I stared at her, amazed that anyone was capable of such savage rhythmic weight.

Otherwise, Lena was unsatisfactory. Her cure for a common cold was to spit it out, and she

Sotos sway

carried

a

when she

coffee

can

with her for that purpose

ill, which was often. We used to watch the wrestling matches on TV with a can between us on the sofa. Occasionally, if I concen­ trated on the spot in the middle of my forehead, I could muster up enough juice to add to the pot. was

Then, in the middle of one winter,

my mother

discovered that all the door handles seemed to

slip slightly in

II

finished eating and said I thought I under­ stood what he meant, which was true. And then I I

tried to think about all the known.

All

those

common

people! The

ones

people I had who live

in

your

hand, and

we

let Lena go.

And you shouldn't get the wrong idea about that, because she let us go too.

"Well, that's nothing," Moulton said, unim­ pressed. "On our street, for instance, there was a funny little woman working for the Scribners who

towns that have "Join the U.S. Marines" in block

turned out to be

letters on the movie marquee instead of a movie, the ones who squat a Jesus on their big dash­

suspicious because one day she saw her walking into the German embassy in a fur coat. We de­ ported that pervert all right. And then there was

boards, the ones who wear nylon socks with a lit­ tle arrow running up the anklebone, the ones who buy the jelly in gas station johns that either speeds you up or holds you back, the ones who buy suction pistols to remove blackheads, the guys who sell four thousand packages of garden 6

a

Nazi spy. Mrs. Scribner got

the time Mrs. Cole had

someone come

out for the

day from the Domestic Service. She was a big strange black woman, in a big white babushka, who didn't seem to know how to do anything.

About noon,

she went up to the attic for NORTHWESTERN

some

TRI-QUARTERLY

and didn't

reason

come

down.

Mrs.

"You

Cole called

were

just bored and you know it. If you

and called, but she didn't answer. She started up­

met this Jimmy Whazit on the street today, that's

stairs but got scared and, as she said later, very wisely, called the police instead. The police went to the attic and found a Negro man stark naked

tho only thing you could talk about. You didn't help him too much, did you?"

"Help him? What more could I do? Jesus, are

on an

old divan."

you

"OK," I said, "but I'll bet you didn't know Jimmy Gene Ray, did you? He was common. His

ever

a

snob! I don't pretend to know all the

but I know

answers

something

of what Jimmy

father drove a cab in town. They lived in the city

Gene felt. For instance, I worked a summer in a filling station, Rudy's, up on the main drag.

and the father

I worked there from six to ten at

brought his son out to play in the

night, cleaned

while he worked. That's where I met him.

the grease pits and lift, washed the pumps, closed

In the rose garden. I knew him before you moved

the place down. Polish Rudy who ran the station was a good guy. He had a knot in his back from

park

here,

here and talk

radio

the

He used to sit

in about fifth or

pretty

grade. right sing. We could pick things off well

and

harmonize.

And

we

weren't ashamed of it.

You'd be surprised how People would stand around the

many people cupola just to hear us. When we quit they would are.

things like, "This is certainly a nice way to spend a Sunday." Young girls would pinch their escort's arm, gaze into his face, and he would straighten up and perhaps ask us if we knew their say

favorite.

We

never

did.

Jimmy Gene did them, and I went along. That along these walks, right here in the garden, and pull up ladies' Sunday dresses.

to

was

J ap bayonet and whenever he lifted anything arms like a road map.

the veins stood out in his

Every night when I came to relieve him he asked me good naturedly, "Getting any ass lately, guy?

Getting any on the side?" Then he would grin and take a mock swing at me, making a noise of destruction with his tongue.

Once he pulled it in front of

run

a

customer,

some

Pontiac. "Hey punk," he yelled. I the windshield while he got the gas. washing

salesman in was

But there were other things we did too. Or rath­ er

a

a

"Getting any on the side lately?"

But I was ready for him. After all, it least the hundredth time he had said it.

was

at

And I

front, chasing him, see, and then when we got near the appropriate couple, he would veer in, and with a grand swipe, send that lady's skirt

is there

were

wiping the window as I answered. "Oh, place for it there too?"

Well, that was it. Again I had humiliated and got away clean, as it appeared I was defending myself. Polish Rudy's mouth dropped open and

above her midriff.

he doubled up over the fender until the tank over­

did any of the yanking myself. I ran in at first the pretext, then the judge. front; along

The

rose

Jimmy Gene would

I

run

in

and

run

as

if I

never

I announced the extent of the attempt. 'Legger,' I yelled, if it were that, 'yowsa,' if there was a

glimpse of those great pastel triangles, and

of

course, 'You got it,' too. The thing was incomplete

without me. Jimmy Gene did it. But I humiliated."

"So there was Jimmy Gene," I pointed out into the roses,

"stooped over at fifty miles an hour, yelling wild with helpless rage, his fine defenses outflanked, the lady locked in a swirl of her own devices, and then me, gliding by, the

escort

noting the

moment.

"

'Crotch-hopping,' Jimmy Gene called it. He so got good at it that he could run full speed bent close to the ground like an Indian scout and lift everything, crinolines, halfslips, knit wear, even shifts. And

we

were

in dead earnest. We did it

because it was better than singing in the cupola, because nothing like that had ever happened in

garden before, and because we left in wake, astonishment. It's a very important thing to be able to pull a big surprise these days." the

rose

our

"You

weren't

taking

any

chances,"

Moult

broke in, "those people lost their capacity for dis­

gust

a

long time ago."

"The

people aren't important," I said, "it was the way Jimmy Gene Ray and I worked together.

Don't you

Spring,

see

1964

that?"

went

on

a

filled and gas cascaded over the Pontiac's trunk. salesman was the same way; helplessly

pointing a finger at Rudy, then at me, shaken in a noiseless rupturing guffaw. Rudy, soaked with gasoline and tears limped around the car, hold­ ing himself, repeating that comeback over and "Is there a over in hisses between his laughs.

Is there a Hee place Haa," and so on.

Finally he disappeared down the ramp into the grease pit, still squeezing himself.

I made change for the salesman but he closed ..

...

...

his hand around mine when I gave it to him.

"Keep it buddy," he said, "You've made my day." Then he put his hydromatic in gear and went.

I had gotten

$1.35 clear, and for the first time

I knew how Jimmy Gene felt about those strange­ ly flattered ladies in the rose garden, and their

tips. Our lasting gifts

through such spon­ spontaneity, when it works, is deeply practiced. It's practice that makes a comeback to the hundredth repetition possible, the capacity to run at full speed close to the ground. Practicing to be spontaneous has a taneous

humiliation.

come

But

lot to do with commonness.

At any rate, late that night when Rudy, the salesman, and I had tired of surprising each oth­ er, I was very depressed and felt like driving the Jeep. I didn't want to take it out on the highway

7

where I

liable, so I just circled the pumps in tires hissing on the hot tar, cruising

was

second,

around until it was time to close. So I know what

happens when you're common. I've done my es­ pionage.

Moulton didn't say anything at first. Then he stretched out, peering over his glasses. "Wow," he said. "Labor theory of value at thirteen. That must be some kind of a record."

I knew what he meant in say

a

hands with Hermann, he takes the wife's coat and

bigger. Then we all sit down in the booth and he tells us what's good. We don't ask. He tells us. 'My wife's not very hungry so she wants the small filet, the boy wants a hot fudge walnut sundae without the walnuts, and you

tells the kid he's

know what I want.' He takes the order and then comes

son's

way, but I didn't

aren't have

As

helping them. The salesman should just given you the dough and let it go at that.

Even if he misunderstood. And when we're the

salesmen, we shouldn't reward because that's so pretentious, and we shouldn't tell them what to do because that's just bossism. We ought to just hand out the cash, to Rudy, to Africa, to Jimmy Gene Whatsit and expect a little civility and be happy that they don't have a reason to beat you the head."

over

"Isn't that all you can do? At least then an excuse."

they

don't have

"Christ, man, who's the snob? You just reverse it, that's all. You don't accuse them; you just as­ sume them. You take them for granted. You leave them alone. That's the final prejudice, you know. That's the last thing people want. To be left alone. The only class distinction I know of is between those people who prefer to be left alone when they're screwed up, and those who want to be comforted. You may be on the right track, kiddo, but you'll take a lot of cleaning up."

It was funny. He ignored them but he liked I

them.

wanted to

help

them

because

I

didn't

like them.

Moult looked

at

me

quizzically.

"What do you want out of

them, anyway?" he

right away with two old John Jami­ a cranberry cocktail for

shaved ice and

m'boy.

anything.

"And I suppose what you're saying," he went on, "is that by going along with these people you

back

on

finish I call Hermann

we

over

and mention

that the kid is

captain of his ball team and is currently hitting a hefty .527. Hermann is delight­ ed by this, and the kid dumps on me the rest of the dinner for embarrassing him like that.

When we're done Hermann forgives me for and overtipping as I forgive his obsequiousness when Hermann goes home to his bachelor fiat, -

removes

his white coat and his

black

enormous

shoes, he lies down on the bed and hopes my kid will keep his streak to

ask

about

me

going so it won't be difficult

it

next

week.

See, because if you can't have all that, if you can't pull that sort of thing off effortlessly you spend your whole god-damned life looking for it."

Moulton's mouth W3S wide open. "Why, there's more to clean up than I thought," he laughed.

I searched for a few moments for something more to say. I wanted to make it particularly big -

and

reduce the argument.

"OK," I said, "what happens when the common people are Commies?"

It didn't take him any time at all.

"Well, man" he said laconically,

"you just

that's all. But if you're in­

yourself away,

gave

terested, just look at our history. Look, we got our wealth looking for something else, salvation or something. And we got our power without looking for it at all. That makes some people think we've been playing our second team all these years. But

asked.

what it means, I think, is that as long as we keep

"Well, it's very simple what I want," I said slowly, proud I could make him ask me a big

I mean if we really pay any looking around attention to them, it'll be the first time we ever met anything head-on except ourselves, and I'm afraid, then, we'll lose ourselves."

I had given myself away because I had used up my last Big Question. I was glad it was overwith.

"All right," I said. "I don't have any sharp theories like that, but you didn't let me finish about Jimmy Gene Ray."

question. family

"What I want is to be able to take my

to

a

good

restaurant

once

restaurant has been around for

a

week.

This

long time, al­ ways been run by the same family. One of them is always there, overseeing things. On the inside, it has wood

no -

music

not

of the

or

a

pictures, but just a lot of red

redwood

-

but real red wood.

best restaurants in the world.

It is

They make their own ice-cream, bread, and chili. They put a dish of butter on the table, and you put it on your plate yourself. And the catsup is in its own unwiped bottle, instead of in a plastic gun with water. They ask you if you want seconds. In this restaurant there is a waiter, say named Hermann, who is not a member of the family, but has been there from the beginning anyway. He knows every­ one's name, including mine; he knows my wife and kid on sight. Once a week, we come in. I shake one

8

.

So

as

a

.

.

finisher,

I

told

Moult

as

much

could remember. I told him about how

we

as

I

fished

in the

park duck pond after dusk. It was full of goldfish, some a foot long, bloated with bread

thrown from the shore. Whole loaves were thrown

slung them like disci. Slice after miracle-whipped sun-cracked, vitamin­ enriched golden crusted manna spiraled out over there.

slice

Kids

of

the water.

If

a

duck got to the bread first he would eat it

this way: down with the eight-color head like

NORTHWESTERN

a

TRI-QUARTERLY

right through the center of the slice. it, hammering, squeezing the wah'!' from the pulp before he swallowed it, wcrking from the center out, until there was nothtng It-'t but a circle of crust. Then with a single movem ent he broke the circle, dove beneath one tattered end, and leaning back, swallowed it like a snake. rocker arm,

He

kept

at

The carp, goldenfish, were more subtle. When they got there first, the slice would quaver, bob, until in

matter of

minutes, its miracle fibers sufficiently punished, simply separated like a cloud, broke into a film of particles which sank to orange blunt lipless mouths. a

the bread

Either way they both got fat. And we would lie in the shrubbery at night, Jimmy Gene and I, with loaf of bread between us, and with a hooked and sinker, pull those carp flopping and

a

string

shimmying

across

the olive

water

like

nothing

at all.

POEMS

By Edith B. Farnsworth The editors

are

pleased to be able to present these

poems by Edith 8. Farnsworth, Assistant Professor of Medicine at the Northwestern Medical School. The

new

Tri-Quarterly first printed two of her poems in the fall of J959, and in the following fall a much wider selection, together with an article by her on modern poetry. Dr. Farnsworth, who is a practicing physician and a research specialist, as well as a teacher and poet, is a native Chicagoan. She attended as undergraduate both the University of Chicago and Northwestern, and took her M.D. at the latter in J939. She has served Chicago hospitals in various capacities and is presently on the Attending Staff of Passavant Memorial Hospital. She has published extensively in her field of internal medicine.

We never ate them, of course, they

were

filthy

fish. We just put them in a pile and let them stran­ gle. They stank even before they died.

Once in

a

while, too,

we

got

a

duck. Uninten­

greedy bill swooped was nothing do. rather were two things. could Or there you With the hook gone smoothly to the gullet you could just yank and rip that duck right through the throat. The red bread would sink, the duck would scream, stand in the water, swim a spiral, tionally, of course. When and swallowed in

one

a

motion there

drown.

Thank Y 00 Mr. Stevens * The prince is written in cuneiform,

Molded, imprinted in character, The Prince is a hieroglyph.

Rotunda his egg-plant his leptoderm, Mahogany brown to lavender, By no means a pineapple.

Hieroglyphic is not agitating

That only happened a few times and usually we

just let the string go. Then the old bird would swing away, trailing twenty feet of twine from the corner of his mouth. He swallowed it slowly, I suppose, unconscious of it at first, only when it caught on some bottom snag and jerked him off course did he know. Gradually, the hook's legacy would be absorbed until it formed a compact sod­ den mass against the ribs, a false entangled heart next to the gaudy real one.

I did

The Egg-plant of a Prince

some

research

once

And the prince does not prance at night In Thebes

or

Sebastopol.

But the egg-plant is a sleep-annihilating

And if She were sleeker or slender, More perfectly curved, more prescient,

exhilarating, Handsomer, more elegant, I could never sleep at all.

to ascertain whether •

duck's gullet is like that of the oyster or deer who make functional use of their cancers. But I a

found nothing. I would like to think that he has such coating, no inner defenses, and that the

"Extracts from Addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas." by Wallace Stevens.

no

MY OWN

hook, wound with string by the convulsions of his own chemistry, rests against his chest like a lock­

When I came back to my own, last night,

soldier's lapel. And that one day, while flying south for the winter, a shot will ring out and he will fall into the reeds. But before et

on

the

the inside of

a

him, as in the movies, he will awake, and inspecting himself, find that the ab­

dogs

reach

sorbed old wound has deflected the shot from soft­ er

regions, that he just has been dazed, that

a

miracle has saved his life.

So

we

and the strench of in­

consequential but still immoral death.

Gene the Carp and me the Duck.

Spring, 1964

The crows still planed in after-light, The low sun stained The empty land with past.

From out of the tall trees

The Red Bird had departed.

With its long coiled crest, With its great plumed tail,

lay in the bushes with bread, rolls of

hemp, irreversible hooks,

The day, and the day, were nearly gone;

Jimmy

Male and female subtly expressed, From the tallest of my own fall trees The Scarlet Bird had taken flight Back to the South Quadrant, broken-hearted.

9

Night Fishermen of Chicago

Their avid fans over the rocks.

And if from the Great Lake were to come,

The fish run by the shores to-night,

In the footprints of the long ground-swell

The fish are running heavy, and from

And the deep hours of the night,

Certain dingy doors emerge

The jewelry of beauty from

The anglers: let's go down to the

The dead, if from the drowned who dwell,

Lake to fish, let's sit on the edge,

Dissolved, suspended, in the sight

Let's set up our poles and light

Of none, there were to come

Our lights, we'll take a folding chair

The judges with their white jabots,

And hope, we'll bait our lines

Evangels and their long flambeaux, The orphans with their dolls; If the divine despair were there And with its subtle, unpredicted glow

And take a lunch, we'll take a chance, We'll fish through the night to-night While the fish are running.

The great fresh lake is full to-night

Would flood the water-

And fuming, straining, out of

Then what allure

Mind and into sight,

Would draw the fishermen to light

It brims its glooming, ebbing surge

Their lights and pass the lonely night

Over the city's concrete shores.

Now from a hot hand eager on the verge Of darkling luck, the baited fishhook flies, Swings on the tensed line to submerge A sparkling hope into the cold surge,

Rising and falling at the city's stony doors.

Behind the curved backs

crouching on the brink Of foundering fortune, flow the damped streets Apathetic, furnaces nightfallen, banked For the long rest; the old dog hesitates At the comer, the cat waits For the passing car, to slink Into its destiny; the cellar vibrates

With the purring of the ocelot.

With the whining ragweed of the vacant lot

Periodic lilacs in the city parks, With rows of elms and prostrate thyme,

Fishing for perch?

Will they who fish for luck endure The bleak glow at the edge of the world, The tokens by the long waves hurled

Upon the rocks?

Translucent to the dawning day, The tender, milk-white undersides And moss green scales lie still.

Thirst fills The gaping mouth and glues

The parching gills.

The sun comes up; the seagull shrills,

Soaring from the far seawall.

Wild luck from the dark-bodied lake

Springs high with the hook, to fall Expiring in the fisherman's pail.

November, 1960.

Tremble damply in their dark procession,

Deployed to be the scene of love and crime.

And if in the great dark lake there were

Lavender as in the sea,

Rockweed, kelp, anemone, What organpoint in harmony, Dissolved, suspended, would concur To sound the marine litany?

Amaryllis Amaryllis, lily Asphodel, Waxing form Elaborelle;

The fishermen, sitting on the floor,

Does it launch into the ages

In the dark of all that seems to be,

Or does it only grow,

On the border of mortality,

Asphodel, slow, slow In limpid cages Of my eyes?

I cannot tell the time,

The heavy buttocks and the hamstrings

Spry, wind-breakers, sweaters and the denim Fly, all gripping hard within the door Of the world; those solitaries Stretched upon the water's flanks Like suckling cubs in new-born ranks

-They angle for a talisman and Slyly cast the baited soul Into the swell, beneath the dark pole

Of a dark sky.

Decode the rages,

Parching in the winter slime.

Soar daily in the twisted ages,

Hirondelle, With waxing torrid wings Tilt, weld the clouded skies, Measure the numbered stages

Long are the fluent waves that roll

Undecipherable;

In from the south-east. Hand

With graphic ribs, with swelling heart,

Over nerveless hand they climb the docks,

Wax slowly, amaryllis, lily

Finger the slimy piles and spread

Asphodel.

10

NORTHWESTERN

TRI-QUARTERLY

symbolize in their form the re­ experience and the attempt to master and give adequate emotional expression to those realities. These buildings are constituent facts of man's history, and their revelation is a a

By Carl W. Condit

genuine style

alities

-

man's

of

part of truth itself.

ARCHITECTURE in the

The

refined

architectural

classicism

that

be­

dominant in the latter half of the eight­ eenth century eventually faced the social and came

economic revolution

scale

brought about by the large­

of

steam power to industrial application and techniques by the new mechanical inventions that accompanied this application. The first clumsy steam engine might have seemed remote from the proud dignity of the Royal Crescent or Cumberland Terrace; yet it represented a force that soon engulfed all the arts and all the modes

NINETEENTH CENTURY

of action of Western civilization.

In the face of

this unprecedented phenomenon, the ancient and vital art of architecture was threatened by pow­

The Antecedents of

erful

disintegrative forces. With respect to utili­ needs, the traditional techniques of con­ struction eventually fell hopelessly short of the meeting requirements and taking advantage of the opportunities presented by the new age of tarian

the Chicago School

mechanized

industrialization.

