· ( ( , ( ~ ~ \ I

J I (

./ ''j

THE PHOENIX

mal'c~ 1960

Published as a literary

Supplement to

The Orange and White.

Poems by J. Means YOU ARE, I AM

You are youth and life and spring.

(I am· a mite from a blackbird's wing.)

You are wind that brushes the bough.

(I am manure beside the plow.)

You are joy of love new given.

(I am pain of nails hard driven.)

You are all my heart would be,

And, oh, that blind are you to me,

For I am a mite, a pile, a pain.

. Lost, am I, in the driving rain.

Library

The University of Tennessee Knoxville

In the Valley, In the River, In the Hills, The Mountains go.

Love? Have I Found thee? Quick thy mind To change.

Wine, at the Midnight feast. By the spring, The waters flow.

Men Are funny in their ways, But, perhaps the Wile of woman pays.

Red Shirt, Black Shirt, Roses on the bed-spread. Time, thy ways to know.

The English Circle meets Wednesday, 6 April 1960 at 7:30 p .m. in Room 218 of the University Center.

The Phoenix is published four times a year by students of the University of Tennessee. It is sold separately for ten cents a copy and with The Orange and White for five cents a copy.

Price :

Separate Copy - 10 cents

With Orange and White - 5 cents

Address letters and contributions to :

The Phoenix

Box 253 1621 Cumberland Ave. Knoxville, Tennessee

THE PHOENIX ORANGE AND WHITE LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

. . . march 1960 ...

STAFF Editor

SUE RENICK

Section Editors:

Fiction JEFF GREENE

Poetry KAY REAGOR

Exposition JIMMY CLEMMER

Art JULIE MEANS

Staff Juanita Brinkley, Chica Colebank, Sonja Eliassen, Ann Foote, Laura Jean Goss, Doris Rivers, David Rubin, Carolyn Smith, Millicent Stone, Julia Witt

Advisory Board Dr. Percy G. Adams, Dr. Dale G. Cleaver, Dr. Robert W. Daniel, Dr. James F. Davidson, Prof , James E. Kalshoven, Prof. Frank Thornburg

TABLE OF CONTENTS

The Beggar

Sketch

A Drowning Incident

Welsh Rare Bit

PAT DAVIS

DORIS RIVERS

C. J . McCARTHY

SUZANNE GRAHN

The Heart of Endurance CAROL COLLIER

Lines from a Madwoman's Diary DAVID LEE RUBIN

Id's a Pleasure JAMES F. DAVIDSON

The Thin Line

The Reviewer's Eye

The Adding Machine A Review

An Experience of Flight

Poems

The Challenging Dramas of T. S. Eliot

JIMMY CLEMMER

SUE RENICK

LAURA JEAN GOSS

SUE RENICK

J. MEANS

CAROL COLLI ER

Counting The Pages Sue Renick, Editor

"The taste of the age is always ,a bitter. one," Ran­dall Jarrell said. How bitter, how bitterly empty he made the taste of our age seem! There was the "sense­less depression" which he described feeling as he watched an eighth grade girl counting the pages be­fore reading her assignment in a simplified version of Evangeline. When I left the lecture room at the Uni­versity Center, I asked myself, "Are you 'counting the pages?' " Regrettably I had to answer yes, but added that I was beginning to hear the words.

Randall Jarrell directed his biting humor against the moderns' tastes in nlusic, in art, and in architec­ture. He said that good music and ballet are accessible to more Americans now than in 1850, but he dispelled the optimism of this statement when he reminded us that very few understand the music they hear and many do not even care to hear it. Regarding the visual arts, Jarrell spoke yet more skeptically. He said that he could not decide whether art "is flourishing like a green bay tree or growing like a weed."

The tone of despair, discernible in these statements, dominated Jarrell's entire lecture. With a poet's con­creteness of expression, he compared Queen Victoria's

age to our own. He said that he could picture Queen Victoria on board a DC-7 telling the stewardess, "No, no dramamine, thank-you." But he could not imagine her reading Shakespeare condensed for easy~ absorp­tion by Reader's Digest. Jarrell's satiric humor implied a deep dissatisfaction with our age of gimmicks.

This, Jarrell said, is the age of "instant literature," literature simplified and made pleasant, literature which tells us what we want to hear. Turning in­cisively to his theme, Jarrell asked if our verbal Mil­towns called books deserve to. be classified as litera­ture. Literature, he said, is "necessarily mixed up with truth," and truth is "sometimes complicated, different from what we expect, difficult to accept." Real litera­ture "can be described," Jarrell said, "as a wish modi­fied by a truth. Instant literature can be described as a wish reinforced by a cliche or proved by a lie."

Jarrell said that the "greatest American industry is the industry of using words." Here he plainly implies the ironic contrast between mass-communication and creation. Unlike the authors whose works the Vic­torians read, commercial writers of today manufacture

(Continued on Page 8)

The Beggar When I was seventeen and lived in New Delhi, I

went to school at the University of Delhi's Miranda House College for girls. During the forty-five minute bus ride from my home on the outskirts of New Delhi to the college, which was completely on the other side of Old Delhi, I was often approached for money, from the outside of the bus, by lepers or maimed beggars. At the same stop every morning, a young Moslem woman came to my window to beg. Every day she came and put her hand on my shoulder saying, "Anna? Anna memsahib?" And I would always answer, "Nay-jau, go away." But I didn't say it very harshly, because she was young and fairly pretty; besides that, it was apparent she was in the last month of pregnancy.

I had become so used to seeing her, that one morn­ing when she wasn't at the stop I missed her and mused briefly over where she could be. Two days later

__ I 1"'1' I _.... =========~~ ....

2

l:. v, I,.)

pat r;])avi:J she was there again; and even though she wore the same grey-white Punjabi trousers and dirty beige veil, there seemed something different about her. As I scrutinized her face, her clothes, and even her walk to find what had changed her, she was coming toward my open window; Just as she reached me, and was pulling her veil up away from her crooked arm, I realized that she would be holding her baby. She didn't uncover it, so I reached down and drew the cloth away from her arm. I remember thinking, as I looked at the baby's red face-all twisted because of the sun's glare-that if its mother couldn't get enough money by begging with a healthy child, she would probably break its arm or put out one of its eyes for a better profit. The woman touched my shoulder tentatively and said, "Anna? Anna memsahib?" So I put the veil back over her arm and gave her four annas.

A Drowning Incident As soon as the screen door slammed he rounded

the corner of the house so as to be out of sight, then ran for the woodshed and put it between himself and the house. The baby was taking its nap. He was not to go far away. Standing there in the shade of the locust tree he looked about. Some wasps were lilting to and fro in the shade under the eaves. Crossing behind the shed and through the gate that divided the huge untended hedges he came through the lot to the old outhouse. He swung the rotted door back care­fully; the planks were warped and soft and velveted with a pale green patina. One board was gone from the rear and a thin shaft of light leaned in. On the floor was still the old coat that he had carried down here to Suzy, after he had followed her, the first day she turned up looking thin and wagging her tail, her dugs no longer dragging to the ground. The coat was matted with a crosshatching of white hairs and the faint sourmilk odor of the pups still lingered. They had gone to a new home last week. He stepped in and peered down into the hole and as his eyes adjusted to the gloom below he could see faintly the two tiny red triangles touching at their vertices. In the corner at his heel there was a chcket resting in the mold, its, antennae swaying in random arcs. He saw it and reached for it, but it sprang, bumping against the facing of the seat and falling to the floor again. He stepped on it quickly, then picked it up. It was still kicking one leg in slow lethargic rhythm; a thick white liquid was oozing from it. He dropped it down the hole and bent to watch. He could see it swaying gently in the elastic web. The black widow came threading her way toward it, and when she reached it she began a weaving motion over it with her legs as if performing some last rite. Soon the cricket's leg stopped. Then he leaned forward slightly, shot from his tongue a huge drop of spittle; it passed the fonns below, receding from white to gray in the graduated darkness. The spider froze. He corrected his aim, and the second ball of spittle fell true, engulfing the fig­ures. The spider fled her victim to the dark recesses of the musty shaft trailing a thin string of spittle which hung in mucous loops among the strands of the web.