T he architectural and technical achievement

vivalism

of the

technical forces of the

Chicago school marked the establishment of a new style of architecture, but at the same time it was the culmination of a structural evolu­ tion that extended

over

the century preceding it.

This dual character was reflected in the two

ma­

jor developments of the school, which existed side by side throughout the central portion of its history. One was highly utilitarian, marked by a strict

adherence to function

and

and

structure,

in great part derived from certain forms of urban vernacular building in Europe and the was

eastern United States. The other

plastic, the product of and the

conscious

symbolic forms

expressive

of

a

new

was

formal and

theoretical

determination to

spirit

create

to

Thus the architecture of the Chicago school must be interpreted from several standpoints: first, in terms of the structural techniques and building forms from which it grew; second, in relation to the architectural dress, so to speak, of the revi­

building of the nineteenth century; and finally, in comparison with the later development of the stylistic revolution which it set in motion.

Style in architecture represents or stands for

va1istic

those

essential

form, ornament,

characteristics

of

and detail that

are

construction, common

to

all the

important structures of any definable pe­ riod in history. But it also stands for those techni­

cal and aesthetic

qualities

of the artistic

duced

product

age

and

re­

social

and

frequently

pro­

successful

and aesthetically functionally valid works of building art, but as the century moved on revivalism grew increasingly out of touch with the realities of the time. The ultimate

artistic failure of architecture in the nineteenth

century

can

to form

a

be stated very

simply as the failure

consistent style. It was the failure to provide, in its own vocabulary, an aesthetic dis­ cipline that would combine the expression of sci­

technology, mechanized industry, and mod­ life with the deeper-lying emotional needs of the human spirit. ence,

ern

urban

Architecture had once been what it

rich

create, in short, a new style contemporary American culture.

-

struggled bravely

Architectural

with the

-

ought to be

the structural art. It is the combined art and

technique of designing, shaping, organizing, and decorating the stone, iron, wood, and glass of which a building is composed. It is not one of these activities alone, but all of them together, making an organic unit with a form and expres­ sion

and

use

of its

own.

But

as

the nineteenth

century progressed, the architect, instead of be­ builder or a designer of a whole increasingly became the person who applies an arbitrary dress to a structure which was largely designed and wholly built by others who cared little about the niceties of scale, pro­ portion, and rhythm. The architect did the best

ing

a

master

structure,

that

he

could in the face of unprecedented de­

mands, but it became more and more difficult for him to

ditions of human existence and out of the aspira­ tions and powers of human beings. We rightly

develop an exterior form that grew out of and gave expression to the dominant social fac­ tors of the time, chiefly the new conditions of ur­

feel that the buildings of a certain style

ban life in the great centers of trade and

that grow directly and organically out of the

Spring, 1964

-

con­

if it is

manu-

11

facture.

tury,

The failure of the nineteenth-century architects,

however, cannot be ascribed simply to perversity or

to

ignorance;

nor

can

it be understood

escape into fantasies that seemed

more

as

an

pleasing

than the harsh realities of the time. It is true that

before the challenge of the machine

they sought refuge in styles with literary, historical, and even ethical associations. But that challenge was so ex­ treme, so complex, and so unprecedented that much of the best talent went to

finding ways in

which

forms

well-known

architectural

could be

adapted to the new exigencies. In a positive sense, the architects of the time reflected the extent to

which the

was

age

imbued

with

the

historical

spirit and its associated points of view. In this re­ spect the nineteenth century was unique: no other period was so deeply conscious of the historical process

as

awareness.

an

essential dimension of man's self­

The borrowing of exterior architectur­

aJ details was often indiscriminate and sometimes

merely capricious, so that when we view the cen­ tury as a whole from our own vantage point, we feel that styles came and went like fashions in dress. But if we consider the names of only a few of the best American architects of the past

cen-

This article

is, with some additions and different illustrations, the first chapter of Carl W. Condit's book The Chicago School of Architecture, which will be pub­

lished this summer

by the University of Chicago Press.

This book is an extensive revision and expansion of his

earlier (1952) The Rise of the Skyscraper.

Condit is Professor of English at Northwestern, where he directs the Senior Tutorial

Reading Program

and

teaches a course in the development of science. His in­ terests are primarily technological and historical. His two

volume American Building Art (published by the Oxford

University Press in 1960 and 1961) is a pioneer work on the history of structural technology in the United States, including bridges, highways, and the structures of water­ way control as well as buildings in the usual sense of the word. He was one of the founders of the Society for the History of Technology and is co-editor of its iourna/, Technology and Culture.

we

realize that, however much the

sion of revivals prevented them from

succes­

forming an

architectural style, they were in no way inhibited creating impressive individual buildings.

from

Some of

them, indeed, are superior to anything produced today, at least in the richness of the visual experience that they can offer.

American architecture in the nineteenth century began with the variations on Palladian and allied classical forms which are generally comprehend­ ed in the term "Federal style." Thomas Jeffer­ son was the best-known exponent of its Roman enthusiasm, but many others contributed to a body of architectural work distinguished by a harmony, dignity, and repose that seem remote from our frantic time. The Greek Revival might be regard­ ed as a simplification of the earlier movement, sometimes combining a dedicated antiquarian­ ism with a perfectly sound understanding of its adaptability to the needs of the young republic.

The possibilities of this romantic classicism, as it has sometimes been called, are most fully re­ vealed in the work of William Strickland, Robert Mills, and Thomas Us tick Walter. we

have

The revivals which followed the Greek came at

shorter intervals. By mid-century, Gothic was in the ascendant. It is best represented in the ec­ clesiastical designs of James Renwick and Rich­ ard Upjohn in New York. Shortly after the Civil War the restless age demanded another change, and the Gothic was superseded by the Romanes­ most poserfully and creatively exploited by Henry Hobson Richardson in ways that ultimate­ ly pointed toward genuinely contemporary forms.

The last phase before the end of the century was the Renaissance Revival, dominated by the great town houses and public buildings of McKim, Mead and White. In the heyday of their lavish practice, however, Sullivan was enjoying his larg­ est commissions and thus providing the perfect que,

antithesis to the revivalistic eclecticism mode

of

to

was

spirit of the age. Yet

continue

as

the

dominant

building until the third decade

of the

twentieth century.

For all the excellence of individual

buildings,

whole pattern of architectural development revealed to a growing degree a serious malaise the

at the roots of nineteenth-century culture. The

ar­

tist in part creates the character of his time, but he must at the same time be nourished by what his age gives him. Architecture, in the period of its decline, reflected certain cultural failures of the

new

can

now

industrial see,

was

age. Most pervasive, as we the collapse of the traditional

well-ordered cosmos that embraced a moral, or at least

a

rational,

sociated

as

with this

well

as

a

physical order. As­

the progressive de­ civic world in which human

loss

was

cline of a public or beings might find scope for meaningful action and the potential self-realization that accompanies it.

The growth of the industrial megalopolis of the

NORTHWESTERN

TRI-QUARTERLY

nineteenth century quickly destroyed the remain­ ing vestiges of the humane urban order that once

provided some measure of self-identity and digm­ ty to the citizen. The past century seemed stubl« on the surface, but in truth the unstable and ep­ hemeral quality of many of its cultural achieve­ ments provided increasing evidence of an inner disharmony and confusion that persists to this day, although in different forms.

What the nineteenth century suffered from was in part a split personality, a "cultural schizo­ phrenia," as Sigfried Giedion explained it. This state has been characteristic of other highly crea­ tive periods of confused orientation.

ritual and

aesthetic

the

or

rapidly changing spi­

emotional

The

experiences

of

statisfactions

people

were

split off from their intellectual and practical ac­ tivities. Science and technology parted company from art, and both were ultimately divided into an ever growing number of separate, isolated compartments. Eventually specialization reached

such

a

point that

Thus at

a

could not

one

world beyond one's less comprehend it.

even

see

special activity,

own

the

much

time when the technical and intellec­

tual elements of culture

were

the

humanizing discipline,

one

most in need of

a

best calculated to

pressing directly, simply,

and honestly the sys­ they employed. However, some of the bridge engineers had a strong sense of form. They looked upon techniques somewhat tem

as

of

construction

the artist looks

on

painting

mechanized industrial culture.

The first cast-iron structure

was

a

small arch

the River Severn at Coalbrookdale, England. It was built by the iron founders Abra­ ham Darby and John Wilkinson between the

bridge

over

Following the precedent of bridge construc­ tion, the builders employed the fixed semicircular arch as the only acceptable form. Thomas Tel­ ford's great project of 1801 for a bridge over the years

1775 and 1779.

two thousand years of masonry

Thames at London involved

achieve it in the public world failed to realize its

600-foot span. In its

highest function. Architecture in one of its aspects is a utilitarian art. Function, structure, and form are indissolubly wedded. Applied science and tech­ nology provide it with materials and with their known mechanical, thermal, and chemical prop­ erties; the artist's sense of form and order and harmony, his capacity to create symbolic im­ ages, transform the physical elements into em­ otionally satisfying objects that live in the imagin­ ations of men while giving voice to their ideals, aspirations, and capacities. A genuine architec­ ture is a technical-aesthetic synthesis that makes it possible for the world of technology to enter into the domain of feeling and morality.

the

In order to achieve this end architects

the material of his

poetry, and they wanted to celebrate the pow­ ers they possessed by means of a new kind of monumentalism. Industry had provided them with new structural materials, cast and wrought iron, and they exploited their possibilities with an exuberance unparalleled in the history of building. Early in the nineteenth century some of the bridge engineers, imbued with a sense of har­ mony and proportion characteristic of trained ar­ chitects, developed structural forms that pointed toward an organic architecture appropriate to a

or

a

flattened arch of

size, its effortless grace, and

delicacy of its iron ornament, it would have a major aesthetic achievement. Telford's finest completed span was the suspension bridge over Menai Strait, built between 1819 and 1826, been

Brooklyn Bridge, East River, New York City, Washington Roebling, engineers.

1869-83. John and

in the

nineteenth century eventually had to turn their back on imitations of the past, for they were faced

with

conditions

and

opportunities that had

no

precedent. They had to master new materials and offer solutions to new problems. The forms of the

past, however vital they once were, came to have little meaning in the face of the conditions which came to

the

exist in New York or Chicago. But just as

great majority

of

nineteenth-century

archi­

tects seemed to have lost contact with the social

and technical realities of their time, individuals

began to appear who, consciously or unconsicous­ ly, accepted the challenge of their age and built directly and boldly on its basis.

It was the engineers who first pointed the way a new structural art might profitably take.

that

They built primarily for use, and whatever form their structures took at least had the merit of ex-

Spring, 1964

13

the first big bridge to embody the new system of suspended construction.

The

of Telford's

success

the extensive

Menai

employment of the

Bridge led to suspension prin­

ciple in Europe, England, and America. The tri­ umph of the cable form came with the Brooklyn Bridge, built by John and Washington Roebling over the years from 1869 to 1883. Contemporary with this structure was James B. Eads's bridge over the Mississippi at St. Louis, built between 1868 and 1874. For this bridge Eads returned to the older form, using a series of fixed steel arches of 520-foot span. Most significant for Chi­ cago architecture was the profound effect that the bridge exercised on Louis Sullivan. Equal in its architectonic excellence

was

Gustave Eiffel's

Garabit Viaduct, completed in 1884. The great en­ gineer of the Eiffel Tower used the two-hinged arch in the Garabit span and thus

provided the large-scale demonstration of another impressive form, the crescent-shaped structural

art

with

a

arched truss. These immense bridges stand to­ day, monumental pioneer exhibitions of a new building technology rich in promise for the whole

architectural

art.

immediate significance for the archi­ tects, especially those of the Chicago school, was Of

more

application of iron to conventional types of building. Cast-iron structural elements began to appear in the eighteenth century. An early and

the

extensive

use

of the material

was

in St. Anne's

Church, Liverpool (1770-72), in which all the in­ that is, the compressive mem­ terior columns bers were of cast iron. An even larger installa­ -

-

tion formed part of the internal frame of William Strutt's Calico Mill at

Derby, England (1792-93), composed of iron columns and timber beams. Within the following decade Matthew Boulton and James Watt began to build multi­ story factories with complete internal frames of

which

was

cast iron. In the United States the

framing

first

new

system of

by the architect-engi­ who introduced cast­

adopted Strickland, iron columns as balcony supports in the Chestnut Street Theater in Philadelphia (1820-22). Within a generation Daniel Badger and James Bogardus, the two most influential builders in the pioneer phase of iron construction, established their re­ spective factories in New York (Badger in 1847 and Bogardus the following year). Their build­ ings often revealed great refinement of form, with street elevations reduced to a rhythmic pat­ tern of rectangular openings enframed by the columns and spandrel girders of the iron frame. neer

was

William

Eads Bridge, Mississippi River, St. Louis, Mi>5ouri, 1868·74. James B. Eads, Chief en9ineer.

of construction

was

used

by George

H.

Johnson

in the warehouse of the United States Warehous­

ing Company in Brooklyn, New York (1860). An early example of large-scale iron framing that prefigured the dominant mode of the Chicago was the John Shillito Store in Cincinnati, (1876-77), designed by James McLaughlin.

By combining interior iron columns and beams with narrow masonry piers in the exterior en­ closure, McLaughlin turned all four elevations of the block-long six-story building into the open cellular walls that the Chicago school later de­

work Ohio

veloped into forms of great architectonic power.

Meanwhile, the builders of England and the Continent ties

of

rapidly exploiting the potentiali­ techniques introduced by

were

the

structural

by Boulton and Watt. One of the most promising and original works of the nineteenth century was Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace, Strutt and

erected for the London

International

Exhibition

reduced the huge building to a tr ansparent, neutral skin of glass stretched over a delicate frame of iron members. The construc­ of

1851.

P axton

tion of the

Crystal Palace was carried out by as­ sembling prefabricated elements of curtain wall and skeleton. It

was

an

invention the useful

con­

sequences of which are

just beginning to be real­ ized by the building industry. A similar system of construction

was

embodied

in

Carstensen

and

Gildemeister's Crystal Palace for the New York Exhibition of 1853. The great significance of both these

buildings was largely lost on the architects

The structure of James Bogardus that most clear­

of the nineteenth century. The fact that they

ly anticipated the iron-framed skyscraper devel­ oped by the Chicago builders was the shot tower

erected for the ephemeral purposes of an expo­ sition contributed to the feeling that they were

McCullough Shot and Lead (1855). In this tower brick were carried panels entirely on the posts and beams of the cast iron frame. A similar system constructed

for the

Company in New York

14

.:....

novelties

without serious architectural meaning. because of its relative perma­

More

influential

nence

is

St.

were

Hippolyte Fontaine's warehouse of the near Paris (completed in 1866).

au en docks

NORTH WESTERN

TRI-QU ARTERL Y

,':

.

Shot tower. pany.

63-65

McCullough Shot and Lead Com­ Centre

Street. New York City.

1855.

Home Insurance Building. Chicago. architect. The first multi-story office iron

1884-85.

William

LeBaron

building supported

Jenney,

internal and steel skeleton and thus the prototype of the contemporary sky­ on

an

scraper.

two

materials

perfectly

were

integrated

in

a

form of great size. St. Pancras Station (1863-76), the creation of W. H. Barlow, R. M. Ordish, and Sir George Gilbert Scott, revealed further refine­ ments of the glass and iron vault in a structure The warehouse is a larger and more thoroughly developed example of the early essays in iron and

Johnson.

produced by Bogardus good evidence that this extraordinary is the first multistory structure carried building entirely on an iron frame without any assistance from masonry bearing elements. It is thus a strict­ ly utilitarian forerunner of Jenney's Home Insur­ ance Building in Chicago (1884-85). Within five years Jules Saulnier produced one of the curiosi­ ties of early iron framing in his Menier Chocolate Works at Noisiel, France (1871-72). The braced framing in the curtain walls of this building, un­ doubtedly derived from the iron bridge truss, is an important step in the development of wind­ bracing for the tall building.

A peculiar problem posed by the industrial de­ mands of the nineteenth century was the need framing There

is

to span wide enclosures without intermediate sup­

ports. The early market halls and theaters

were

in traditional forms. The train shed of

examples the metropolitan railway terminal, however, of­ fered novel difficulties because of its great size and unique function. The engineers attacked the

problem with characteristic directness and cour­ age, and by mid-century they had produced the great balloon shed that

was

once

the most strik­

ing feature of the transportation structures. I. K. Brunel and M. D. Wyatt, in Paddington Station, London (1852-54), created a huge vault of wrought­ iron ribs carrying a shell of glass and iron. The

Spring,

1964

of even greater dimensions. The first Grand Cen­ tral Terminal in New York (1869-71), designed by John B. Snook and Isaac

American structure

dinary

Buckhout, was the first

comparable to these extraor­

British achievements. The train sheds of

the nineteenth century embodied

a

prevision of

the twentieth-century builder's treatment of space, not

as

inclosed volume, but

an

element

integrated

with

an

as

a

open

free-flowing buoyant

and

structure.

The great bulk of iron-framed buildings in the past century belong to the domain of vernacular architecture. Although it is impossible to define this type of building exactly and to separate it from architecture consciously designed for ex­ pressive and symbolic ends, one can readily dis­ tinguish its dominant visual and utilitarian char­ acteristics. Vernacular

building comprehends all by carpenters, masons, ironworkers, and others with the requisite tech­ nical skills but without formal training in architec­ tural design, and planned usually for strictly utili­ those structures erected

tarian

containment, and protection. purely func­ but this of does not the preclude possibility tional, its possessing a genuine aesthetic distinction. The earliest colonial residences and churches belonged to the vernacular tradition of the carpenter-build­ ends

such

as

shelter,

Vernacular form is thus

er, but

as

the American economy

expanded, such

building was progressively restricted to barns, mills, warehouses, factories, and the like. These structures are usually marked by extreme sev15

Grand Central Terminal, Park Avenue at 42nd Street, New York City, ISb9-71. John B. Snook, architect; Isaac C. Buckhout, en­ gineer. Interior of the trainshed, looking toward the head house, or

station

building.

Crystal Palace, London Exhibition,

IS51.

Joseph Paxton, designer.

Interior of the central transverse vault.

erity of form, an elemental geometry of flat rec­ tangular wall planes and gabled roofs. The timber mill building, for example, might consist simply of a New England braced frame covered by a sheathing of clapboard siding. The common struc­ tural alternative was a building of masonry bear­ ing walls with an interior frame of wooden col­ umns and beams, wooden trusses, or combinations of timber and iron. Materials

were

generally di­

rectly presented, and openings were as simple in shape, as regularly spaced, and as large as struc­ tural

exigencies permitted. The use of

cast and

wrought iron for wall framing, as in the build­ ings of James Bogardus, allowed the builder to open the exterior walls almost entirely to glass.

Many of the surviving vernacular classics of the pre-iron age are the early mills of New England and the barns of eastern Pennsylvania.

Chicago's first major contribution to the build­ ing art grew out of the vernacular tradition. The balloon frame, invented in 1833 by Augustine D. Taylor, was an enormously useful and influential variation on the heavy New England frame. For the stout girts and posts of the older system, Tay­ lor substituted a closely ranked series of light studs, joists, roof rafters, and purlins joined by simple nailing. The resulting structure was usual­ ly covered with clapboard siding nailed to the studs. St. Mary's Church in Chicago, built by Taylor, was the first building carried on a bal­ loon frame. From it grew a countless progeny in on the farms of the West. One can

the towns and

16

trace a fairly direct line from the little church through the cast-iron fronts of Badger and Bogar­ dus to the mature architecture of steel framing that Chicago produced at the end of the century.

A good example of vernacular building in ma­ sonry, wood, and iron is one of the few survivors of the Chicago fire of 1871: the Inbound Freight House of the Illinois Central Railroad, on South Water Street a block east of Michigan Avenue.