He went out then, and carefully pushed the ruined door to. The sun was well up in the oaks on the far side of the house. Some blue jays flashed among the leaves. He hesitated for a moment, then turned down the path toward the corner of the lot. Here he crossed a sag in the honeysuckled fence and started off through the woods. Shortly he came to an old wagon

3

road winding dappled and serene in the morning light through the dripping trees. He took the road downhill, shuffling through the leaves, turning up their damp undersides. He stopped once, stripped off a handful of rabbit tobacco, stuffed it in his mouth and shuffled down the road, spitting, his thin shoulders rolling jauntily.

The road angled and switchbacked down the hill until it came to the edge of the woods where it straightened briefly before losing itself in the humming field beyond which stretched the line of willows and cottonwoods that marked the course of the creek. He could still feel the ruts beneath his feet as he waded through the knee high grasses or threaded among the sporadic blackberry brambles. Then he was parting the screen of willows, lime and golden as they turned in the sun with his passage. He could hear the faint liquid purling even then, even before he emerged from the willows where the bridge crosses, glimpsed through the green lacework the fan of water beyond where the sun broke and danced on the stippled surface like silver bees.

He walked out onto the little bridge, stepping care­fully. The curling planks were cracked and weathered, bleached an almost metallic grey. The whole affair bellied dangerously in the middle, like a well used mule. He sat down on the warm boards, then stretched out on his stomach and peered over the edge into the water below. The creek was shallow and clear. The floor of the pool was mottled brown and gold as a leopard's hide where the sun seeped through the leaves and branches overhead. Minnows drifted obliquely across the slow current. Through the water-glass he watched the tiny shadows traverse the leopard's back silent and undulant as a bird's flight. He found some small white pebbles at his elbows and dropped them to the minnows; they twisted and shimlnered slowly to the bottom trailing Ininuscule bubbles that stood in brief tendrils before rising and disappearing. The minnows rushed to inspect. He folded his arms be­neath his chin. The sun was warm and good on his back through the flannel shirt.

Then with the gentle current drifted from beneath the bridge a small puppy, rolling and bumping along the bottom of the creek, turning weightlessly in the slow water. He watched uncomprehendingly. It spun slowly to stare at him with sightless eyes, turning its white belly to the softly diffused sunlight, its legs stiff and straight in an attitude of perpetual resistance. It drifted on, hid momentarily in a band of shadow,

emerged, then slid beneath the hammered silver of the water surface and was gone.

He sat up quickly, shook his head and stared into the water. Minnows drifted in the current like sus­pended projectiles; a water-spider skated.

They were black and white, they were black and . . . except for the one black all over. He crossed the bridge and started after it, then stopped. When he turned his eyes were wide and white. He came back and started up the creek along the path that curved above the low cutbanks. He studied the water as he went. Small riffles ran through aisles of water-cress awash and flowing in the stream, aluong rocks where periwinkles crowded. A crawfish shot beneath the looped bole of a cottonwood. In one pool an inex­plicable shoe sat solemnly.

At the bend in the creek just below where it passed beneath the pike bridge the current swirled faster and the following pool was deep. Because of the turn the creek made, the sun was now in his eyes and he could not see into the water. He hurried to the pike, crossed the small concrete bridge, and worked his way down the other side, through a stand of cane. When he reached the creek he was on a high bank; below him the current rocked in a swift flume, the water curling and fluted. Below this, in the amber depths of the pool, he cbuld make out a dark burlap sack. He sat down slowly, numb and stricken. As he stared, a small head appeared through a rent in the bag. It ebbed

: softly for a moment, then, tugged by a corner of the current, a small black and white figure, curled fetally, emerged. It was like witnessing the underwater birth of some fantastic subaqueous organism. It swayed hesitantly for a moment before turning to slide from sight in the faster water.

He had no tears, only a great hollow feeling which even as he sat there gave way to a slow mounting sense of outrage. He stood up then, and pulled down a long willow limb and worked it back and forth across his knee trying to worry it in two, but it was tough and resilient and after a while he gave it up. He made his way back through the canes to the road and to the other side where there was a fence. He followed it until he found a loose strand in the wire. This he pulled out, and with a few bendings the rusty latter end came free. He went back to the creek and with the wire hooked at the end tried to fish up the sack from the bottOlU of the creek. The wire was too long to control, and the current would sweep it away; it was nearly half an hour before he hooked the sack. He twisted the wire in his hand, and when he pulled it the sack followed, heavy and sluggish. He worked it to the bank and lifted it gingerly to shore. It was

4

rotten and foul. When he opened it there was only one puppy inside, the black one, curled between two bricks with a large crawfish tunneled half through the soft wet belly. He hooked his wire into the crawfish and pulled it out, stringing behind it a tube of putrid green entrails. He tried to push them back inside with the toe of his shoe. He went to the road again and scouted the ditches alongside until he found a paper bag, which he brought back and into which with squeamish fingers he deposited the tiny corpse. Then he pushed through the heavy brush until he came to the field, crossed at a diagonal, and entered the woods just a few yards short of the wagon road. He turned up the road swinging the dirty little bag alongside. His steps were trance-like and mechanical, his eyes barren.

When he reached the house Suzy came trotting across the yard to ll1eet him. He avoided her and went in by the back door, closing it carefully behind him. In the kitchen he stopped and listened. The house was silent; he could hear his heart thumping. A warmth­less light filled the panes of glass above the sink. Then he heard her cought-she was always coughing-and listened closer. She was in the bedroom. He listened at the door, then quietly eased it open. The shades were drawn, and where the sun beat against them they were suffused with a pale orange glow which permeated the air, air infested with the faint urinous odor of the baby, the odor of the blankets, sensuously fetid and intimate.

He stood in the doorway for an intenuinable min­ute. What prompted his next action was the culmina­tion of all the schemes half formed not only walking from the creek but from the moment the baby arrived. Countless rejected, revised, or denied thoughts moil­ing somewhere in the inner recesses of his mind struggled and merged. He lifted the stinking bag and looked at it. It was soggy and through a feathered split in the bottom little black hairs protruded like spiderfeet. Afterward, thinking about it, it did not seem him that crossed the room to the crib in the corner, lifted back the soft blue blanket, and along­side the sleeping figure, small and wrinkled, dumped the puppy and then folded the blanket over them. He remembered vaguely seeing the green entrails oozing onto the sheet as the blanket fell.

He is waiting for him to come home now; it is al­most dinner time. He is sitting on his bed, his mind a dimensionless wall against which only a grey pat­tern, whorled as a huge thumbprint, oscillates slowly. His mother went once to the room quietly, but the baby did not wake. He is waiting for him to come home.

Welsh Rare Bit Suzanne grahn A Satire on the Poetry of Dylan Thomas

The fork of love pricks our red marrow Into the black pocket of death. Clanking penny bones love and leave Shattered change of the lover's thistle. We rocked graveward in the long bed Of love black the flaming bones, And lie down thorny in the valley of flesh Till all the lovers are smoking dead.

The Heart of Endurance Carol Collier

The Old Man and the Sea, by Ernest Hemingway, is an unusual book. It is brief, almost a "long story" rather than a novel, yet its brevity, like its directness of style, is appropriate to the narrative. There is just the old man, the sea, the fish, and, briefly, a boy.