Originally built in 1855, the interior timber work of the station was destroyed by the fire and re­ placed in 1872. The building measures 45 by 572 feet 6 inches on the exterior in plan, with a clear interior space of 40-foot span. The bearing walls, 2 feet 6 inches thick, are composed of irregular blocks of Niagara limestone, which was availa­ ble in great quantities following the completion of the Illinois and Michigan Canal in 1847. The gable roof is supported by purlins in turn resting on curious trusses built up of heavy timbers and wrought-iron rods. In its homely simplicity, re­ lieved only by the texture of the limestone walls, it represents a perfectly functional approach to building. Yet it was this strict utilitarian func­

tionalism that formed the very foundation of even the

sophisticated designs of the Chicago Only a short step removed from this ver­

most

school.

nacular essay

was

the first passenger terminal of

the Illinois Central in

Chicago. Known

as

Great

Central Station, it was designed by Otto H. Matz and built in 1856. With its vaulted shed of wood and its arched

openings in the masonry end wall NORTHWESTERN

TRI-QUARTERLY

Inbound Freight House, Illinois Central R.R., South Water Street, Chicago, 1855, 1872. End Elevation.

Mary's Church, Chicago, Illinois, 1833. Augustine Deodat Taylor, builder. (Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architen­ St.

ture)

for the passage of

is the

the vernacular

thetic and hence ought to express its practical function as well as the inspiration that leads to

trains, it actually belonged to phase of the metropolitan termi­

nal. It was demolished in 1892, when the present Central Station was completed.

The transmutation of vernacular its exclusive

building, emphasis on immediate utility,

with into

genuine architectural style was in part the product of a relatively long theoretical prepara­ tion. The growth of a functionalist and organic theory of architecture was one of the numerous by-products of the pragmatic and evolutionary currents in nineteenth-century thought. Among European theorists the most influential was Eu­ gene Emanuel Viollet-le-Duc. The English trans­ lation of his Discourses on Architecture was pub­ lished in the United States in 1881, but his proposals for a new architecture consistent with the physical properties and the structural poten­ tialities of iron had gained wide currency before that date. Gottfried Semper, a German historian and theorist who derived his organic doctrine of architectural style partly from the Darwinian hy­ pothesis, was read and discussed in Chicago around 1890. A native organic theory, however, had begun to develop before the middle of the century. Its founder was Andrew Jackson Down­ ing, who proposed in his Landscape Architecture (1844) that a building ought to be adapted to its site and ought to express its end or purpose. A more thoroughly developed organic theory, with transcendentalist elements, was worked out by Emerson in a series of disconnected fragments scattered through his journals and lectures. The a

essential idea in his doctrine is that architecture

Spring, 1964

only

art that

is both utilitarian and

the creation of beauty. Emerson held that the from natural structures such

and that his work is the

ment of the

as

ar­

that is, trees and shells

chitect derives his forms from nature

-

aes­

-

imaginative

embodi­

physical laws of natural processes.

strictly functionalist theory of design developed around the middle of the century by the sculptor Horatio Greenough, who was a contemporary of Emerson and possibly an influ­ ence on his thought. Although Greenough himself did not present an organized and consistent doc­ trine, his friend and admirer Henry T. Tucker­ man provided a comprehensive statement of the artist's ideas in A Memorial of Horatio Green­ ough (1853). Like Emerson, Greenough believed that nature is the primary source of form in ar­ chitecture and that just as the form of an organ­ ism reveals its functional capacity, so should the form of a building reveal its function. The chief characteristic of the natural organism, he said, "is the consistency and harmony of the parts jux­ taposed, the subordination of details to masses, and of masses to the whole. The law of adapta­ The first

was

tion is the fundamental law of nature in all struc­

examples of human creations in which embodied, he cites various machines and the clipper ships. His extreme admiration for ships led him to assert that if civil architec­ ture were as well designed as the sailing vessels, public buildings would soon become superior to the Parthenon. Beauty in architecture, then, was ture." As

this law is

17

some

of whom, most notably Joseph W. Yost, be­ a modern style emancipated from

gan to demand

tradition and consistent with the

new

structural

materials and utilitarian demands. Thus many of the ideas from which a new philosophy and a

style of architecture might be derived had been given a wide currency in numerous writings by the time the Chicago movement began the material revolution in the building arts. new

The architects who

together

came

following the fire of 1871 included creative talent who had

no

architecture but who had

a

in

men

Chicago of

rare

formal education in

remarkable

capacity

for learning their craft through direct attack on the problems of large-scale commercial building.

Few of the

Inbound Freight House, Illinois Central Railroad, Chicago, Illinois, 1855, 1872. Cross-section showing the roof truss.

leading figures were born or grew to Chicago. The city had no schools of architecture and only a handful of architects who could train apprentices. Yet in little more than a manhood in

decade after the fire

they invented and mastered technique of riveted steel framing and were thus able to develop the office building, hotel, and apartment block as we know them to­ day. But these categories hardly exhaust the the

simply the promise of function. Greenough's con­ cept of the aesthetic quality is thus highly empiri­ cal and positivistic and is strictly bound up with a scientific understanding of nature.

modern

areas

in

school I call therefore upon science in all its branches to arrest the tide of sensuousness and arbitrary

embellishment

..

the

architects

These

included

of

the

every

Chicago type

of

building: residences, railway terminals and way stations, warehouses, factories, churches, schools, hospitals, museums, theaters, and even tombs.

Nor was their work confined to a single city.

They designed buildings erected in New York.

Buffalo, Cincinnati, St. Louis, New Orleans, Kan­ sas City, Omaha, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Pueb­ lo, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, and Seattle.

They were the acknowledged leaders of their pro­

negatively by criticism

not

which

worked.

thereof alone, but positively by making the instru­ ment a many-sided response to the multiform de­ mands of life. The craving for completeness will then obtain its normal food in results, not the

opiate and deadening stimulus of decoration. Then will structure and its dependent sister arts emerge from the standstill of ipse dixit and. like the ship. the team. the steam engine. proceed through phases of development toward a response to need.

fession in the Middle West and among those few and

functionalist

theory remained the most extensive and thorough until Sullivan elaborated his own aesthetic philosophy at the end of the century. However, the twin themes of natural adaptation and empirical fit­ ness continued to be presented with variations in a steady stream of essays and books. Attacks on eclecticism began to appear in the engineering press in the 1860's. Calvert Vaux argued in his Villas and Cottages (1857) for an architecture built to suit the needs of the American people and the local climate. James J. Jarves, in The Art­ Idea (1864), repeated Greenough's doctrine that if the functional and pragmatic basis of Ameri­ can technical creations was applied to the design of buildings, America could quickly create an original and beautiful native architecture. John Burroughs, whose Signs and Seasons (1886) was extremely popular, presented a romantic natur­

Greenough's organic

alistic

variation

on

the

fundamental

theme.

In

addition to adaptation to site and need, he ar­ gued for the honest presentation of natural mate­ rials in their rudeness and simplicity. By the last decade of the century, these doctrines

ginning 18

to

impress

the

architects

were

be­

themselves,

critics in the East who

willing to risk their assessment objective reputations by making of what the Chicago group was doing. That they were either forgotten or condemned in the period between the two World Wars is one of the major ironies of American history. were an

Their

achievement

was not an accident, and they belonged in the main­ stream of a world movement. They knew exactly what they were doing and why they ought to do it. They recognized their problem with relentless clarity of insight, and the solutions they devel­ oped represented a mode of attack very much in the spirit of creative scientific inquiry and theo­ rizing. They believed that they had created a new style of architecture by means of a new kind of thinking about it. Several of them, most nota­ bly John Wellborn Root and Louis Sullivan, wrote we

now

know that

extensively about the technical and aesthetic as­ pects of their art. Architectural journals and so­ cieties were founded in Chicago to preserve their

Sullivan, the most sensitive and subtle personality among them, in developing his own aesthetic philosophy recognized the true value of their achievement: that they had taken a long words.

NORTHWESTERN

TRI-QUARTERLY

articles

step toward the development of an aesthetic dis­

merous

cipline of the powerful forces of nineteenth-cen­

could train

tury industrialism. The whole forward movement of contemporary architecture lies in the dil'('!'I1111l

that it could not,

of that

synthesis.

The recorders of were

also

aware

cal architects.

standing lies

in Chicago unique success of the lo­

The best evidence of this under­

in the pages of Industrial

Chicago,

whose anonymous authors were tireless in their praise of the originality and greatness of what

they called "Chicago construction." They coined the phrase "commercial style" to designate a form of building that had no counterpart in the past. What is most remarkable, however, is their recognition of the union of science, technology, and art that reveals itself in the structural-utili­ tarian-aesthetic

unity

of the best

Chicago build­

ings.

Among the critics and scholars of the East, a few saw the importance of the architecture that was growing up in the city of the prairies. Chief among them were Montgomery Schuyler and Russell Sturgis, the leading exponents of a ra­ tional and realistic architecture. The latter

con­

sistently maintained that work like that of the Chicago school represented the only genuine structural art of the time. He pointed out in nu-

OCTOBER BEACH On this very beach, This spit of sand rimmed by a sea

school

no

architecture

of

like as

a

By the time of Sullivan's death in 1924, the

building progress

of the

that

Sullivan, Jenney, and Root, matter of fact, turn out an architect at all, and that any real imagination and technical skill would be corrupted by it. men

ideal that he stood for seemed to be As

a

lost cause.

Chicago school had to be rediscovered by a later generation. Perhaps the first to do so was Lewis Mumford, whose discern­ ing chapter on Richardson, Root and Sullivan in a

consequence, the

The Brown Decades (1931) awakened interest in background of the modern movement in the

the

building arts. In 1932 the Museum of Modern Art in

New

York

showed

small

a

exhibit

entitled

"Early Modern Architecture in Chicago" and is­ sued

a

slim catalogue

and their works. with

on

some

of the architects

Hugh Morrison, in connection

another exhibit of the Museum

of Modern

Art, wrote a comprehensive critical and bio­ graphical study of Sullivan that was published in 1935. The most thorough treatment of the school in its full historical setting appeared in Giedion's Space, Time and Architecture, first published in 1941. Today recognition of the school is world­ wide, and its once forgotten principles now con­ stitute the basis of architecture as it is practiced on

every

continent.

And to swim with her.

Where I can see black petrels on the swell, I have seen her swimming.

As I do now the sterile grains of sand.

Along this strip of beach, From the point northward in the haze, Along the rim of waves where I am walking,

Or the blades of beach grass,

There is no one,

Or the oak leaves that pass on the wind,

But for me,

Once I touched her here.

But for having seen my love, But for having lost her.

With no end, I have touched my love.

Lips, Her fingers, Her hair.

I have touched her here.

I have passed this way before

And waded in the sea, Felt the chill,

Along there in the wet,

Touched the grains of sand

Along the land-most fringes of the foam, I have seen her walking, Washing her ankles in the sea.

I have seen her footprints there,

And seen them blowing on the wind.

I have

passed this way before,

And I have posed the question, How can I begin again.

DAVID

And counted her toes.

NEELoN, L.A., '63

There, where the sandpipers dart against the foam, I have seen her walking.

LOVE: A DEFINITION Far out on the swell I can see black petrels dunk and bob,

Love is finding

And once I saw her swimming there

Two snowflakes

Among them, Dunking and bobbing.

You can never prove it.

I have swum to meet her

Spring, 1964

Exactly alike: PATRICIA RABBY, L.A., '64

19

PROFESSOR EDWARD B. HUNGERFORD After six years, Professor Edward B. Hungerford is retiring as editor of the Tri-Ouorterly, this is his last issue. The fol­ lowing note from Vice-President Wild is inserted by the undergraduate editors.

Were it not for Professor Hungerford's initiative and his devotion to the concept of a magazine reflecting the University's intellectual interests, there

probably would magazine of the Tri-Quarterly's special character of excellence at this time. Professor Hungerford carried the idea of such a publication into reality, and virtually single-handed has served as editor in a highly effective and distinguished fashion. All members of the Northwestern community, faculty, students and those in the University administration, are grateful beyond measure to him for inaugurating and then producing a magazine have been no Tri-Quarterly. At least, there would not have been

a

of the finest quality, a journal which has been of invaluable assistance in an

outlet for faculty and student literary efforts

as

providing

well as for significant works of

alumni and others. Just as the Administration was delighted to help Professor Hun­

gerford's efforts, whenever possible, the objective now is that of making certain that the magazine goes forward in line with the standards already set. The continuation of the Tri-Quarterly is the best possible way to express adequately the gratitude of Northwestern to Professor Hungerford for his outstanding accomplishments.

February 14, 1964 20

PAYSON S. WILD NORTHWESTERN

TRI-QUARTERLY

by Gary Lee Blonston

Future Tense When's

top of the discarded shirt. Lights out, radio on,

off his shoes and

cold, and they made him even more nervous and

she get in?" Sid slumped in the chair.

"About five. I'm gonna go to bed." Stan kicked

began unbuttoning his shirt.

"In the morning? What's she going to do while you're in class?"

"No, no, in the afternoon."

"And you're "Sure.

and he rolled into bed. The sheets anxious

fingers

new

and

girl's arrival. He drummed his

the bedstead in time to the radio.

It

had been two months since he had been home for Christmas and since he had

going to bed now?"

Still

get my rest." Stan threw the

Have to

for the on

were

riding

on

bad

the

seen

her.

float.

homecoming

Carol.

"Stanley, is there something you're not telling Sid? Why is it you must build up all this strength? She making promises already?"

"Hell, how many promises did you ever get from a girl like her? I'm amazed she's even coming."

"So am I, buddy. I don't see much you got to

dear lady.

"No, Stan, not tonight. Busy." But there was that one night no, couldn't happen again. Going to be a bad weekend. Probably foul up everything, and then she'll squawk some more. Damn car won't start,

damn state school she goes to."

and I'll be late to the station. "Can't you do any­

01'

offer. That's

no

"Get out of here.

If I

can

work her up

to

a

night like last year, you won't have much to say.

I'm going to bed and dream about you getting plastered while you jealously watch us whirling around the floor." Stan pirouetted across the room.

"Crap." Sid picked

up

his

jacket and walked

out down the hall. Stan turned to the mirror and

combed his

hair, brushing the dandruff from his

temples with his free hand. He pulled his shoul­ ders

back,

turned

looked at himself

away

over

from

the

mirror, and

his shoulder.

Man, I just ripple.

He struggled to scratch a skinny shoulder blade, then took off his pants and tossed them on

Spring, 1964

Too

she knows

Queen

shirt in the closet.

and preen and squawk like

she's a

so

good. Strut

bird. "Don't get my

down your back, Didn't like that much or me either.

hair

wet,"

so

snow

..

thing right? You knew what time I was coming. things to do with my time than sit

I have better

in

a

train station. Just leave

me

with all these

bitch. All the way back. Be

people." Bitch, bitch, good to have her in the car again, though. Sits nice. Lots of body. Shoulders back, chin up, stomach in, hup. "What are you looking at?"

Bad, bad weekend.

He turned over and bent his pillow in half, bur­ rowing his head into the sponge rubber.

"So remember, gents, for the best in evening attire, for that feeling of confidence that comes with immaculate dress, rent your formal wear from Adelo and Sons, 4954 East Static "

popped in the radio.

21

Have to get Dietrich's tux in the morning. That feeling of confidence that comes with borrowed clothes. She'll probably check it out for rental tags. Things won't fit. "Lose some weight, Stan?"

And then smirk. So sure of herself. Maybe a cou­ ple drinks and she'll corne around. No, maybe not. "Stan, aren't you going to have one, too?"

"Sure." "Stan, aren't you going to have one, too?" "Sure." "Stan, aren't vou going to have one, too?" And then drop the goddam thing in my lap.

He yawned and kicked at the sheets.

Allenson seemed pretty interested. Probably bird dog all night. "Stan, you don't mind if I dance with Carol just once." And away we go.

Maybe just forget about the dance and go to a drive-in. That'd go over big. No sex this week­ end. Not from royalty. Bet she'd be good, though.

Fat chance.

He lay in the dark,

staring at the ceiling.

The

wind rattled the window, a warm wind for March.

The sparse

snow

that had come and gone all win­

again. Stan's eyes crept shut. The radio popped, so he snapped it off and sighed his eyes closed again.

Maybe it'll be all right. Get out of the dance early and walk a while and talk. Might work ter was

out

gone

He

drifted, his hand in Carol's, into a dark green park, moist and comfortable, aphrodisiac with early March. She smiled and leaned her head against his shoulder.

"It's much nicer out here than inside."

I get tired of all the fakes that show

up at these

things."

"Like Dick Allenson?"

"For one."

"I know what you

mean.

He's not hard to dis­

like. All that beautiful blond hair and

ing lit

it.

What's wrong with me? Damn. It was so easy.

Nothing I could do. Nothing at all. Just like that.

Come on, slow down.

He stood in front of the mirror, watching the smoke as he blew it through his nose. A history

lay on the table, and he thumbed through it absently until the filter on the cigarette began to burn. He put it out, turned off the light and got back into bed. His thoughts skirted the park, and he finally slept without dreaming.

The next morning passed from class to class like every other Friday. By four, Dietrich's tux was in Stan's closet, there was money in his wal­ let, and he had started the drive to the station. He felt good, the car felt good in his hands, his hair looked good, everything was good. Trees and lawns, then buildings passed quickly. He left the car in the station parking lot and walked into the terminal several minutes before five. The long book

green benches were full of old men and children and sailors. And on one sat Carol. He walked up

her, wearing a smile she didn't return.

to

big talk.

·'No., right on time. Four o'clock." She shook "But you said five. what you said."

22

fit."

She laughed

.

.

.

that's

"No, four. And really, you should have let me going to be late. There are lots 01' I could have seen while I was wait­ in town things But it's ing. my fault. I should have known you wouldn't be on time. Pick up my bag."

She got up, and Stan followed her out of the station.

"I

even

In your letter

know you were

left,

didn't

You're in early."

her head and looked at him in disgust.

squeezed his hand. He put his arm around her and maneuvered her to a big tree. She grasped his shoulders and kissed him. She was soft, and she molded against him, willing.

"I'm glad you carne."

"So am 1." She smiled and leaned back against the tree. Her eyes looked beyond him, hazy and happy. Then she looked hard over his shoulder.

"Stan." Strange tone. He turned around. Two men were coming toward them up the narrow path.

One carried something Stan couldn't see.

"Nice stuff, kid. How about sharing her?"

Stan pushed Carol around the tree. "Let's get out of here." He turned back just as one of the men lifted a length of pipe. His head exploded, and he could feel blood in his eyes. The ground came up and hit him again. "Stan!" She was frantic, but he couldn't move. She screamed, one of the men laughed, cloth ripped, and something heavy hit the ground. Stan's brain was filling with clouds of blood and color. Carol screamed again.

tux

ceiling.

on

and

And his

at the

double-timing under his fingertips. Switch­ the light, he picked up a cigarette and

heart

"Hi.

...

"Yeah,

opened his eyes and stared

He

His hand moved to his chest and he could feel his

sit.

called your dorm, and they said you had 1 waited. An hour is a long time to just

so

"

"Okay, 1 did it again. I'm sorry. Take it easy."

"Well, after all, Stan, 1 didn't have to come clear up here just to sit in a train station. The least you could do is meet me on time."

"1 know. I'm sorry." He opened the car door for her, put the bag in the trunk and began the

drive back to school. She sat

on

the far side of

the car, facing straight ahead.

"This is your first time in the

city, isn't it?"

He smiled eagerly.

"Heavens, no, we used to live here."

"Oh.

"

They said nothing more until Stan pulled up in a girls' dormitory, took Carol's bag in­ side and delivered her to Marge, the girl who had agreed to put her up for the weekend. Carol seemed much happier to see Marge than she had been when she greeted Stan. He walked out of the dormitory frowning. front of

NORTHWESTERN

TRI-QUARTERLY

should have left well enough Gray day homecoming queen's place is at home. .

.

.

alone. A

Smart aleck bitch.