Unified around the theme of man's endurance, these simple elements are woven into an intensely compel­ling story. Its force lies in the fact that the old man, Santiago, never loses his faith-a faith that is more than the' prayers he promises to say if he catches the big fish, a faith that is the will to live.

This essential closeness to the basic elements of life, upon which the old man has always depended, is sym­bolized in several ways. The sea is significant. It is the earliest of all environments, and that the old man understands it, taking from it his sustenance, shows a deep and simple faith. The friendship of Santiago and the boy Manolin is representative of the old one's hope. They talk of baseball, which the old man loves because it is hard and challenging. And like the boy, Santiago plans for days to come. He rolls up his patched sail at night, takes in the gaff and harpoon, and thinks of the next day's fishing.

The most remarkable quality about the old man is his sense of oneness with the Gulf, with the great fish, with the seaweed, and even with the movements of the water. Once, when he is beyond sight of land and his left hand is cramped from fighting the big marlin, he suddenly feels alone. But "he could see the prisms in the deep dark water and the line stretching ahead and the strange undulation of the calm" and clouds, "and a flight of wild ducks etching themselves against the sky over the water." He is not alone. He knows "no man was ever alone on the sea."

The union of this man and the sea cannot fail be­cause for him the sea is life. Although for eighty-four days he has fished and has returned in an empty skiff, he feels his luck will come. So, in the fight with the

5

marlin, he must bear pain and tiredness and must not let go. Throughout the description of this struggle, one truth remains. The old man must triumph, for he is man and his nature is to endure.

Even in tragedy this endurance cannot fail. Sharks, following the marlin's blood, come and take great chunks of the flesh until only a skeleton is left. But Santiago goes on.

Man's lasting strength is clear in the image of the old man, with the rolled sail over his shoulders, walk­ing painfully to his small shack. The faith which is the foundation of such a will is depicted in Santiago's words to Manolin when the boy comes to him the n10rning after his return. The old man speaks of an­other time when they will fish together.

The strangeness of such a man is emphasized. It is as though Hemingway says, '''The old man is deep. He is a part of the sea. He is one with the great fish. But he is one man and we are different." The tourists who look at the hull of the fish beside the little boat do not understand the human struggle it represents.

A sense of something fine and different pervades Hemingway's book. Its theme, man's endurance, is portrayed through a skillful characterization of the old man and through the presentation of the relation­ship between the man and the sea. The sea, like the fish, is his enemy and his brother. It is the challenge from which he draws life. The clear style Hemingway has used is well chosen. The sea and the situations, described in words the old man would speak, convey a deep awareness of the infinite variety that is the environment of the Gulf Stream.

Lines from a Madwoman's Diary ;])aviJ J!ee Rutin

Six. Atoms and empty space-or feathers, Suspended in the air, dilating fire, Condensing stone.

Where are my holy weathers? In zodiacs? Stamped charms on tempered wire? My cutlery's rust-thick. I've hammered out The rafters for that gold ellipse, morning Glistens through my thatch.

And in full rout, Swallows glide sunward, sunward burning . . Noon. The blue pool and a threaded play Of smoke silhouette the swan; here are plums And mist. (Illusory icons grace the day!) . . . I rummage peace from rubble in these rooms, Await the dummied scale, the blind one's yawn, Prolix with lightning; and the festive dawn.

Reprinted from Poetry, February, 1960, copyright 1960, The Modern Poetry Associ­ation. Reprinted by permission.

Id's A Pleasure Whenever I read that an American official has land­

ed somewhere to observe the situation, I always have a twinge of sympathy for the situation. This is because I was once observed, you might say, by a foreign official myself.