Two

hours

he

later

trich's tuxedo. Carol

was

was

back,

even

well ring

011"

impressive

more

and even less hospitable than she had been earlier in the day. She wore a that moved

nicely and

shiny green cocktail dress frozen expression that car but sat without

a

didn't. Stan took her to the

turning on the engine.

"Look, if you don't want to go to this thing, I could take you back down to the station. I don't want to

put you out any."

over

You asked

you?

me

to

com e

up,

and I

said all right. That's all there is to it. Maybe I shouldn't have, but since you borrowed a tuxedo,

might as well go through with it."

"Why can't you say just one thing civil? And

we

didn't borrow the tux.

It's

mine."

Stan twisted the key viciously, raced the en­ gine and spun the tires on the gravel as he pulled

nothing until they

sat down in the

big country club ball room. Carol slowly became talkative, and the situation seemed to be im­ proving.

"Would you like

a

second, and she looked back, puzzled. "What's My face dirty?"

"No. Nothing." A quizzical sound worked out of his throat, and he went to the bar. Allenson was there ahead of him, wearing a red plaid din­ ner jacket.

"Hello, Stan, that babe of yours make it?" a

the matter?

"Yeah. Two Manhattans."

"Guess I'll have to

drop over and say hello."

"Hey, look, sport, I've got enough trouble as it is. How about spending one night with your own "

could

excited, Stan. You don't think I give you any problems, do you? Me, horn

in

the great lover? I have great

"Don't

on

your

get

respect for

and opened his mouth to speak, but his eyes blurred. He dropped two bills on the bar and left with the drinks.

Carol han­ dled as

at

him

Manhattan glass well, curving her fingers a flower. From the other side of his

a

if holding

drink, she seemed to be changing her mind about him. The conversation relaxed, and her laugh was almost friendly.

He suddenly wanted to be able to see her again.

"Really, why don't you see if you could make it to Florida in the spring? I'll probably drive an­ other couple if you want to go. if you'd like it." mean

You'd like

it.

I

.

"Well, I already have a couple invitations to go home with people. I couldn't say right now." She was

surprised at the suggestion.

Spring,

1964

a

knew it would

planned?"

new crease

with thumb and index finger.

in his

pants

"No, dammit, I just

happen."

"You knew it would happen?"

I knew last

night. only it wasn't

sup­

posed happen like that. It was supposed to be your fault, sort of. Indirectly, anyway." to

"What

are

you

talking about?"

"It's stupid. You wouldn't be interested."

"No, tell me." She put a hand on his wrist and looked at him

as

though she knew what he

was

going say.

"Well, last night I started getting nervous. And don't think you're anything special. This happens a lot. Anyway, I started predicting things that would go wrong. And they all have, some way or other. I figured the car would break down, and I'd be late to pick you up. Managed that pretty well without the car's help. And then I thought and hit it pretty

well, too. And I borrowed this tux, and it's too big. You didn't have to say anything about it, but I knew you would. And then I thought maybe if I got you drinking you wouldn't be so hard to get along with, but I decided that wouldn't be a very good idea because you wouldn't drink any more than me, and I'd get tight and dump my drink on the tux or something." He shrugged and smiled.

She shook her head and laughed. "Amazing.

Planned incompetence."

Stan's smile faded, and he stared at her nar­ rowly until she looked down to sip her drink.

"You're really hard to believe. So thoughtful."

"Oh, stop pouting. With that expression and those

pants,

men's

room.

tossed

prowess."

Stan looked

"Not this soon? You had that He sat down, running

about the ride back to school

drink?'

"If you have one." Stan looked at her hard for

date?

shaking bourbon and vermouth on the table cloth and dabbing at his borrowed pants with a napkin.

to

"Then you bought it too big."

out. He said

on.

trees.

"Yeah.

"Oh, stop it. What do you want me to do-crawl all

What could be better? Tall, waving Broad, sweeping beach." His hand dcscrrbed the broad, sweeping beach, in the proc­ ess sweeping his drink into his lap.

"Uoddammit, not this soon." He stood up, "Come

l'alm

a

it

looks

like

you

didn't

make

the

Dry off and dance with me." She napkin at him and they stood up. Far

floor, Stan could see Dick Allen­ plaid coat weaving among the couples, homing in on their table. Stan hustled Carol out from among the tables, but Allenson was faster.

"Hello, Stanley. I came over to meet your across

the dance

son's

friend.

"

"I know, I know.

Carol, this is Dick Allenson. knowing."

"Yeah, but I dance well. You don't mind, do you, buddy?"

Of course not. You're right on schedule." Carol looked at him and giggled as she and Dick walked onto the dance fioor. The music ended quickly, He's not worth

and she returned to the table alone.

"What

"Oh,

happened to your partner?" might say we didn't hit it off. He is

you

23

really obnoxious." She sat down.

"You want another drink?"

"Might as well. Ought to do something." jammed his cigarette into the ash tray.

"Well, you sure as hell don't have to. I'd just as soon save my money, if you're having such a goddam rotten time. I don't know what you think you are, but I'm tired of it, whatever it is. I don't much enjoy getting dumped on all night."

He glared at her, and she smiled back. Putting her empty glass down, she reached out and pinched his nose.

Stan

caught up with her, and they went on down the path, stopping within the shadow of the trees.

She pulled him to her. "Now, isn't this better than the car?" She was flying.

He shrugged and breathed the whisky in her breath. "You win."

She tossed her head. "Of course."

They kissed

for the first time, harshly, as if competing. Sev­ eral minutes passed before Stan looked up.

"What

that?"

was

"What?"

"I

thought

I

"You're sweet."

stood

silent

moment.

He sat

the trees. "I guess not." distant, light He pushed his face into her hair. She was warm,

instant, swore at her, and then went trip twice more in the next half hour, refilling her glass as soon as she could see the bottom. The band stopped playing, and couples began returning to tables around an

to the bar.

He made the

them.

"Hot in here. out.

It's

nice

a

a

heard

"Listen." She did.

to the car, all right?"

exaggerated

bent, and for

foolish

drunk and

-

a

finally

"I don't know. I just don't like it here. Let's go

"All right. Kiss He bent to her

One

she looked very slightly human. Stan

moment

wondered.

They walked out of the clubhouse and turned a paved path onto the golf course. A chill was replacing the warm night air, and Stan put his jacket around Carol's shoulders.

"What a pretty night."

"So are you." He swallowed hard.

"What an impetuous youth you are to say such things. She slurred, but she smiled, too.

"Sorry." He put his arm around her, disturb­ ing her alcohol-ridden balance. They walked on, and suddenly he stopped.

"Hey, let's not go down there." A grove of trees stood a few yards in front of them. She down

"

Why are you

nervous?"

"All right." She turned the glass upside down and shook a few drops out. Then she set it on the ankle

a

"You hear that?"

"Huh uh. There wasn't anything. so

and stood up.

both

receptive, expert, completely different from the afternooon, like that wild night before. She kissed his ear, sighed into it and kissed his lips. He looked up again.

Finish your drink, and let's go night." He said it as though he

care

They

The clubhouse shined

on

unsure

had rehearsed it. She looked at him levelly and poured down the drink.

table with

something."

again first." lips and she held him tightly.

me

close, and she smelled alive and warm. a steady mur­ mur like flowing water in his ears as he kissed her again. She leaned back against the tree,

She

was

The sounds around them blurred to

closed her eyes, and smiled at him. So sure, so confident, so much in control. Her eyelids lifted

slowly. Then she looked up, her smile faded and her eyes widened in fear.

Something reverberated through his head, and red, swirling curtain fell before his eyes. He heard Carol struggling, heard cloth tear, heard something heavy hit the ground. The grass was a

wet

knees, but he couldn't

under his

see.

His

hands groped forward. Then his head filled with her scream, high-pitched and hysterical.

"Stan, stop!"

looked up at him.

"What's wrong? 'Fraid of the dark? Don't wor­ I'm here." She grasped his arm maternally

ry.

and started to walk on. He didn't move.

pear in The

"No, really, I'd just as soon not."

"Why not?"

You're

not

afraid

of

the

dark.

You're

to

down

'fraid of me."

"No, there.

I

dammit.

just don't want

go

"

"No, a dream." She looked at him and laughed. as

soon

not talk about it. Let's go back

to the car instead."

"Back to the car? But it's such Don't be

so

nice. Now

She

24

a nice night. superstitious. You're silly. I'm being

come

released

presently studying for his master's degree in ;ournalism at Northwestern. As an undergraduate here, (Journal­ ism, '63) he was a member of the honorary journalism society Sigma Delta Chi, a scholarship student, and the Managing Editor of the Daily Northwestern. born in Cleveland, Ohio, went to school in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Gainesville, Florida. He has He

"More predictions?"

"I'd just

Tri-Quarterly, his "Wedding Knot" having

been published in the spring issue last year. 8/0nston ;s

"You wouldn't understand."

"Oh.

This is the second story by Gary Lee Blonston to ap­

was

worked

on

the

Harrisburg (Po.) Evening News and on

the Miami Herald, and hopes to resume work on the latter as reporter when he has received his M.S. degree in June.

on."

his

arm

and

walked

away.

He

NORTHWESTERN

TRI-QUARTERLY

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

• -

T�[ liNTERNAl �ONOLOGUE

• •

TIN Iffi(Q)OOC§ ANI[)) IFllIL�§

By Russell L. Merritt

•

••

•

•

•

•

•

••••••••

•

•

Russell L. Merritt (L.A., '63) has made four films, in

three of which he

was

writer, director, and producer.

The most recent of these, made at U.C.LA. is Time of

the Horn. As

an

undergraduate

at

Northwestern he

and produced several radio programs,

wrote

including

hook review series, a children's program, and a series of detective and horror stories. He wrote two a

Last Year at M arienbad and 8%

are being called "pretentious bores" and "interesting failures" by literary magazines, it seems time to consider

what film

and cannot do with literature's lat­

can

est and most controversial

In literature

make

out

at

we

are

least

gift. enabled,

two

very

theories

roughly,

regarding

to

the

years before coming to Northwestern, and he is present­

language of the mind. The first regards the thought process as an essentially verbal one. It is clear from the "Proteus" and "Penelope" chapters of ULysses that this is what Joyce believed. For Joyce, the mind thought in terms of words and the impressions words radiate. The mind chan­ nelled thoughts of past experiences, impressions of present events, and clouds of vaguely realized

ly a first year graduate student at Harvard working for a master's degree in English.

forever unreeling in continuous silent speech. The

articles on films for Dimension Magazine and notes for

University Film Society. He is a Sher­ lock Holmes enthusiast-a Baker Street Irregular who in 1960 won the coveted Irregular Shilling.

Born in Ridgewood, New Jersey, he grew up in Old

the Northwestern

Greenwich, Connecticut, and Connecticut.

He

attended

now

Boston

lives in Stamford, University for two

subconscious

responses

into

a

stream

of words

direction of thought was channelled by the words

and quality of that speech

F

as well. For instance, "Proteus," Stephen Dedalus thinks to himself, "I just simply stood pale, silent, bayed about. TerribiLia meditans. A primrose

part way through

rom

books

the

earliest

have

been

Filmmakers

as

von

Stroheim

well

as

days

of

film,

movies

uncomfortable

and

bedfellows.

early as D. W. Griffith and Erich some film producers as

battled

contemporary film critics when they bor­

techniques from the pages of subjects Charles Dickens and Frank Norris who said au­ rowed

and

diences would be confused and bored. situation has not much

Today the

changed. As filmmakers

continue to ransack novels and short stories for new

material, literary and film critics

are

still

hesitant about the result but certain that it is not

"pure cinema" and therefore less than golden.

It is altogether appropriate, therefore, that the current focus of this

controversy should be on the

internal

monologue, developed and made popular in literature, now being taken over by the movies.

And as more and more filmmakers are becoming a place for the internal monologue on the movie screen as well as on the printed page, and as more and more films like

convinced that there is

Spring, 1964

doublet."

Here it is the words themselves that link the three sentences rather than any

plot or rational progression. "Pale, silent, bayed about" brings to Stephen's mind the fearsome words of the Catholic Mass. TerribiHa meditans, on the other hand, a medieval phrase in Latin, brings Stephen's mind back to a medieval time and helps shape the next phrase "a primrose doublet." In each case it is the quality of the words themselves that allows Joyce to make the transition. Perhaps an even better example can be seen further on. "For that are you pining, the bark of their applause? It is the pining and the connotative meanings of the word "pine," the feelings of forelorn despair, that origi­ nally leads Stephen to use the word "pine." But it is the word "pine" as a pine tree that leads him on to use the word "bark." Not as a part of a pine, but as a description of a noise, the same word is 25

used to trigger off the next thought, "bark of their applause.

Yet other writers have regarded the thought process as an essentially imagistic one. This is what William Faulkner thought. In The Sound and the Fury the continuity of thought is pre­ served not with words, but through external action and through pictures of past impressions. The "Benjy" section of the book, for instance, begins on a golf course where the idiot Benjy and his thirteen year old guardian Luster are searching for a missing quarter. Yet with a little impetus Benjy's mind is thrust back to thoughts of his lost sister Caddy and thoughts of his childhood: "

(Luster and I) went along the fence and came to the garden fence, where our shadows were.

My shadow was higher than Luster's on the fence. We came to the broken place and went through it.

"Wait a minute," Luster said. "You snagged on that nail again. Can't you never crawl through here without snagging on that nail."

Caddy uncaught me and we crawled through.

Uncle Maury said to not let anybody see us, so we better stoop over, Caddy said. Stoop over, Benjy. Like this, see. We stooped over and crossed the garden, where the flowers rasped and rattled against us Keep your hands in said.

Or your pockets, Caddy they'll get froze.

You don't want your hands froze on Christmas,

morning hed have something to sigh for a dark man in some perplexity between 2 7s too in pris­ on

for Lord knows what he does that I dont know

slooching around down in the kitch­ lordship his breakfast while hes

and Im to be en

to

get

his

rolled up like ever

see

a

mummy

will I indeed did you

running."

me

But if the mind does indeed think with images rather than with words, film can do much with the mind that the

printed word cannot. instance, all writers must use a linear de­ scriptive pattern to present their scenes. In the internal monologue this becomes a special handi­ cap because it inevitably slows up a swift mental For

process.

Faulkner

pace of his pause

before

ingeniously

has

characters'

-

limited

control

over

the

minds because he must describe

each

scene

detail

by detail,

to

the

-

however

ever-changing

surroundings the character's mind encounters.

But as our experience will testify, this is not how the human mind works. Details are presented to the mind not linearly, not one at a time, as liter­ ature must present them, but with apparent si­

rnultaneity.

This is how film works. As the middle part of

Last Year at Marienbad insists,

a

woman

can

be

cocktail party, think back to a scene in her bedroom, and come back to the party instantane­ at

a

....

on

do you.

"It's too cold

out there."

Versh

said.

"You

don't want to go out doors." is

"What

"He

now."

it

want

to

Mother

out

go

It is the action of

said.

doors."

Versh said.

pushing Benjy through

the

a

present

later it is Caddy's remembered statement, "You don't want your hands froze on Christmas, do

you" that links the past

to

another time when

Versh says,

"It's too cold out there.

want

out

to

go

You don't

doors."

That is, in this passage and throughout The Fury, the mind works as a stage

Sound and the

upon which various

scenes

are

played. The

cur­

tain on a particular scene goes up when the prop­ words

er

bered; that

are

scene

scene.

nects

spoken or the proper event remem­

the curtain falls when

reminds

the

a

word or action of

playwright

of

another

Where for Joyce the mind thinks and con­ primarily with words and symbols, for

Faulkner the mind thinks and connects primarily with pictures and images.

Film second terms

work effectively only by following the impression. If the mind does think in

can

of

thought process word.

possibly render the succinctly than the printed be no imagistic equivalent for

words, film

There

can

"if he knew how he

26

cannot

more

came

out

on

the cards this

the other hand must allow for

a

few words to

orient the reader to a new time and place. Where­ as

film can cut from one scene to the next in Ij24th

of

a

second, and instantaneously give the viewer physical information needed to under­ stand that shot, the author must put one word aft­ er another, must assemble paragraph after para­ graph to give us a gradual and incomplete picture formed in his subject's mind. all

fence that connects the past and the in this passage, just as several lines

wire of

ously. The flashing images accurately mime the lightning-swift pace of the mind at work. Faulkner

the

Moreover, by working with both an auditive medium, film can assail eye and ear simultaneously as literature cannot do. Where Joyce in "Circe" attempted with such difficulty and with such stilted style to suggest a musical tone by selecting words for alliterative and ono­ matopoeic qualities, film is able to present literal music. But even more significantly, music as part of the sound track can be used contrapuntal­ ly, can be played against as well as with the images on the screen. In the British Free Cinema film Nice Time, for instance, we see on the screen a picture of a Coca-cola sign flashing on and visual

and off

as

we

hear the British National Anthem.

In 0 Dreamland "I Believe"

selves

as

we

hear Frankie Laine crooning

watch children making them­ at an amusement park. This

we

repulsive technique, used in the internal monologue, allows the filmmaker special opportunities de­ nied the novelist. In Last Year at Marien bad, the narrator tells the heroine what happened last year, the image simultaneously reveals a consame

NORTHWESTERN

TRI-QUARTERLY

Film, on the other hand, can't do that. It is lim­

while the context and mood of

tr adictory scene,

underscored by the heavy sound of

ited to what the mind

sees

organ music. Just as a chord of music is able to blend the sounds of several notes to sugg('st II

sory raw material for

thought. It cannot actually

musical impression that could not be evoked by any of the notes alone, so the sound track allows

allel the narrator's mind

the

scene

are

the filmmaker to blend

image with dialogue, mu­ present a simultaneous effect the printed word cannot suggest by itself.

Film, then, by use of the image, the editing

sic, and local effects

to

trope, and the use of sound, can do much with the internal monologue that literature can't.

And yet, there are problems; and one of the reasons

Last Year at M arienbad and films like it

have met

with

such

a

violent

response

is

that

their directors

apparently haven't yet recognized those problems. For if film can color more quick­ ly and more comprehensively than can literature, it cannot color as deeply.

For with the advantages of representation film also suffers the limitations of representation. What­ ever

message film has to

deliver, it must deliver

directly to eye and ear. It cannot appeal directly to taste or touch or smell. It is true that it can dis­

play objects that will appeal to our sense of smell a picture of a steaming stew, a picture of a man eating to senses is in­ the these yet appeal variably secondary and for the most part ineffec­ tual. When we help a detective crash through a door and discover a gagged wretch bound in a room filled with carbon-monoxide, we are im­ pressed not by the smell of the gas, even though the detective whipping out a handkerchief lets us know he is dazed by the foul smell and even though we are familiar with that odor ourselves.

We are instead impressed by the foggy appear­ -

-

of

ance

the

room

and

the

creepy

vapour

that

swirls about.

Literature

the other hand is

extra-sensory. appeals directly to no sense and thus to every sense. For the printed word is not a medium in on

It

the way film is.

It is not the appearance of the

word, the form of the letters or the shape of the page that brings us into the author's world; it is instead the denotative and connotative

meanings

minds give these words and sentences that brings that world alive. Whereas the images on the screen exist and are comprehensible regardless of the audience's understanding of them, the our

words

book

of the

are

dead

unless

the

reader

brings his active mind into play. For this reason the novelist less than the to

a

can

suggest much

cameraman can.

literal representation

as

more

and much

He is not fettered

the filmmaker

is.

He can suggest aroma, tactile sensations, as well as images and sounds, by triggering off with words in the reader's mind an impression of these sensations. He can suggest the inside of a charac­ ter's mind proper

by guiding our imaginations with the All he need write is "Phillip

words.

thought about lip's mind.

Spring, 1964

"

and

we

have entered Phil­

and hears

-

the

sen­

show the thinking process. Marienbad cannot par­

reasoning, as Joyce and merely show the outward results of those thoughts. The reasoning, which must be left to the audio, becomes of secondary concern in an essentially visual medium, less forceful because it is competing with the im­ ages; less convincing because it is articulating aloud a process which is by its nature silent. For this reason, the narrated portion of the film, as the makers of Marienbad have acknowledged, is Faulkner

It

can.

can

not intended to serve

as

the source of the internal

monologue. The images alone assume the task of showing what the narrator remembers, while the narration

contains

ticulates to the More

only what the

important,

this

two media has forced as

narrator

ar­

between

the

woman.

a

difference

second restriction on film

well, a difference apparently neglected by the

makers of Marienbad. Words

work

can

as

syrn­

images. In literature the word trope allows the imagination to soar to two or more levels of comprehension si­ multaneously and unaffectedly. Several levels of reality photographic actuality, hypothetical re­ ality, the reality of a dream, allegorical reality are all equally "real" and concurrently pres­ ent before the reader. In "Proteus," for instance, Stephen's thoughts travel simultaneously on up­ bols ;

pictures

must work primarily

as

-

_.

per and lower levels of consciousness and

di­

are

by greater and lesser levels of symbolic meanings throughout the chapter. Franz Kafka's zoo, peopled with apes and bugs, can be signifi­ cant not only as animals, but as symbols of filth, of pathos, of bestiality, of conformism, of man's relation to God. In "The Judgment," for instance, rected

Miss Katherine Flores has shown that Kafka the word

can

suggest a literal covering up of Georg's father and suggest at the same time a symbolic gesture of trying to suffocate the use

cover

to

old order so that youth may be free.

Physical re­

ality becomes then only secondarily important in a non-visual medium. In literature, removed from the reader

by the medium, the realities work effectively on all levels.

as

Film, from its early affinities to literature, has thought it could do much the same thing. As great a practitioner as Sergei Eisenstein thought that film's trope, the art of editing, could some­ how parallel literature's trope, the use of words, as a symbolic system. Thus he believed that by joining two images, the image of a man smiling and one of a bird chirruping, that the filmmaker could suggest a man singing or suggest the feel­ ing "to sing," just as Japanese hieroglyphic writ­ ers had done years before. Yet, for the same

reason

Marienbad fails

senstein's

in

certain respects,

"conflict-juxtaposition

of

Ei­

accompany-

27

ing intellectual effects" failed." For by linking

The

inability

of film

the

of each shot. A picture of a bird

visual, cripples the medium

chirruping is far different from the words, "a bird chirruping," as far different as an image of a red rose is from the phrase "a rose is a rose IS a rose." I do not mean to challenge Eisenstein's theory of editing, but I submit that it can only work, that shot "A" added to shot "B" can only produce "a new qual­ ity arising out of that juxtaposition" when the shots

are

used for the visual statement that the

image in itself suggests as well as for the mean­ ing it gives to the montage when added to other separate shots.

For the

reason, film cannot

same

than one level of

a

suggest more

multiple reality as effectively

literature. Because it is

visual medium ap­ pealing primarily to the eye, film is inevitably weighted to a visual and physical actuality. By as

a

very nature, film is essentially a reporting medium, describing the reality of nature as it is presented to the naked eye. In Marienbad, then, we first identify the balcony as a balcony and

its

the hotel

them

as

as

series of

a

rooms

else.

anything

death's head does not in

before we consider

"Just

as

a

grinning

film appear as a sym­ bol but as an actual part of the human skeleton, so the connection between two objects shown on

film

a

but

a

simultaneously never

metaphorical

seems

always at once real and ontological. In short,

there

be

metaphysical poets in film. enough, and yet by ignoring this limitation, by confusing the symbol with the image, Marienbad had crippled its effec­ can

no

This would all seem obvious

tiveness and its statement. For instance, the brok­ en balcony and shattered railing Resnais has in­ terpreted as statements on the relation between

love

and

war.

The narrator has

death force in addition to being

a

been

called

a

persuader, con­

vincing the heroine that she should step out of the hotel ("Life") and come into the less confus­ ing, the freer, the less stifling world of Death.

Hence her hesitation in following him and yet her ultimate Freudian Willingness; hence the associa­ tion of death with sex, and her final persuasion coming at "the end of the picture, and thus of life.

"

run over by cars can sum up the futility of a man trying to go his own way in a modern society, but only after we recognize that it is a picture of a hat and that the cars are crushing it. The makers

of Last Year at Marienbad are of the hotel

asking us to think

life and the narrator

as

death by

asking us to forget that the hotel is

a

hotel and

that

the

as

narrator

is

a

man.

·In fairness to Eisenstein, it should be said that he clarified and modified his famous statements thirteen years later in "Word and Image." pp. 9-10 in Film Sense, Meridian Books.

New York. 1959.

28

levels

and

but instead inevitably to favor the

fective

logue,

even

objective and

more

as

an

ef­

presenting the internal mono­ where these multiple levels continually means

of

exist.

The visual aspect of the film limits the medium in yet within

third way. Film cannot pinpoint detail scene as well as literature can. If, for

a

a

instance, a filmmaker wished to film an aspect of

Joyce's "Penelope" he would confront a passage like' 'the day we were lying among the rhododen­ drons

on Howth head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to me yes first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my

mouth and it was leap-year like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my

breath

.

."

.

He

would realize at

that he

once

establishing Molly and Leo­ them in the pold, showing garden at Howth head.

Yet whereas Joyce can in a few words highlight must film

shot of

an

exactly what Molly remembers about Bloom, film must treat all the objects it photographs in that sort with the same seniority. Even when it jumps to the close-up, there is nothing in the close-up of a

tweed suit that tells

us

that it

because it

was

grey and a tweed that Molly remembered it.

As Basil Wright wrote, "First and foremost we was

must

remember

things in the

that the

camera

does not

see

the human eye. The way brain behind your eye selects the points of em­ Not so the phasis in the scene before you as

same

....

camera.

The lens soullessly records on a sensitized

piece of celluloid simply the amount of light dif­ ference that passes through it. No amount of thinking on the part of the cameraman will achieve any other emphasis."

Yet the internal monologue demands that the filmmaker show precisely what provided the link between the first image and the next. Moreover, as we have seen before, he is limited to visible and auditive linkage. He cannot as effectively suggest a linkage of mood or of tone between the clouds of consciousness as Joyce can with the written word. The innate imprecision and limita­ tion of the linkage are yet further handicaps to the internal monologue in film.

Film can suggest metaphor, but not in this way.

In Lonely Are the Brave, the image of a hat being

simultaneous

as effectively depths of thought,

suggest

to

the images metaphorically and intellectually, Ei­ senstein denied the all-important visual integrity

Generalities and rules

are

risky for a medium

that is every year developing new techniques and

creating

new

styles

of

expression:

a

medium

which has already brought forth such impressive studies in the internal monologue as Last Year at

Marienbad, Hiroshima, Mon Amour, 8lf2, and on humbler level, This Sporting Life and The

a

Manchurian Candidate. Yet the very limitations the film form has imposed on the internal mono­

logue suggest the direction the filmed internal monologue might take in the future.

The most

step

away

readily apparent direction from literature.

is

a

firm

An art whose limits

NORTHWESTERN

TRI-QUARTERLY

depend on a moving image, a sound track, and an editing principle can't help differing from an art whose limits depend on language, a printed page, and the word metaphor. As we have �1·1·1I, the fact that both film and novel feature

stream

stroyed

the same aspects of it. The novelist is most at

novelist.

home

weaving

mean

an

that

infinite fabric of observations

and recollections in order to evolve

language­ bound mental continuum, reveling in memories, thoughts, and relationships that no longer have an equivalent in the visible world. A medium rely­ ing on language and metaphor is well suited to that purpose. Film, on the other hand, has been most successful when it has followed a strictly material or physical continuum. In short, if the internal monologue is to be a permanent part of film, it is clear that filmmakers cannot rely on literature's internal monologue for their model. a

Nor does film need to. For the internal

mono­

the crucifixion of the Saviour to

in

they are able to focus

of life does not on

a

t le from

a

20th

Century criminal execution. Babylon of the Old Tr-stament was separated from the United States today by a fraction of a second. Objective time, as discussed before, could be juggled and de­ ways

closed

to

the

playwright and

It is in this direction, it seems to me, suggesting

subjective relationships between past, pres­ suggesting subjective relation­ ships between divergent places and objects, that

new

ent, and future;

film can make the most effective use of the inter­

nal monologue. In 8%, for instance, how effective­

ly film was able childhood with

to

juxtapose

scenes

scenes

of Guido's

of Guido at the rest home,

bring new insights to his personality. way it was able to hop from Guido, and mistress at a cafe, to Guido in his imagi­ wife, to Guido alone in his preview thea­ nary brothel,

in order to

In the

same

ter, for effective and comic comment on his love

logue has given film an extraordinary opportunity

life. In

Marienbad, as suggested before, the film­

exploit those' aesthetic properties peculiar to

makers

were

to

film, properties which film can render as no other

able to mix the past and present in

order to suggest startlingly new, purely subjective

art form can. And before finally exploring a direc­

relationship between separate events of the past

tion for the filmed monologue, it might be

with events of the present.

as

well

to review briefly those special properties of film.

Moreover, it was within the limits of matter that

Surely Siegfried Kracauer was right when he recognized that the photograph's senior contribu­ tion to art has been its ability to draw out from the physical universe hitherto unsuspected forms of familiar sights. Photography, and later film, was able to give new dimensions to such seem­ ing commonplaces as mudpuddles, slum tene­ ments, and eyeglasses. The German photographer

impressive. The moving camera, the over­ exposed and underexposed picture, the slow-mo­ tion and fast-motion frame, the varying grades of film itself-from the very grainy and coarse news­ reel-like film to the glowing "sunlight" film-all allowed the filmmakers creative opportunities de­

Gustav Schenk uncovered in

square millimeter

nied the novelist. To summarize: if literature has

moving plain water "an endless succession of shapes so fantastic they seem to have been dreamed rather than found." Photographers like Eugene Atget, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Walker Evans came back from the ugliest slum neigh­ borhoods with breathtakingly beautiful and deep­ ly moving pictures of people and buildings. As Kracauer said of yet another photographer, "He

used the internal monologue to explore the world of the mind through the subjective language of

a

of

knows how to make walls and wet cobblestones

eloquent." What thrills us today, then, is the pow­ er of the photograph, so greatly increased by tech­ nical innovations and scientific discoveries, to open up new perspectives of the physical uni­ verse.

an

ar­

ray of technical innovations to make its statement most

symbol and metaphor, film is uniquely able to ex­ plore that mind through the subjective world of time and matter.

perhaps just as important as the direction give the internal monologue is the direc­ tion the internal monologue can give film. Last But

film

can

Year at Marienbad has shown at least part of the way. It has shown that it is no longer necessary to

depend on the traditional awkward flash-back de­ vices for transition from present to past, that the thought process in film can be rendered visually rather than orally, and perhaps most impressive­

When

pictures began to move, the revelations multiplied. With use of the moving camera, in­ animate and moving objects were given still new­ er dimensions. Even more important, the less tangible and more complex phenomena of move­ ment and time became subjective as well. Places and events widely separated from each other in an objective world could now be dramatically brought together in film as in no other media. In Intolerance D. W. Griffith could jockey an audi­ back and forth from the fall of Babylon to the 17th Century St. Bartholemew Massacre, shut-

ence

Spring,

Last Year at Marienbad was able to bring

1964

ly, that it is possible to make contrapuntal use of all the parts of film-music, narration, sound effects, as well as photographic image-to suggest more accurately the nature of that stream of con­ sciousness. In short, by giving film a further op­ portunity to exercise its unique powers-the ex­ traordinary power of editing, the ability to re­ produce accurately portions of the physical world, the power to juggle time and space-the internal monologue can expand the realm of film as it has already expanded the realm of the novel.

29

POEMS By Rohert Lee Moore If Robert Lee Moore discovers these

undergraduate

poems of his in The Tri-Quarterly, I hope he will forgive me for printing them without his permission. He left them

with me in manuscript when, many years ago, i/l health

forced him to leave college unexpectedly. I have cher­ ished the poems but lost track of the poet.

These poems of the early 1930's have given pleasure

glad to save a few pages of this last issue of The Tri­

Quarterly which will fall under my editorship to give a

more

We are the wasters, we,

Skipping the life to come, No disrespect to Thee,

God, or the Holy Three.

We hear the distant drum

to many Northwestern people. Indeed, the manuscript itself is falling apart from many readings, and I am

the poems

CHANT FOR PAGANS

permanent form and make them

But do not choose to come.

We hear the

rolling tide Surge toward the shore divine.

We choose the earthly side; Here where the meadow wide

And the cool arbor vine

available to other readers.

E. H.

Make earth itself divine.

We are the wasters, we; Let the dull tide depart,

Just so the sparkling sea With its bright gems is free.

When we have filled the heart

From THE SOLILOQUY

Let the dull tide depart.

Grant that a spring love could be true,

We are the wasters, we,

That man could know a woman's heart.

Hearing the distant drum

In spite of all that love could do

Call from beyond the sea.

They still remain apart.

We hear the calling drum But do not choose to come.

And though their mouths press each to each

And through their heart-beats

pulse as

BALLAD

one,

My love is walking down a rose-thick lane,

J know their souls can never reach

Far away, 0 far far away,

And touch, as stars have done.

With two red blossoms in her hand.

For every woman lives alone

Her eyes, as deep as violet rain

And likewise every man must dwell

Dream of the spot where I am lain, Far away, 0 far far away.

As though some sin he needs atone

In penitential cell.

My love is walking by the willow row, Far away, 0 far far away.

Her face is white, her hands are cold; She wonders where the waters flow;

"Where does the Other River go?"

I cannot tell her, though I know: At first I had planned to print only four or five of Moore's poems, but the undergraduate editors urged me to leave out none of them. So I'll include in this footnote the charming little dedication which Moore put at the head of his manu­

script.

E.H.

TO MR.

and MRS.

HUNGERFORD

Far away, 0 far far away.

My love is riding down the village street, Far away, 0 far far away, But does not see the weeping eyes, The lilies by her winding sheet, The horses' slowly moving feet; Far away, 0 far far away.

Poor little songs, this my dedication is: Although you may be ragged, as I wis, And

'though your content may be mostly rot, Yet you're the best I have, God wot.

And so I you send forth, withouten fear.

Go, Beggar Verse, on limping feet, and sore; Be not downcast of heart, be of good cheer, All will not turn Lazarus from the door.

30

And now my love lies rotting in the mold.

Far away, 0 far far away.

I would have told her, if I could;

But now it is done, and Time grows old; The snow lies heavy on the wold; Our graves are far apart, and cold;

And far away, 0 far away.

NORTHWESTERN

TRI-QUARTERLY

INCIDENT REMEMBERED

SONGS

FROM KANSAS

Here is sixpence to buy some songs, Songs with a lilting April note.

Let one be a tune for carnival throngs, And one for the lonely shepherd's oat.

We lived upon a farm, when I was five.

Our drafty, old frame farmhouse was alive

With spiders, mice and crickets. There, at night I used to listen often to a slight

Let one be a song for a maypole dance

Rustling and scurrying inside the wall, Or to tiny footbeats scampering down the hall.

My mother hated mice. She was afraid Of snakes and crawling things, a fear which

And one for a gypsy serenade.

Let one have a magic spell and a trance;

Let one be the tale of an old romance; Let one be of spears, and a bannered

made

lance,

Her life unpleasant on that Kansas farm.

And armor and bugles, and cavalcade.

She scrubbed and mopped, and with a vigorous

Let there be songs for exulting breath,

arm

Of love and of joy, but I pray

Fought back the daily dust the wind blew in; Swept from the road in clouds, that laid a thin

Let there be no songs of death This bright April day.

Veneer upon the chairs. Beneath the door, An inch or two of space; and warped the floor, And warped the planks and shingles on the wall.

From THE My mother then was young and fair and tall, Though always tired, and burdened with dispair, Weighted somewhat with worry, thin from care, From doing all the thousand piled-up tasks And all the crude demands

a

SOLILOQUY

Tomorrow will be a spun-glass day.

There will be prisms hanging from the trees.

At every breeze, Aeolian chimes will play,

farmhouse asks.

Filling the air with tinkling melodies.

But now, on with the tale. One day in June,

There will be mirrors to walk upon

A blistering sultry day, an afternoon

And every branch will be a work of art.

When on the fields the soaking sunshine beat.

There will be a fragile beauty seen at

I lay upon the parlor rug; the heat

dawn,

Had kept me from the yard, and so I slept.

Silver and grey, and brittle as a heart.

Near, sitting where I lay, my mother kept Close watch upon my slumber, as she sewed.

Around the house the heated current flowed; The flies droned drowsily against the pane; And creaked the ever-swinging weathervane.

Only one day a year does nature give Unto the world a dress of glass to wear, And though it fade, the memory yet will live Like Cinderella's slipper on the stair.

My mother sewed away, 'till suddenly She glanced up from her work, and looked at me.

TIGER IN THE GARDEN

She screamed. There where my head lay near the door,

Through a garden in Versailles Once my dreaming eye did pass And there were hedges carefully trimmed

A blacksnake slid its length across the floor.

I woke and looked at it, transfixed with fear.

And there were nurtured floors of grass

It pulled its black repulsive body nearer,

And there, I was surprised to see,

Its bright eyes gleaming, then, like little beads.

A tiger prowling,

I gave a cry. My mother came and seized

secretly.

The writhing mass. Afraid, yet risking harm,

But dreams are evil visions

She ran into the yard. Around her arm

Which the daylight should dispel

The snake wrapped coil on coil its glistening

As matins of the morning cock

length.

She pulled it from her with the nervous strength That fear provokes; then with a heavy chain She killed it, striking hard, again, again.

The erring spirits send to Hell.

But this dream somehow seemed to stay

Upon my soul, until this day.

For now in every mind I see

Then coming in, shaking, cold, and weak,

The cultivated garden of my dream;

She sank into a chair. I pressed my cheek

And in the formal walks of life

To hers, and held her tight, and there,

I see the savage eyeballs gleam, And deep in every woman's face,

She

cried,

and

hair.

Spring, 1964

ran

her moist hand through

my

Her jungle heritage, the tiger-trace.

31

RETURN OF ADONIS

REMINISCENCE OF KANSAS Birthplace for me an old frame farm-house,

Pale Venus walks amid the melting snow.

Upon the trees her doves sit motionless.

About the field is all the bitterness Of winter, and the lovelessness of woe.

Sad are her eyes; her footsteps sad and slow.

bleached And sweetened by long years of Kansas sun.

But now she stops, and bends in eagerness

In front a row of lilacs grew, and reached

Above a bank, where bold in forewardness

The always-opened windows. There was one

Some little clumps of purple flowers glow.

Which by my bedroom grew, and in the spring Its never-cloying sweetness used to blow Into my room, and with the morning bring

The awakening hour.

"Anemones!" she sings. "Adonis now Draws near! Her doves are fluttering white

About her head, and all the land is changed.

Adonis comes, the radiance of his brow

When I was yet too young To seek the fields wherein my father toiled,

Again has put the spectre snow to flight And stirred the world again with something strange.

I spent the fleeting happy hours among A thousand country pleasures, yet unspoiled.

I used to dig around the chicken-coop

And fill up holes I dreamed that foxes dug; Or watched, upon the hard-baked a

earth,

troop

AMARYLLIS

Of ants besiege some crippled waterbug;

"

Or watched the wrigglers in the water trough;

Now there's a peg to hang one's credo on.

Or played upon the summer-kitchen floor;

To crush the lushy grasses of the lawn

'To sport with Amaryllis in the shade,'

At times, I'd pry the cistern cover off

With Amaryllis, loving, unafraid.

And drop in stones to hear the echoes roar.

To make of life a bauble, like the jade

Within the cozy house, on rainy days I talked with corn-cob people on the floor, Or passed the time a hundred other ways;

By listening to the rain beat on the door; Or, with my face pressed to the window pane Watching the rolling yellow fields of wheat Bend down their heavy heads beneath the rain, While plodding steaming cattle slowly beat Familiar homeward way across the plain. .