It happened in Chicago, where I was studying and working part-time as a visitor's aid at a professional center that attracted many foreign officials visiting this country. This job required great versatility. In fact, it required more than I had. I was pretty game at explaining American local government to conti­nental civil servants, pretending not to hear them clucking their tongues and all that, but I never got used to the stockyards. They always wanted to see the stockyards. The main compensation, besides groceries, was supposed to be the occasional distinguished or colorful visitor who relieved the routine of my work. My most distinguished and colorful visitor wanted to relieve me of more than that, if he had just had time.

He was the mayor of a large city in a small country, on a six weeks tour of the United States. I was sup­posed to coordinate his program for two days in Chicago. For minor visitors, program coordinating means finding things for them to do; for important ones, it meant getting them places on tinle. The differ­ence to the coordinator is between the warm sweat of feverish ingenuity as appointments run out and the cold sweat of gentle urging as they approach. This particular assignment came at q bad time, because I had just been asked by one of my professors to turn. in two chapters of my dissertation which I had rashly told him were "practically finished." They were prac­tically finished in my head. All T had to do was get them on paper. So the first morning I arrived in the hotel lobby after thirty-six hours of marathon writing and almost no sleep.

My advance information said the mayor was fifty­three, a doctor, and in his younger days an athlete whose specialty had been tumbling and wrestling. He had come into politics through the national university, where he had first been m'edical director and then chancellor. American newspapers had picked up the story that he was a temperance leader who enforced sobriety among the citizens of his city with police­operated stomach pumps.

I announced myself on the house phone and waited until the elevator discharged a small figure, scarcely over five feet, of remarkable dignity. He was followed by his interpreter, a somewhat taller man with the general appearance of a harried Adolph Menjou. The

6

mayor's girth indicated that he probably hadn't done a backflip in years, but his grip as we shook hands gave me a momentary picture of myself hurtling through the air above a solid, smiling cube of human energy.

After introductions we went outside, where an offi­cial from the Sanitation Department was waiting with a car for our first tour. One thing the mayor wanted to see in every city was its garbage disposal system; so we made the long trip out to watch Lake Calumet being filled with the unloved relics of Chicago's days. On the way, the interpreter explained to me, "His Ex­cellency believes that one can understand much about the character of a city from its disposal system." He added, after a pause, "He is very interested in psychiatry. "

The possibility of a Freudian contribution to urban sociology, on such a tremendous scale, had never oc­curred to me. "Has he specialized in psychiatry?" I asked.

He frowned. "I think not in his training or practice, but he reads nluch. As director of medical studies at the university, he pressed for the new methods."

There was not much to see at our destination. The trucks bounced in to dump their loads, some carrying rubbish, others bringing dirt to cover the fills. Bull­dozers were at work clearing and leveling. The mayor looked at it all for a while and then asked what pre­cautions were taken againts rats. The sanitation man responded triumphantly that the dirt was ore refuse from nearby mills, which repelled rats. His Excel1ency grimaced disapproval and uttered a curt expletive. The interpreter did not render this for us, but hastily said, "His Excellency was most impressed by the method in Paris. He considers it remarkable. " murmured that Paris was a remarkable city and we all went back to the car in silence.

On the drive back, as if to recoup his city's reputq:­tion, if not his department's, our guide changed th~ subject to the marvelous new infiltration plant. This nearly resulted in our having to detour past it. The three of us finally convinced the mayor that we would miss the luncheon with city officials. He sulked all the way, while the interpreter tried to tell him (I think) that he could inspect the water works some other time.

As soon as we arrived, he seemed in good humor again. He made a short speech after lunch, gazing around the room during the interpreter's intervals with complete detachment and aplomb. I heard six of these speeches in two days, all skillful variations of the first, and I learned from a subsequent visitor from his coun-

.. ,

try that he reported a total of one hundred and eight for the trip. My informant added that the opposition press said they were glad to export these to the United States, but they thought we had grounds for protesting oratorical dumping.