.

.

And now how many years

are

in the night,

Which hangs upon her throat and glitters

there; To make of time a garland in her hair, An endless dewy chain. Within this glade Would brilliant space be bound. And sitting

here, I'd pipe melodious echoes of her name Until young Pan, in jealousy and fear Would creep away, and break his reeds in

shame."

-Thus the young poet sighs and writes A brief philosophy for summer nights

.

How many springs and summers come

and gone, How many drifts piled on the farmhouse site Have melted lonely where horizons yawn?

For me there is a land, beyond the stars, Where furrowed hills

unending rise and fall, Where thick green grasslands are, and never bars.

And where at even comes the distant call Of whippoorwill, or hoot-owl after mouse, And where the winds come up, great-lunged, and roar

Around the corners of an old grey house, And rattle in a wash-pan by the door.

SONNET WINTER Now is the time to write of winter woes' The frantic wind that sought among the

leaves For someone he had lost, now only grieves

Disconsolately; and the gathering snows Against the bleak skies pile their heavy drifts.

Autumn is dead, and now the feeble sun

In mourning creeps away, and there in none But thinks of death and tears. And no song

lifts The dull oppression of the season's weight.

It is the time to write of death and fear.

Of things macabre, blood, and lust, and hate;

To put upon a melancholy art; To paint the world as loveless, bitter, drear; And to ignore the laughter in your heart.

32

NORTHWESTERN

TRI-QUARTERLY

The DRYAD'S LOVER

LANDSCAPE The tall trees, soft with greenish grays

My love is too wild

Shine indistinctly through the haze.

To be an Earth-child.

The western sun's diluted rays

Send vague tints filtering through the mist.

And rose, diffused with amethyst

Her dark eye's light Gleams green at night.

Has lightly stained that crystal cyst, Her tresses flutter slow

The pale suggestion of a sky.

Though no winds blow.

Here floating strands of cloud sweep by,

Her songs are strange

-

I hear

And shudder, cold with fear.

I know that Dryads' grey-green dresses Are woven out of willow tresses,

With the whisper of the wind

Their vapors tinged with that same dye

Which makes the lake a gauzy sheen Of languid indistinguishable green.

The world, in one harmonious scene Of pearly multi-tinted gray Is like a landscape by Monet.

And the forest-song left in; For once I hid, in forest deep

Where they their secret meetings keep, And saw them dance inside the ring,

And heard the haunting song they sing:

From THE

SOLILOQUY

She is not gone forever, that I know.

Love is but latent now, and sleeping lies

"0 dryads are fairer than flowers,

Waiting to wake again when melting snow

And sweeter than moon-showered

Runs in fresh rivulets from the land, and skies

trees.

Come away, come away.

Come away where our leaf-sheltered bowers

Will hide you away from the search of the hours, And bed you in rose blossoms, lull you with ease.

Come away,

come

away."

Glow with the fresh warmth of an April sun.

She is not gone, and she will come again I know. What brings me sorrow is this one

Sad fact: the inevitability of pain.

For after Spring there lies another Fall;

And nothing lasts, however good it seems.

All will be lost. Love, happiness, they all Will vanish as the daylight shatters dreams.

All through the night the clock of life ticks on;

That was their song, which they sang, and departed,

At dawn

-

the bell

-

and all our dreams are

gone.

Nimbly pursued by a satyr, who started Up from the brush where he long had laid hidden I came,

expected, unbidden), But then as they ran, one turned, and (He came,

as

she cast A smile and a beckon at me as she

passed.

Then I grew cold, and I fled from the

place: My love's eyes were there, my love's face!

Under the spell of a Dryad's eye I know that a man will wane and die.

SONNET TO A CASUAL KISS "And have you ever loved before?" she said.

He closed his eyes. His mind was far away.

He thought of one whose hair had seized the

red

Gold of the sun, to wear for everyday.

He thought of one whose solemn eyes were

dark, Remembering her smile, and quiet air; How on one foggy-night-walk through the park The dew strung beaded diamonds in her

Alas,

my love's too wild

To be an Earth-child.

hair.

He thought of slender hands, and then of one

Who gaily once petitioned to be kissed, In her low-pitched refrain I hear a Delphic strain.

Under the spell of a Dryad's eye I shall pine and die.

And he had laughed, and when the deed was

done, Had noticed that her eyes were soft as mist.

"Loved before this?" His voice was husky,

flat.

Thus do I love and fear, With a kiss, with a tear.

Spring, 1964

"No, dearest, no. What made you think of that?

"

33

HILLS

HERCULES

Why do we climb hills? Is it because We long for vistas, crave the far-away?

Or is it something from an ancient day, A vestige instinct, one of nature's laws That says: here, safe from predatory claws Is point of vantage, sanctuary, stay!

Or is it that the soul, inclined to pray Feels some resistless force which upward draws?

When the hero's ship had slid upon the sand

Why do we seek high hills and mountain peaks?

Of the Isle of Amazons, and Hercules

Met with Hippolyte, with all her band Of warrior women beside her on the strand,

Their bows bent back, grim, in a warning

smile, The arrow tusk bared in the threatening snarl; -He knew the prize was his, without a trial

Of arms, or the necessity of parle.

Because we dislike earth! The spirit seeks

For when the queen saw Hercules advance

For something kindred to it in the skies.

She marveled at the power in his stride,

Thus we climb hills, and thus we train

And loved at once his strength and

our

kingly stance

eyes

-

And motioned back the archers at her side.

On stars; and in our gazings are the same

Bright aspirations of the moth and flame.

That moment he had borne away the prize And left her pyre-plume bent against the

skies.

SONNET

TEATIME

I said my love was fairer than the sun I offer her my love, as on a tray

And fairer than Dian, who is the moon.

One brings in tea and cakes, at four o'clock.

I said she sings more sweetly than that one

I try to sound quite steady as I say,

Who set the trees to dancing from his tune.

"I'm sorry, but the sugar's hard as rock.

I called her fragrant as the month of June,

"The tea's too

Said from her eyes the heavens take

As, in the sunshine, golden towers do.

come

But when I tell her this, in accents true,

was

out."

true.

"Do have another cookie, I insist.

My love but laughs, and says I only flatter, And calls this conceit fair, and that one new; matter!

I fear. The cook

Cup to her lips, my future hangs in doubt.

She smiles, and all my rarest dreams

I said her hair did glisten at high noon

But love, she says;

weak,

I hold my breath as she inspects its hue.

their hue.

"Here's one with cocoanuts, as white as snow.

"Ah, that's another

"Do take another one, it won't be missed."

"

(Each cake's a kiss, but that she doesn't know, Nor does she know the way my heart leaps up When she decides to drink another cup! )

Ah me! I flatter her! And if I do?

Gadzooks! Cannot one love and flatter too?

THE SCHIZOPHRENIAC'S REPLY

APPRECIATION

I ask the world no questions, let it ask

Friends of the old years, the dusty years, Singers of songs and sonneteers of old, Men who wrote lyrics while their hearts were cold, Dampening the fertile manuscript with tears;

Great-hearted solemn men, whose listening Heard in the air the instruments of gold,

ears

Of me no explanations. If a dream

Composes my reality, why scheme To lure me back to yours? No. Let me bask In the warm sunshine of my thoughts. The

mask Of fantasy is sweet, and the rare gleam

Bringing to those who hear, in music's mold

That colors my existence makes it seem

The answer to the world and all its fears.

More fair than any earthly love or task.

Poets of old, who dwell in regions bleak

Dementia precox! You have named my

Show me the path which all the shades have trod,

That I may leave my silent cell to seek The land that Keats and Spenser knew,

the sod That Dante knelt upon to pray, or speak To the poetic spirit known as God.

34

case

As senseless to environment, mute, and

blind.

Well, you have never seen this other place, Here where a thousand colors, undefined, Blend with a soundless harmony and trace In fire the bright creations of the mind.

NORTHWESTERN

TRI-QUARTERLY

ISAAC, SON OF ABRAHAM

We lay our lives, and at whose will, we die."

Mother, for three days we scarcely slept, But rode the rocky plain, nor stopped to rest From dawn until the searing sun had crept Its fiery arc from east to smoky west.

He started up the slope, I followed him.

We rode all day, and when at last the sun

Slanted up its last heat-burnished ray, We stopped, our day's tired journey finally done,

Eager for rest. Then Father knelt to pray And till he finished, neither food nor drink Could we prepare, though hunger made us weak.

He walked as one who walketh in a dream.

I asked to lead him, for his eyes are dim.

He took my hand; across each rocky seam I guided him, until we reached the peak.

"This is the place," he said, "It is the same As in my vision;

rocky, bold, and bleak,

by God's eternal flame."

Yet lit throughout

"Father," I said, "what will you sacrifice?

No lamb, nor dove, nor sacrificial bull

And when at last we ate, he seemed to shrink

Have we brought with us, neither myrrh nor

From all of us

spice, Though all our fields at home are bountiful."

My father looked at me, he saw me not.

He spoke out in a deep and solemn tone As though he spoke to God: "It is your lot

-

from me

nor

-

would he

speak, But only stared at me with sad strange eyes.

I tried to speak with him. I asked him why He did not bring the lamb my heart's own prize I offered him. He tried to tell me why: The journey was too long for it, he said, We'd buy a fatter one along the wayPray speak no more. His face was overspread With such a look I could not disobey.

And yet we bought no lamb, although we passed -

-

Field after field.

To die upon Jehovah's altar stone."

I stood too paralyzed to

move.

He tied

Me fast, piled heaps of brush about my feet; He rose and prayed, drew out the knife

-

I cried,

Mother, as lambs upon the altar bleat.

The knife-stroke never fell. My opening eyes

On the fourth day we came Unto Moriah, land of peaks, at last.

We wandered long among them, each the same, Until at last he seemed to think he'd found

Beheld my father standing, knife in air, Transfixed, as though he saw step from the skies

Upon his knees and prayed aloud to God.

Angels of God. I looked, no angels there, And yet he answered them, "Lord, here am 1."

And then he prayed, with me before his feet, And lifted up his white hands toward the sky.

Behind me then I heard a sound, a bleat

"But Father, still we have no lamb," I said.

As of a lamb. I turned. A goat I saw,

He

Caught in a bush, held prisoner by its horns.

My father loosed me then. I watched him draw The goat from out the clinging of the thorns.

A certain one. At foot of it we stopped.

"Here

we

will build the sacrificial mound."

He looked at me again, and shaking, dropped

pulled

me

down beside him

on

the sod

And placed his shaking hand upon my head.

"God will provide, my son"

-

the words my son

Stuck in his throat, and I was sore afraid.

He seemed to tremble with an inner fright.

He placed his forehead to the ground and

prayed;

Mother, I saw him kill it then, the knife Plunge deep into the whiteness of its throat And then the flames lick up its quivering life.

And when he rose, a strange ecstatic light

I shuddered then. There where he slew the goat,

Burned in his eyes, a savage gleam, and new.

But for that voice he heard, I would have lain.

He took a long knife then, and washed it clean,

Anointed it with oil, and thrust it through His girdle

-

the one you wove, of gold and

green.

Then, "Come, my son, now we will go prepare A sacrifice unto the Lord Most High,

Mother, he is mad, I tell you, mad!

To offer up his own son to be slain!

He bears upon his head the curse of Cain.

I would have died, 0 Mother, had He not again heard voices in his brain.

Whose ways are past our knowledge; in whose care

Spring, 1964

Mother

.

.

I fear to look upon his face again.

35

That joy and sorrow come in equal measure.

THE HAUNTED HOUSE It stood on Maple street, below the hill, A house whose soul had felt the ruthless will Of time and slow decay. It seemed festooned

With dust and age. The hedges were unpruned; The rusty boards bore many a weather-crack; A tangle of weeds and bushes hid the back.

Such happiness as theirs could never last," So my informer said, "Their fates were cast Into a plan immutable. Their joys Weighed with their sorrows hung in equipoise.")

But for a happy time, they watched the sun Count off the days, until a year had run

The spacious yard, too bare and quiet, gave

Into the well of time. Then came a day

A hush of isolation like the grave.

And war, and he was called away.

The night wind through the shutters sometimes

sighed.

And sad their parting. Many were the tears And tightened throats, and empty-sounding

Long ago the garden oak had died.

No intruder ever breaks the spell

cheers.

Then he was gone. The winds began to moan.

That hangs around the house. The old folks tell

She sat and dressed her hair for hours alone.

Of strange sights they have seen, and strange

At night she walked the grounds, and sometimes

things heard.

cried.

The eaves give shelter to no nest, no bird;

The leaves fell from the trees, the bushes died;

A woman's voice in song is heard at night;

The house took on a melancholy air

Sometimes between the shutters comes a light

Until a sable-bordered message brought despair.

Of an unearthly texture.

For he had died.

Some folks say

...

("And thus the Balance swung

So sorrow in the trays the lower hung.")

That they have seen the ghostly play

Of shimmering lights, and then, the singer's face,

What would the widow do? The neighbors feared

A floating star within that dismal place.

To guess. One lonely day she disappeared.

A woman's face, they say, her hair

The house was boarded up. No one could say

A brilliant black, and gleaming with a rare

If she had killed herself, or gone away

And subtle sort of iridescent light,

To some far land.

Bright as high noon, but beautiful as night.

Face of unearthly beauty, all took heed, -Whether from hell or heaven, none agreed.

That when the second year drew to a close

(1 heard this story from an ancient dame, A lonely woman, old and gray and lame, Who knew all things, and watched the work of Fate With an approving eye. Not love nor hate Were in her narratives, but in them deep A vibrant consciousness of those who sleep.)

The house once burned with beauty's light;

(She said) there wit and beauty, love and might Were wont to meet.

What sights this house had seen: The glow of glimmering ladies, silken sheen,

Soft hands and brilliant fingers, bright with fire!

A hundred jewels in feminine attire, In laughing groups, all powdered and perfumed.

The grounds were greener then, and roses

bloomed Where all is bleak

today. Where laughter rung

Now dusty silence holds her muted tongue.

Here dwelt a man and maid. 0 it would be Too weak to call them happy ecstasy Long drawn out through their days, and still uncloyed, A pagan happiness, the pair enjoyed. ("And thus the pair forgot, 'mid all their pleasure, -

36

But so the story goes A ghost was seen among the barren trees.

And thus there grew by slow degrees A ghostly legend, full of chants and moans And rattling chains and closets filled with bones.

Until a youthful parson, strong in grace,

Proposed to lead a party through the place.

They searched, and in an upper chamber's gloom They found, upon a table in the room, A long thick silky mop of graying hair.

The party gazed in awe, and left it there, Its silver waves still falling as they fell When close against her neck they used to dwell.

But no one knew just what the woman's fate; Whether she lived within some convent gate, Or (as my withered dame has often said)

She drifted in some reedy river bed.

And then the years rolled on, a score or so, And men forgot the tragedy and woe That caused the sad old house to sigh.

And when at night the children pass it by

They shudder at its dank and ghostly look.

But when I pass, I think of that great Hook Held in the steady hand of grim old Fate, Who deals to every mortal his just due; On which the balance swings, and how the weight Of joy and sorrow always balance true.

NORTHWESTERN

TRI-QUARTERL Y

I love my room, it is so well acquainted

TRIVIA (stanzas to whoever will listen)

With all my needs, my comforts and despairs.

I love the grey white light that filters through The interlacing tracery of twigs

I

Thut m ake a scroll-work on my window pane More delicate than any carved by man.

How long a week may be, How short a minute!

The bookstand by my bed, I love

And how distorted time,

Of Keats and

When Love is in it!

Spenser,

-

the books

my beloved

friends,

Bound all in deepest red, in leather soft

And loving to the touch and to the eye.

I think, when you're away -

So slow the hours pass

-

That Father Time forgets To turn his hour

glass.

I love the etchings on the wall, the two

Italian hillside towns, with sunlight bright; With beauty trembling in the airy poise Of poplar trees along a river bank.

And then, the woodcuts, strong and dark

II

and chaste I thought that I'd remember Your voice, and eyes, and hair.

Yet strange

I did forget,

-

And stranger

did not care.

-

All memories are faint, And scarcely bring a sigh.

Save one

-

your coldly cruel

Dispassionate goodbye.

Against the whiteness of the papered wall.

And then the rack of pipes with deep thick bowls Fragrantly mellow, sweet in rainy weather (Lacking the prettiness of cigarettes, Blue-plumed, and white against the ebony tray Dignified by beauty of their own), Like fragrance of the woods, the quickening smell

Of distance, fog-borne on a misty sea.

Then there are people I have loved, some friends

And some whom I have seen at times and felt

VALE

A friendship for, although I knew them not.

A week or more, and they will all be gone­

These days that I have loved, and

cherished more

Friends who have made me grateful

for a smile.

A casual smile, like sunshine beating through

And more since rarity made them so dear.

And warming up the drifts of self-reserve.

These last few days, I hold them close to me

Friends with whom I've sung familiar songs

Although the dawn with silver arrows kills One after one the days I loved so well.

A week or two, and I shall only have The memory-pictures of a face or two Fast fading in the sunlight of the world; Only a dim collection of old prints Of scenes, of buildings, and the campus trees All gathering dust, and used

And rollicked home, the while the staid old sun

-

-

Lifted an eyebrow at me from the east.

Friends with whom I've sat past mid-night hour In reading well-known verses which we loved;

New friend with whom I walked beside the lake In spite of rain; and felt a kinship with Because of mutual young romanticism,

Foolishly sweet, and all too soon out-grown.

for anchorage

By spiders spinning threads from wall to chair.

And lastly, friends who taught me how to look For something in myself, and offered all The help that older minds can give, who watched

Ah, but to outwit the spiders, I Will take this fragment of my fading days And make a record proof against all time, My time, I mean, for this is interest to No one but me: These are the things I loved, The things I shall remember when old age Has set me reading psalms and hoping for

My efforts kindly

Another Dawn in a more radiant East.

The spots of light above the campus walks;

-

These are the things that made the days so

Spring, 1964

friends who never laughed.

These are the people I have loved: And last of all The scene: the lake; the fog grey-green against The red-tile roof of Fisk; the lanterns wrought

Of iron that hang above the U.H. door; The cinder-crunch of footsteps

scarcely heard;

The light up in the tower, dim at night.

dear,

So hard to lose,

-

so

sad to bid goodbye.

37

•

Virtue IS NOT DEAD

By Mary E. Henrikson

"It's Time to Face Facts; Teenagers and V.D." January, 1963) "The Moral Disarmament of Betty Co-ed"

(McCalls,

(Esquire, Sep­

tember, 1962) "Sex

the Campus; The Real Issue" (Redbook; Octo­ ber, 1962) "Sex in the U.S.: Mores & Morality" (Time, January 24, on

1964)

ThiS list could

be

made

with

infinitely long

point where the problem does not exist. My fresh­ man year in one of the many dormitory "bull ses­ sions" that I

which

-

around

to

sex

almost

without

sooner

or

later

exception -

I

come

commented

surprised that more girls did not be­ pregnant when they were so frequently in­ dulging in extra-curricular sex. To my astonish­ ment, one of the girls replied, "Good grief, Mary, pregnancy went out with the Middle Ages!" I was

come

this

the

co-eds

magazine articles of only the past two years. Ev­

think

ery article points out the loss of morality among the teenage and, more particularly, among the

it is they possibly become pregnant simply unthinkable to them. At another session two years later, I was asked in all earnestness by

college co-ed set. Many irate, red-blooded Ameri­ can college women would like to stand up and shout to every magazine editor in the country that virtue

in

the

word is not dead

"old-fashioned"

sense

of the

the college campus. True, that will not deny keeping it is an ever-try­ they ing battle, but it is not yet as dead as the current on

reading public is being led to believe.