I remember that lunch mostly for a small incident which I caused at dessert. I· ordered ice cream while preoccupied with a phone message, brought by one of the waiters, affecting our afternoon schedule. After­wards, I noticed several embarrassed glances in my direction and realized that I had the only ice cream at the table. My neighbor to the right, the Sanitation man, told me that I had missed the mayor's little lec­ture on the evils of refrigeration generally and ice cream particularly. He said I had his sympathy.

Next on the program came the high moment when the mayor was driven to city hall and ushered into the presence of his peer. They embraced, exchanged pic­toral guides to their cities, enjoyed each' other's witti­cisms tremendously without really bothering with the interpreter, and were photographed. The whole thing took eight minutes. Then we left for Northwestern University where we took in one institute and two deans, and were taken in by an exchange student from the mayor's country. She talked him into making a speech in one of her classes. I got them back to the hotel just half an hour ahead of their scheduled ban­quet, and then took the train home.

As I came in, my wife was just finishing the typing of the first of my two chapters. She had also typed three pages of excellent criticism of it, for which I was temporarily unable to express my gratitude. I found out that the stove wouldn't work, and that the neigh­bors were not speaking to us because the latest fight between our son and their son had involved a blunt instrument. I finished the second chapter at three in the morning. At eight o'clock r was once again on the phone, listening to the interpreter's account of how well his Excellency had slept, how long he had been up, and how anxious he was for the day to begin.

* * * * ~;:

This was the mayor's morning to see two museums, the Aquarium, and the University of Chicago. As we rode down the Outer Drive in the rented limousine I was allowed to use for special visitors, he pointed to the skyline and asked the name of one of the buildings.

"I don't know which that is," I said. "There's the Tribune Building over there."

The interpreter laughed, nervously. "His Excellen­cy says you showed him that yesterday."

"That's the Conrad Hilton we're passing now," I volunteered.

7

The laugh disappeared somewhere between a giggle and an anxious whisper. "His Excellency can read the sign."

I threw in my hand. "I'm afraid the buildings look much alike to me. I have never learned them all."

His Excellency looked at me reproachfully. "Each building is an individual," he said, through our com­panion. "One may know much of the character of a city from the outline of its buildings. He who builds in his own life has a feeling for majestic buildings." I tried to assure him that r had no feeling against them, but he looked doubtful.

Arranging to miss the luncheon that day, I went home for the two chapters, ~~livered them, and then stopped by to see a friend who had a public relations job. He helped me get a photo of the Chicago skyline and inked in the names of the buildings. I was actual­ly looking forward to the ride back, now. The only remaining event was a party in the mayor's honor at the hotel, from which he would leave for the airport. My main worry was that somebody would mention the stockyards to him. We had missed that one, and he probably believed that one could know much about the character of a city from its methods of slaughter.

By mid-afternoon we were on the Outer Drive again. As we passed Soldier Field, I casually reached inside my coat, and then froze. My piece de resistance wasn't there. I searched frantically through my pock­ets, stopping only when I realized that my two com­panions were staring at me. SuddenlJ"l all the accumu­lated weight of fatigue seemed to come down at once. r slumped back and glared at the buildings as they swung past in all their anonymous majesty.

The mayor conversed with his interpreter for some time, in low tones, and then asked me what sports I engaged in. I said I played some tennis and that I used to box in college. He nodded with satisfaction, although J couldn't tell whether he approved of boxing or just thought that was what I would do.

When we reached the hotel, he invited me up to rest until time for the party. His choice suite was a gift from the hotel, a tribute to international amity and he asked the owners to build in his city. On the ' table was a large basket of fruit and a bottle of scotch, compliments of the house. He waved me toward the bottle with a smile. I thought about my responsibili­ties, and the stomach pump, and hastily declined. He and the interpreter then retired to bedrooms at either end of the sitting room, leaving the couch to me.

r don't know how long I had been suspended un­easily between sleep and waking when a noise roused me which I couldn't place, at first. Then I discovered that it had been a chair moving across the room, and

that the chair was now slightly behind my right ear with His Excellency perched on it.