If

we

read the

magazine

stands

numerous

articles

now

in perfectly

the

on

respectable it azines and from seemingly accurate polls would seem that today's college woman thinks no more of going to bed with her current date than she would of going to a cocktail party or to the movies. There may be college women who feel this way, and sexual relations may be promiscu­ this is an almost in­ ous among the college set evitable result of the freedom possessed by to­ day's college women. Yet the college women who graduate with their virtue include more than just those who have lacked the opportunity to do oth­ -

mag­ -

-

erwise.

Just

as

there

are

numerous

reasons

why

a

co-ed may be promiscuous, there are also many reasons why a co-ed may be virtuous. Before go­

ing into the reasons for a co-ed's remaining vir­ let me "re-hash" the reasons why her friends and sorority sisters may be promiscuous.

Seldom does the thought of a possible pregnancy enter the mind of the co-ed who frequently in­ dulges in sexual relations, yet in many cases this is precisely the reason why another co-ed may abstain. The promiscuous co-ed often feels that birth control methods have been perfected to the tuous,

38

is

way

many

feel

could not

that

-

-

girl, "Isn't virtue awfully dull?"

Many promiscuous girls do, though, recognize at least the remote possibility of pregnancy. Of these, many abstain for that reason and that rea­ son only; yet even while recognizing the possibil­ ity, many still indulge, some hoping it will not happen to them and counting on luck. Others also recognize the possibility and figure that they can if they get the boy concerned to marry them can determine who he is. Many engaged girls feel that they could move up their wedding dates "if anything should happen"; and many, too another

-

many

tion.

will not hesitate to

"see

about

an

abor­

"

Why do college women indulge in sex? Exclud­ for ing those who merely "think it is fun" while these exist, hopefully they are few in I think it can be safely said that the number majority of promiscuous co-eds are so because they are, or think that they might be in love.

Some even go so far as to use sexual experi­ -

-

ences

as

a

test of their love.

A great many of

indulge in pre-marital sexual relations do so with their "pin-mates" and their fiances. This type of relationship, while not yet completely approved, is an accepted fact among college students. Several engaged couples I know frequently take week-ends together with everyone's knowledge; their action is not really approved, but neither is it condemned.

The mere necessity of the college co-ed's finish­ ing college before she can establish her family may be one of the factors leading to her promisthe

college

women

who

NORTH WESTERN

TRI-QU ARTERL Y

Mary Henrikson is a senior in the College of Liboral Arts, maioring in English. For last year's WAA·MU Show she was Wardrobe Mistress and is this year a Board Member for the show. Her satirical article, "The Maior Concern of Today's College Woman," which won her a membership on the College Board of Mademoiselle, ap­

peared in the winter (1963) issue of The Tri-Quarterly, undergraduate editor of the maga­

and she is now an zine.

She was born in Johnson City, New York, went to school in Canton, Massachusetts and Grand Rapids, Michigan. At Northwestern she is a member of Alpha Delta Pi Sorority. Editorial work for a magazine or publishing house is what she would like eventually to do.

cuity. A working couple may, after dating for a period of time, become engaged and set a wed­ ding date in the near future. A college couple may meet and fall in love their freshman year with no possibility of marrying until they both

graduate. They may even have law or medical school through which to wait. The contemplation of this wait is simply overwhelming to many students, so they participate in the sexual part of married life although they are yet unable to enjoy breakfast for two, or four o'clock feedings.

At

some

point in this discussion, it should be

mentioned that the so-called "double standard"

of love remammg

which to base

on

a

marriage.

Though this whole argument is an obvious result of insecurity, it nevertheless has validity, and it points out the concern that today's college grad­ uate has for creating a happy and permanent marriage.

Of course the currently popular arguement for pre-marital sex is the intellectual one. It seems the

that

"free"

new

is not to consider

woman

herself truly free until she has

experienced every phase of life -every phase, naturally means primarily the sexual one. (I wonder just how much we women really feel we would like to be

plays some part in many women's decisions that there is nothing wrong with sex outside of mar­ riage. In previous times it has been up to the

liberated -oh how loud

male to "know what to do" when it

standard, I say abolish it all the way -don't expect to have all of the freedoms you desire and still be treated as the "weaker sex.")

The

woman

was

to be

to

sex.

totally inexperienced

and

came

expected even to be very well-informed.

Today, both sexes are expected to be well­ informed, and many women feel that if their husbands-to-be can be out gaining experience, there is no reason why they too can not be. Some women even think that possibly correctly men desire their wives to be sexually experi­ was

not

-

-

enced.

Last summer, while living in

Chicago with some young college-graduate work­ ing women, I heard what I considered to be the most logical justification of pre-marital sex re­ lations that I have ever heard. It was explained to me that the young men and women of today are of a generation made up largely of the sons and daughters of divorces, separations, and un­ happy marriages in general. Many of this gener­ ation can see the extreme folly of those who -

in many cases were their parents who marry for sex and primarily sex. In order to make sure -

that they themselves do not marry for the same reason that many of their now divorced parents

did, they participate in sexual relations with a possible permanent mate. After the newness of sex wears off, they feel they will be able to tell whether there is enough of the non-physical aspect

Spring, 1964

who

women

But

would

this

from

like

scream

promiscuity, feating the purpose

that

men

no

found

of

the

the

double

reasons

for

are

some

virtuous

wom­

college campuses. After read­ first half of what I have to say -just

to be

ing the after

articles

abolish

may think that I am de­ of this article, which is to

maintain that there still en

to

discussion

readers

as

apartment in

an

we

longer hold doors and give up bus seats! To the

on

reading "sex

one

or

more

of

the

the

current

college level" you may readily get the impression that "everyone in­ dulges." For someone to draw a conclusion like that is just as invalid as for him to conclude that everyone in the United States is a vegetarian on

on

after he has read an

all

many

-

discussion of the values of

a

vegetable diet. My point is this: though co-eds

have

many

different

reasons

for

having pre-marital sexual relations, there are just as many co-eds who can give just as many reasons for remaining chaste as there are rea­ sons

for

eating

meat.

add at this point that al­ probably though I write of virtue in the "old-fashioned" of the word and chastity will forever sense mean chastity today's chaste and virtuous cooed is not as totally inexperienced as her grandmother probably was on her wedding day. Furthermore, I

should

-

-

39

if she is skillful, she will conduct her "love life" so that no one will ever be sure that she isn't

group and in different sections of the country.

Whereas moral ideals are determined by the in­

"just like the rest of the girls."

dividual,

A discussion of chastity

should, though, for the begin with the mention of

sake of its scorners,

social

as

group; tinct sets

ideals

result,

a

of

we

social

are

determined

by

a

end up with two not-so-dis­

mores

-

those

of

the

"in"

those who remain chaste because of lack of op­ portunity to be otherwise. The mocker of virtue

group, and those of the "out" group. The ques­ tion becomes obvious: on the subject of sex mo­

would like to say that the majority of virtuous women are so for this reason. But such an as­

rality,

just

group,"

and what is considered "out

sumption could be

an

enormous

untruth. A cooed

today may have a problem with such tasks as bi­ ology mid-terms and philosophy finals, but if she sets her mind on losing her virginity, the oppor­ tunity will come to her. She need do no more than wait

briefly.

-

On the other hand, the scorners of virtue will have to put up a real battle with those who re­ main virtuous from fear of pregnancy. The first knows that birth control methods are today fool­

what

attitude

is

considered

"in

group"?

I

would like to be able to say that virtue is still "in," but such is not the case. With today's em­

phasis on the individual and his right to his own opinions, the only attitude that is really "in" is an almost unhealthy tolerance of any opinion about anything that anyone might have. And this tolerance results in the fact that almost "any­ thing goes" as long as you aren't bothering any­ one by it. "Do what you please, but be discreet" is the cooed's credo. This

that on the ques­

means

proof fool; the second knows that the first is the fool who could someday "get caught" because no method is foolproof. Neither person will be able to persuade the other that she is wrong, and the

tion of sexual morality, the only people who are really considered "out" are the indiscreet. From

second will remain virtuous.

Rather significantly, the religious attitude against pre-marital sex is seldom heard. Many girls who originally may have abstained from sexual relations on a religious basis have been

and feels

that the

second is

a

Victorian

The psychological argument is also frequently used. Not being a psychologist, I find it hard to state this

one

accurately, but it

goes

something

the

same

standpoint, we can be thankful that the

coe-ed is not yet condemned for remaining vir­ tuous as long as she is discreet about it.

-

like this: psychologically it is unsound for a per­ son to give himself (or in this case herself) as

forced to base their abstinence

completely as it is necessary to do in the sex act, of a marriage relationship. The indul­

"why?" The practice of religion on today's col­ lege campus is definitely "out group." It is diffi­ cult for a non-religious person to understand the feelings of a religious one on any issue on the college campus, but it is particularly hard for him to comprehend the girl who states that she "will not" because it is against her religion. She is forced, if she is to defend her virtue at all, at least to use a "logical" defense.

outside gence

in

extra-marital

sexual

relations

causes

which later may bring real harm in a socially acceptable marriage

guilt feelings and difficulty relationship. This particular argument is actual­ ly quite easy to get around, for we find many happy, normal marriages taking place today among couples who have had previous sexual re­ lations

either

with

each

other

or

with

others.

However, if a woman has decided that she will use this argument as hers, she will use it.

The

moral

issue

is

probably still

strongest deterrents for most women

one

of the

college or otherwise. Many women abstain from pre-mari­ tal sex simply because they feel it is morally wrong. This feeling that something is morally right or wrong is, it cannot be denied, a result of the feelings of right and of wrong that have been passed down from generation to generation: nei­ -

ther can it be denied that in this chain of genera­

Victorian forefathers (and mothers) large part. Just the same, moral atti­ tudes toward right and wrong do keep many col­ lege women virtuous. It also should be added for the benefit of this group that just because some­ thing is old, or even Victorian, it may not neces­ sarily be outdated.

Socially, it is difficult to say just what is con­ sidered right or wrong. Here there is definitely a

tions,

our

played

a

confusion

40

as

least

at

for

the

benefit

The logic of virtue is

of

an

on

those

other reasons, who ask the

important topic with

which to close this discussion, for in this very log­

ical age the

majority of the defenses of virtue simply not logical. The fact that indulgence is unhealthy psychologically, or is wrong moral­ ly or religiously is incomprehensible to those who indulge. They tend to have very logical explana­ tions of why they are right; so why, they reason, cannot the virtuous person at least have as logi­ cal a reason for virtue being right? I have no answer for this question, but I hope that the world does not become so logical that all of its virgins give up to logic. At this point let it be enough for me to emphasize for the magazine ed­ are

itors

of the country that there

still do

remain

college campuses who are illogical enough and/or stubborn enough to stay out of the statistics printed in their magazines. Women, even today, will graduate with their diplomas in their hand, and, after a long, hard four years chastity. women

on

-

to mores, which differ from group to

NORTHWESTERN

TRI-QUARTERL Y

by R. Barry Farrell

The Student

and the

University Under Communism" R. Barry Farrell is Associate Professor and Director of

ters

of

resistance."

It

is

Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Political Science at Northwestern University. He is also Co­ Director of Northwestern's program of graduate training and research in Comparative Politics. He is a Canadian,

possible, however, to made to develop the new communist university and the new com­ munist student. These efforts are particulary in­ teresting in the countries of Eastern Europe where

coming from Ottawa, Canada. He obtained his Ph.D. degree from Harvard in 1953 and served as a member

is still in progress.

examine

of

some

the

efforts

the process of transition from the old to the

new

of the Department of Political Science at Yale until 1957.

He has been at Northwestern since then. When this article is published he will be on his fourth visit to the

There are many similiarities in the pattern of administrative organization of universities in the

Eastern European countries. in Poland, Yugoslavia,

Notable

communist countries in Eastern

are

and

many, but the other Eastern

European countries

exceptions

Europe and the Soviet Union. His research has taken him there previously in 1954, 1956, and 1960. Farrell has lectured extensively in the United States and Canada, Western Europe and Czechoslovakia, Jugoslavia and Poland. His volume, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, 1948-1956, was pub­

Yugoslavia the Stalin era model of university organization has been more sharply altered than elsewhere in Eastern Europe. In Eastern Ger­

lished in 1956.

many

have

demic

a

great

deal

in

common.

Eastern In

Poland

several elements of the old German

tradition

have

persisted

in

Ger­ and

aca­

association

with efforts to copy the Soviet model.

SEVERAL

western scholars have referred to uni­

versities under communism of actual

or

as possible centers potential political resistance. On the

other hand at Party congresses and in economic plans communist authorities have customarily

referred to their universities in their

possible

as

a

sound

resource

national power. At this time it is not to judge whether the communist uni­

versities constitute "a sound resource"

or

"cen-

-Revised from a paper delivered before the National Asso­ ciation of Student Personnel Administrators, June 26, 1963.

Spring, 1964

1. GENERAL ADMINISTRATIVE ORGANIZATION OF THE ACADEMIC COMMUNITY At the top of the academic

hierarchy in East­ European countries is the Ministry of Higher Education. This organization has a general over­ all administrative responsibility for curriculum, textbooks, teaching staffs, certification for de­ ern

grees, organization of various areas of extracurricular life, student exchanges

student

abroad, 41

and the implementation of plans in association with the academy of Sciences for academic re­ search. Typically also the Ministry of Higher Edu­

cation has responsibility for the work not only universities but of higher technical schools

of

and

other

higher

classed

institutions

as

engaged

education. Certain faculties such

as

in

Medi­

cine, which come under the jurisdiction of oth­ ministries, may be excepted. In several coun­

er

tries there

tive load was

indications that the administra­

were

the

on

Ministry of Higher Education

excessive. Thus instances of slow processing

of materials occurred, and of administrative bot­

tle-necks,

and

obviously overworked officials.

In the countries under discussion

icy originates with

the

Ministry serves

an

as

Communist

general pol­ Party. The

executor and administra­

policy which originates with the Commu­ nist Party. Thus the organization of the Party

tor of

Central Committee and its subordinate staffs in

capital of a socialist country in some re­ spects parallels the organization of the govern­ ment and its respective ministries. Thus typical­ ly a department of the Party headquarters is

the

concerned with education and there may be sev­ eral persons on the Central Committee of the

Party who specialize in questions of higher edu­ cation.

some Party and Ministry personnel overlap already mentioned, and partly because there are areas of less interest to the Party and in

that as

these

interests

in

Party

activities

the

the

of

The first

Higher Education. ment of the

must have two over-all

Ministry

concerns

of

the fulfill­

plans laid down by the Party for the

undertaking of research projects specified in cur­ rent plans and the training of scientists in scientif­

ic areas and in numbers prescribed in Party plans.

The second concerns

the

major

area

of the

Party's interest

ideological and organizational

as­

Of less

on

the student university organization, it is only that the Academy of Sci­

a assumes role of the importance of a ministry of the government. It is responsible for the planning and organization of all of the scien­ tific resources of the country and for the assign­ ment of research tasks to specific institutions and individuals. Policy guidance for the Acad­ emy of Sciences comes from the plans drawn up by the Party. ences

The

of

overlapping of per­ Party concerned

the

with higher education may also serve as senior officials in the Ministry of Higher Education. In many

areas

the

guidance of the Party

may not

be in the form of detailed instructions sent from the Party to as

the

Ministry.

In

informal

formal ways the officials of the

come

aware

of

Party policies.

as

well

Ministry be­

These

officials

may be responsible for the day-to-day decisions in carrying out those policies. Nor should it be

suggested that there is a complete separation of policy and administration, partly for the reason 42

tend to be less

universities and

research

or­

teaching organizations than

ganizations would be typically the case of major universities in the United States. Though research is carried on in the university, the professor will normally find it to his advantage economically and sci­ entifically to work under one of the departments more

of

the

research funds

are

with

the

sections

Academy

of

Sciences.

Most

controlled by the Academy of

exception of specialized re­ may come under specific minis­ as such tries, Agriculture. Some research will be conducted by the universities under arrange­ ments with the Ministry of Higher Education, but most will be conducted under the direct organi­ zation of the Academy of Sciences and within its structure. Many of the employees of the Academy Sciences, search

which

of Sciences

some

decision­

necessary to mention

sities.

There is, of course, High officials

wider

zation of the academic community. For the pur­ poses of the present discussion with its emphasis

munist Party are not fulfilled through the Minis­ try of Higher Education alone. Particularly the

sonnel.

have

will

in the field of student affairs

concern

pects of student life. These interests of the Com­

ideological and organizational interests may come under the jurisdiction of the youth organizations and the Party organizations in the universities.

Nevertheless, as the Party is interested in the general fulfillment of its plans and the Ministry of Higher Education is the ministry responsible for the university activities, the Party has a very direct role in guiding the Ministry.

officials

but of great importance to professors is the role of the Academy of Sciences in the general organi­

or

The Communist

areas

making discretion.

are

associated with the univer­

not

Conversely,

university professors Academy of Sciences.

Those who do have double appointments tend to fare much better economically. A professor fares particularly well economically if he is elected as a corresponding or full member of the Academy are

many

not associated with the

of Sciences.

Then he takes home

with him

his

university salary, an income for being one or other grade of Academician, and probably a sal­ ary coming from his research work in one of the sections of the Academy of Sciences.

A final element in the

organization

general administrative

of the academic community is the

Communist

Party youth organization. Normally European country a Party like the Soviet Komsomol youth organization which has a student department. The Party youth of also embraces membership organization in and other areas factories the younger people of activity, and thus the student group is typically only one section of the organization. As in the Soviet Union, memberships from eighty to ninety there is in each East

per

cent

of

the

students

are

NORTHWESTERN

claimed

for

the

TRI-QUARTERLY

Party youth organization in several of the East­ ern European countries.

There is also typically another organization called an association or II union of students which tends to look after ques­

tions of student welfare such

health insurunce,

as

housing, travel and tourism,

and physical con­ Typically this or­

within the university. ganization tends to be rather less

ditions

important than the communist youth organization, although in Poland the reverse is the case. Since 1956, mem­ bership in the Polish Party youth organization, now called the ZMS, has fallen off sharply and the student organization has assumed some of the roles in social affairs and university activities which are performed by the communist youth organization in other socialist countries. The stu­ dent organization tends to be far less political than the Party youth organization. In Poland this means

that

rather less

the present time the student is

at

organized politically than is

true in

other socialist countries.

followed in the Stalin

produced stu­ proletarian ��('nealogy but often with narrow perspectives and c apabilities.

In the relaxation following 1956 a grouter representation of the sons and daughters as

was

dents

with

the

correct

era

peasant

or

of the old middle classes and of the communist

officialdom has occurred.

Nevertheless, the goal is

and

social

a

class

which

revolution, intelligentsia supports Party and is both scientifically and politically contributing to the socialist society. And though the worker-peasant ratio of the total student pop­ ulation may be rather less than some of the Party activists would wish, there is no question that it is enormously higher than it was before the com­ ing of the communist leadership. a

new

the

mechanics of recruitment

The

and admission

reflect the class goals and the political goals well as the drive for scientific competence

Before

we

examine

the

actual

oganization

within the university it is important to look at the

general structure of admission and recruitment.

In

western

countries

it is

well

known how the

university Office of Admissions can, by its selec­ tion policies and activities, materially affect the character of the student body. As countries under­ a social and class revolu­ taking a revolution tion this process of influencing recruitment of the future intelligentsia is perhaps more import­ -

-

ant to the leaders

of socialist countries.

The mechanics of recruitment

or

admission to

the communist university tend to be in superficial

similar to

respects

our

own,

number of students

a

who receive

the

primary and high school education. From this enlarged pool of potentially eligible students questionnaires and special recommendations attempt to identify those who possess both academic ability and de­ sirable political qualities. The student applying for university will typically have to receive rec­ ommendations from his high school section of the Party youth organization, from his academic au­ thorities in high school, and sometimes from officials

such

have

as

trade

leaders.

union data

to

a

He

will

his

provide parents' probably political backgrounds. This is particularly true in Eastern Germany and those countries which on

in association with Hitler in World War II.

were

When the student

although there is

much greater stress on an oral ad­ interview or examination. The student

typically missions

in

the Party deems important. The first step has been the enlargment of the pool of potentially areas

eligible students by substantially increasing 2. RECRUITMENT OF STUDENTS

as

he will face

view,

up not

comes

an

up for his oral inter­

examining committee made

only of academic officials of the university

fills out

a

long questionnaire, submits records of high work, and then appears before a committee whose members judge his capability.

but also of representatives of the Party, the youth

his

school

organization, and possibly the trade unions. They

The latter step is not invariable, but it seems to be

competent academically and at the

quite common. Since Eastern European societies are undertaking a revolution, a revolution which favors the peasant and the proletariat, they have concluded that the intelligentsia of their society should so far as possible have origins among the

loyal politically. They will explain this dual in­ on the grounds that they have no interest in training a student scientifically so he will be better equipped to undermine the regime politi­ cally. In the Stalin era it was frequently the case that worker-peasant genealogy, Party youth or­ ganization activity, and general political loyalty were regarded as more important than academic competence. With the enlargement of the pool of eligibles and less dogmatic application of politi­ cal policy, the tendency now seems to be more in

industrial proletariat and the agricultural peas­ antry. This means that special advantages are

given in recruitment to students with such ori­ gins. There are frequent appeals in the press and at

Party gatherings to increase the proportion of

the total student population with students of work­ er

and

peasant

origins.

The

preferred targets

will

ask

themselves

whether

this

candidate same

is

time

terest

the other direction. Students with what the

com­

gories. One suspects that by elastic definition of

munists regard as dubious political backgrounds do get admitted to university on the gamble that in

the term "worker" and the term

the

would place the majority of students in these cate­

"peasant" these

quotas have been reached better on paper than in reality. A policy of wholesale discrimination such

Spring, 1964

course

come as

of their college education they will be­

more

useful

politically dependable and thus serve

resources

for the communist system.

43

An example of the extreme to which this

politi­

cal element in recruitment went in the Stalin

era

was the story of a woman who had two sons.

She, but not they, had been regularly attending

church

and

services

manifesting her religious son applied for admis­

devotion. When her eldest sion to the

university it was

ord that he

clear from the

rec­

of the strongest candidates He was in fact first in his class in one

was

academically. his large school. Nevertheless he was rejected.

The high school principal told the woman that if she did not want the same thing to happen to her younger son, she had better discontinue her

religious activities. It might also be pointed out son who was rejected was not himself attending church services but it was regarded as important that he was being brought up in an that the

"unscientific" environment. This sort of Stalinist

dogmatism undoubtedly resulted in the wastage of talent. It is worth noting that in the Khrush­ chev era, particularly in the last two or three years, increasing efforts are being made to make maximum use of available resources of talent.

In recent years it has become eral of the countries of Eastern

the

Soviet

Union

to

recruit

common

in

sev­

Europe and

students

who

in

have

the way, spends most of his time being "His Magnificence." Typically in Eastern European universities there is a symbolic head who is often not a Party member. Below him there is a vice­ rector, or otherwise appropriately titled official, who generally has enormous power and generally is a Party member. This official will very often serve to join the interest of the Party and the interest of the university leadership. His powers may extend over budget, hiring, promotions, job placement for students, curriculum, and publi­ cations. He will also be important in organizing the research activities of the university. This is not to say that he will make all policy regarding all of these matters but he will probably have a hand in policy and a power of veto which will be of great importance.

The person with the title of "dean" is pri­ marily an academic official and his responsi­ bilities refer most directly to matters of curricu­ lum, standards and promotion of students, and the general organization of the academic activi­ ties in the specific area in which the individual is dean. He will be responsible for the carrying out of the directives of the Ministry of Higher and the

Education

of

aims

the

state

scientific

spent a few years working in factories, on the farms, or undertaking their military service be­ fore enterting the university. There are also

plans in collaboration with his colleagues. He is more analogous to an academic dean in the

for

Europe the professor, particularly Chair, seems to be rather more important than a professor in the United States.

There are far fewer people with the title "profes­

cases

many

of

students

who

have

worked

several years in factories before being admitted to the university. It is claimed by the commu­ this

nists

that

more

mature

provides the university with a student, one who has been ob­

served under mature adult conditions.

The

com­

munist hopes also this may possibly serve his objective of breaking down the wall between the intelligentsia and the proletariat, giving the intel­ ligentsia a sense of awareness of the broad

United States than to

dean of students.

a

In Eastern

the head of the

sor"

and

the

head

of

a

assistants.

tions

In

which

accordance

by professor has typically are

no

The Com­

assistants whose

careers

Party policy in Eastern European coun­ tries has placed very great emphasis on the re­ cruitment of students for training in the natural sciences and much less for training in the hu­ manities. Education from the beginning of college tends to be heavily vocationally oriented. The great majority of students in higher education in socialist countries are studying in the sciences,

tend to remain

as

masses.

One final comment

on

recruitment.

munist

Chair

may

be

more

important than a chairman of a department in the American system. �uch a person will have associated with him a "cabinet" of scholars and

periods

than

with

means

at his control

depend

assistants

would

European tradi­ communist, the

be

the

on

for

case

a group of him and who

rather longer the United

in

States. These people will help him in his teaching and research and also perform a variety of ad­ ministrative

duties.

For

the

student, education

may be more personalized. He may attach him­ self to a professor and rely on his support, pa­

tronage, advice, and

censure.

Some of the func­

might be performed by deans of stu­ dents in the United States are undoubtedly per­

and in many instances the pressure seems to be to increase this percentage rather than diminish

tions which

it.

formed by heads of Chairs in Eastern Europe.

We must

3. ORGANIZATION WITHIN THE

UNIVERSITY The

organization of universities still varies a great according to the historical tradition of each. In East Germany one will still find a deal

somewhat decorative officer who will be known as

44

"His

Magnificence,

the

Rector"

-

who,

by

now

examine further the role of the

Party organization and the Party youth organiza­ tron in the university. It is worth noting that a great deal of extracurricular advice and counsel and even administration of discipline takes place through the Party and Party youth organization.

In a typical university in Eastern Europe there are several manifestations of the Party. One is in connection with the Party youth organization NORTHWESTERN

TRI-QU ARTERLY

activities, make recommendations on scholarships, arrange excursions and vacations,

and its leadership. As mentioned before, mem­ bership in this organization in some East Euro­

summer

pean countries

and help in the admission to university and

high as ninety per cent of university students. Membership can serve as u training ground for membership in the Party it­ self. The youth organization is responsible for helping students in academic activities, for ar­ ranging social affairs, for developing Party con­ sciousness among the students, for organizing demonstrations like the May Day demonstrations, for helping with job placement, and for several aspects of student discipline. Since the univer­ sity section of the Party youth organization is only a part of the total organization, the univer­ sity section also has a responsibility for bringing the

is

as

in contact with

students

industrial workers

in the placement of students in

even­

jobs after

tually graduation.

4. THE CHARACTER OF ADMINISTRATIVE INFLUENCES

ON STUDENT LIFE The

"administrative"

word

has

special

a

meaning in communist countries. It implies the application of coercive methods to direct behav­ ior along desired channels. It also implies the ap­ plication of punishment for undesirable behavior.

Thus if

Eastern

an

European communist were to

and other segments of the orgnization. In differ­ the organization has countries ent different

look at the activities of the office of an American

in the Soviet Union it is

responsible for the application of "administrative measures." It may be appropriate, therefore, to

For

names.

called

the

example, Komsomol;

in

it

is

called

Bulgaria Komsomol; in Hungary it is the KISZ; in East Germany the Free German Youth.

It should be underscored again that in Poland the equivalent organization the ZMS is much the

Dimitrov

-

weaker in the dent

universities is

-

and

the

Polish

Normally membership open to

a

in

the

Party

itself

is

very small number of students. Never­

theless, the Party has

a

strong influence in the

university. Several of the leading professors are Party members. The heads of the student youth organization and its professional managers are almost invariably Party members. In most uni­ versities in Eastern Europe there is a Party Sec­ retary who is responsible for coordinating all of the political activities of the university. He works in close association with the university Party Committee, which serves as the executive cabi­ net for the full party membership in the univer­ sity. Each faculty of the university may have a similar Party Committee and Party Secretary who are in turn responsible to the university Par­ ty Committee. most universities in Eastern Europe there required courses in Marxism-Leninism and other political subjects, and their organization and close scrutiny represent a further duty of the university Party organizations. Finally, the Par­ ty cooperates with the Party youth organization in organizing student demonstrations on political occasions, in Party propaganda, in the correct presentation of the political line, in the organiza­ tion of political "circles" for discussion of politi­ cal and other issues, and in the correction of political influences which are regarded as unde­ sirable. In collaboration with the Party youth or­ ganization the officials of the Party help organize In

are

Spring,

1964

examine here the elements of the system of re­ wards and punishments including subtle coer­ -

cion

as

well

direct coercion

as

to be found in

-

the communist university structure.

Stu­

the

principal organization for Polish students. Probably also in Poland a relatively larger percentage of politically active students in universities join the Party itself than is the case in other Eastern European countries.

Organization

dean of students, he would say that that office was

Two

generalizations

in order at the outset.

are

The communists tend to be rather sive in in

areas

more

permis­

of personal conduct than is the

American

institutions.

that

dean's

case

The

university worries less about student social gatherings, pan­ ty raids, sexual improprieties, and the com­ plaints of distraught parents. A second generali­ many

zation

is

the

concerned with the

office

planning of

is a

rather

less

student's

cur­

riculum so that he may get what we call a broad, liberal education. In fact tends to be

undergraduate training

highly professionalized

and

special­

ized from freshman year on. As mentioned be­ fore, the majority of students study in the natural

physical sciences and almost all look on training as direct professional preparation.

Apart from courses in the Russian language and in Marxism-Leninism, the student is required to take very few courses outside his field of speciali­ zation. He plans his courses according to his pro­ and

their

fessional interests and with the advice of his pro­ He does this within the framework of

fessor.

requirements provided for degrees in various subject areas. The examinations at the end of courses tend to be oral examinations and profes­ sors devote much of their lives in the late spring conducting oral examinations for each of their

students.

The academic and

terested in scientists

Party establishments are in­

fulfilling their objectives, training top who are politically supportive, and

these in numbers

more

or

less

according

to

the

quotas established in the scientific plan. It is in the fulfillment of these objectives that the specific

system

of

This should

A

major

rewards now

and

punishments

operates.

be examined.

administrative

influence

on

student

45

life is the assignment of scholarships, prizes, and awards. Most students are on scholarships. These

to be found in some, but not all, socialist coun­ tries, and in not all faculties in each university.

adequate for a frugal existence,

Discussion groups of limited size meet at regular

scholarships

are

existence which is low by our standards. On the other hand, for meritorious political and aca­ an

demic

activity there are a good many special scholarships and prizes available, some of which are so large as to more than double the amount of the basic scholarship. This makes it possible for the student to live in obviously much better conditions.

Likewise there

are

conditions under

which the basic

intervals to discuss political and academic topics.

These groups also arrange study aids, including assistance to beginning students by more senior

help of poorer students by better

or

ones,

ones.

In these groups students and faculty watch over the actual processes of study and learning. In these groups also there may be a discussion of individual members. A member who has exhibit­

scholarship can be reduced or unsatisfactory behavior. In some countries the scholarship is controlled by the uni­ versity, but the Party youth organization can give important advice which is very often fol­ lowed. In other instances the Party youth organi­

ed bad political attitudes or incorrect Party youth organization behavior, who has neglected his studies, or who has otherwise created a negative

zation

kind of discipline can range from

withdrawn for

almost controlling power.

Whoever the ultimate authority may be, the fact seems

remains that

to have

an

ultimate sanction of reducing or can bring disastrous

cancelling the scholarship

hardship to the student. Cancellation may be tant­ amount to dismissal from the university. Simi­ larly an increased scholarship can be of greatest aid for the student's living conditions and social activities.

Placement

on

mentioned. In

a

graduation has already been planned economy there is prob­ ably a closer relationship between the authorities within a university and job placement than there is in a society such as ours. As a consequence, a student's activity in the university may have very

decisive

influence

on

his

future

life.

One

stepping stone to a successful career is Party membership. Eligibility for membership in the Party can be greatly influenced by scholastic, political, and social behavior while in the univer­ sity. In the case of younger candidates recom­ mendations for membership will naturally be sought from distinguished Party members on uni­ versity faculties who have known the candidate while he was at university. Thus both the assign­ ment to jobs and the determination of eligibility for Party membership will be substantially in­ fluenced by the university record. The ambitious student will be anxious to keep his file looking as acceptable as possible.

In

some

ment to

but not all socialist countries assign­ can involve reward or sanc­

"practice"

to the policy of having during their vacations sum­ mer work which is supposed to help them gain an awareness of the practical applications of their studies and improve their political perspectives.

Not all jobs are equally desirable, and less desir­ able assignments may go to those whose records have been less satisfactory politically or academ­ ically.

tion.

"Practice"

students

refers

undertake

Another form of influence

on

student life is the

discussion or group "circles" set up by the Party youth organization. This form of organization is

46

impression may be subject to criticism and disci­ pline by other members of the group or by higher authorities on recommendation of the group. This mild word of

a

criticism to a rather harrowing emotional ordeal.

Both assignment to assistantships and general professorial patronage represent further forms of influence over the student. With degrees much

professionally oriented than in American a proportionately larger number of stu­ dents look to the assistance of professors or re­ ceive other forms of professorial patronage. Such more

society,

benefits go to those who in the eyes of the profes­ fulfill the

best

sor

ideals

of

the

system

as

he

interprets them. Sometimes the Party youth or­ ganization may have a veto or at least an in­ fluence in the selection of a professor's assistants.

Another form of outside influence behavior

dent's

in

comes

the

the

on

evaluation of

stu­ re­

vacation camps or par­ quests a student applies in abroad.

When ticipate trips for such benefits he can probably not expect a to attend

summer

favorable decision in the event that his shows

unsatisfactory foreign travel permits some

behavior. are

record

Regulations for

much

strict in

more

socialist countries than others. Where the

regulations

most strict the

are

check

on

a

stu­

dent's political reliability is particularly careful.

A great deal of politically important prestige at­

taches to travel at home or abroad of

a

delegation with

some

cultural

as or

member

a

exchange

purpose. Those selected to be delegates are com­ monly those most active in political organizations.

Thus the

student who has

pleased the political opportunities for travel within his own country and abroad, and he may have wider opportunities for participa­ establishment

in

tion

may

summer

have

more

vacation

camps.

The ultimate form of administrative influence on

the student is of

university

or

course

ultimately

even

expulsion from the

police action. In the

Stalin era, students, like all others in the popula­ tion, did go to jail for unacceptable political be­

havior, and for the were

dismissed

same

from

the

reasons

many

others

In

recent

university.

years the tendency has been away from this kind

of sanction and

more

in the direction of

NORTHWESTERN

develop-

TRI-QUARTERLY

ing a system

of rewards and

punishments

of

a

be admonished along the way and perhaps

even

less brutal sort. The student receives substantial

dismissed from his studies. Of course, there is

political training designed to create favorable at­ titudes and he is strongly encouraged to do his

e-vidence

best

academic

work.

this

In

line

lies

reward

while he is at university and the possibilities of a bright future after he graduates. Many of these benefits are denied him if he chooses the opposite course.

Likewise if he chooses that course he will

of

student

contrariety, nonconformity. The ultimate verdict on the Stalinist methods which relied heavily on coer­

opportunism,

and

post-Stalinist methods which rely more heavily on other forms of persuasion, will await the judgment of time. cive action,

or

the

POEMS See here, how the cottonwood fills my mouth,

COLLAGE FOR THREE CHILDREN

my eyes;

To my youngest son I bequeath

I have slept long, and long will be

The waking.

No place of residenceAround my throat a necklace of good byes

one

Pennsylvanian leaf fossil

one

empty bay rum bottle large copper coin we called Noble American Penny dated 1830 with Liberty's bosom in

the ...

Around me here a room no longer me, A house with empty symbols of forever, mocking

The spent illusions of a time-worn dream.

near mint condition

the feedback squeal of my hearing aid one

For that which once we had, is not, and never shall be.

on

They rooted up the trees that cradled me, That shaded all those young midsummer days

-

They took the love that filled a house with laughter And left to it the hollowness of death.

And strangers' eyes peer from familiar faces That give me now my life, once bound to theirs, Without a hurt, to lead it as I will

tickle fight,

campfire past bedtime

one

and one chocolate turkey hiding in the forest

...

Nor will I start with shock when that last forest

Thanksgiving Day

To my daughter I give one

cellophane-wrapped cinnamon ball

one

post office box adorned with brass eagle

one pun, one an

geode, one lesson on the guitar

autumn nature walk hand in hand

a climbing apple tree, all my rhyme words and a snapshot of a little girl with the

photographer's shadow on the lawn

Which yet is mine, is hawked through city streets And saved to wrap the market's rotting fish.

To my eldest son I leave

They're building prefabs on my soul's horizons.

LAUREL TETHER, L.A., '64

one

rock hammer, one buffalo hunt

one

pair of old army boots

Orion's belt and jewelled scabbard when you are

old enough to wear it

one snow

fort, one bowl of warm tapioca

TREES IN HEAVEN TOO

my car key

If I can sit with two tangerines, a peach,

and the folksong I sang for courage on hard mornings with a raw bite like whisky on

And several grapes, On my three limbs of the tree;

tastebuds.

MARK REINSBERG, Staff Associate

A rough board rusty-nailed

in the Transportation Center.

To be my table, A smooth board slanted

WHAT THAT GIRL SAID

To be my bed;

A paperback book, and "L' Apollo du Bellac,"

His opulent intellect weighed

Abundances of leaves to shred,

Me down with fatted quotations

Sky to climb towards, grass to consider, if I want to tie String for tying An itch for scratching; Seven cocktail toothpicks to stick in my teeth, And two cinnamon ones to suck; A chunk of red crayon, only bark for canvas, Bark, and the back of my hand; -

-

Revered, culled from many ages.

I sheared wool with invisible light, Let me say I emptied His mind out

Until it was alone And he naked in night

Shuddered at the thought of me

And

As it had to be.

Five fingers on one hand

He speaks to my name

To count the five on the other.

PATRICIA RABBY, L.A., '64

Spring,

1964

Even during snow flurries.

VAUGHN KOUMJIAN,

JOUR., '53 47

NORTHWESTERN

Tri-QUARTERLY

UNIVERSITY

816

University Place, Evanston, Illinois 60201 after you've read Tri-Quarterly

And

...

Deering Library Archives Northwestern Evanston

THE

TESTAMENT OF STONE

Thems of

Idealism and Indignation

fromthe

Writings of Louis Sullivan

by edit

MAURICE ENGLISH

Thefoundr

of modern architecture in

Chicago is represented as phi­

lospher and

prophet in this collection of his writings from rare sources

Sulivan's

and

unpublished manuscripts. "Gives us an unflinching exposure of weakness and an equally courageous insistence on the basic Carl W. Condit. $6.50 vision"

validty ofhis

-

IMPROVISATION FOR THE THEATER

A Handbok

of Teaching and Directing

Techniques

by VIOLA

SPOLIN a

bookful

TheDircto

of Workshops at Chicago's Second City gives us

sity of

delightfu of

exercises for the theater. Film Quarterly, of the Univer­ California, calls it "an iconoclastic handbook of theater by the An im­

higprest

of improvisational theater in this country

$8.50

RELIGON

portan

document in practice and theory."

AND AMERICAN CONSTITUTIONS

by WILBERTG.

KATZ in

contempray

study Aof

neutrality in the interaction of government and religion America. of which Paul A. Freund says, "A refreshingly

his cand

evry point by

and luci

discriminating analysis. Even those who are not convinced from the author's concept of state neutrality will profit $3.50 cogent argument."

NORTIlWESTERN UNIVERSITY PRESS

on

Campus