"Please be as you are. I do not wish to disturb you." This was the first time he had spoked in English. I didn't say that it was being as I was that disturbed me, but I got up. He smiled indulgently, indicating that he was familiar with the type that wanted to get up, but I sensed disappointment.

"I am interested at your boxing. A manly sport." "Oh, it wasn't anything, really." It really wasn't,

either. I ne~er even got into intramurals. My usual opponent and I had followed a policy of coexistence. Once we were ordered out of the ring by the instructor on the grounds that it was not a bicycle built for two.

"Did you enjoy the contact with the body?" I tried to say that it all depended on what part of

the body the contact was with, and anyway, "enjoy" was too strong a word. I didn't say it very well, but he wasn't listening. I had the distinct ilupression that the challenge of anatomy over the language barrier was inspiring him to heights at which my answers were superfluous. He trained on the target now.

"Was there satisfaction after? One has great release in games with violence, do you think?"

I thought one had usually a headache and the main satisfaction after was walking away, but I knew this wouldn't get me anywhere. The interpreter came in just in time to save me from a contrived escape that would have gone right into my case history. He said it was time, to go to the party. The mayor frowned and sighed, then remembered himself and gave me the smile, plus an encouraging clap on the shoulder.

On the way down, the interpreter dropped back

with me and asked curiously, "About what did His Excellency talk with you?"

"Sports," I said. He nodded appreciatively. "It is remarkable how

he can converse on that subject in a language of which he knows so little."

"That," I said, "was my impression." * * * * *

It was a large party and His Excellency was in fine form. The interpreter sweated and smiled, juggling the repartee faster and faster as the enthusiasm swell­ed, with never a pause for breath or refreshment. Partly in tribute to him, I passed up a drink. My employer arrived, and I noticed that the mayor sought him out for a second conversation during which he glanced twice in my direction. I sloshed the ice in my coke, wondering if he were telling him that he had a threat to the Chicago skyline on his payroll. Evidently not, for my employer could never have absorbed the shock with a straight face.

At the hour of departure, I went with the group that saw the mayor to his limousine. When all the official farewells were done, he came to me. He thank­ed me for my services and then, throwing an arnl around me and drawing me toward the car with him, he said, "You must be a skyscraped!" I stammered my thanks, he bounced in, and the door closed on my assignment.

Taking his-advice to heart, I went home and slept like a steetl girder for eleven hours, after which I felt considerably better adjusted. But I still have traumatic tremors when anyone asks me for the name of a building.

Counting The Pages (Continued from Page 1)

for mass consumption. They concoct a palatable dish that the public can consume without overworking their mental digestions. The innocuous and usually insipid entertainment provided by radio, television, and popular printed matter lacks the dignity of litera­ture "in its higher and narrower sense." Jarrell sum­marized this world of instant literature in a striking image: "All of us are living in the middle of a dark woods, a technicolor forest of words, words, words."

At the conclusion of Jarrell's lecture, I was deeply conscious of the vacuity existing in an age of "non­readers." I imagined a room-long unused-contain­ing many books: Virgil, Homer, the Greek tragedies;

B

Milton, Shakespeare, Dante; and the work of Eliot and Mann and Ibsen. The volumes lay closed, gather­ing dust. Jarrell's final words sounded loudly through my mihd-"Counting the pages, counting the pages." T was glad that someone had struck through the in­sensitivity of my page-counting attitude and sparked an interest in literature. I hoped that this spark would not be drowned in a drab sea of manufactured word combinations.

Jarrell's simple, direct language, his incisive sar­casm, his calm despair had aroused in me an almost fierce response. His implication was absolutely clear: we must commit our minds to the complexity of truth, we must actively seek it, each of us as individual beings. But his tone said plainly, "Will we?"

J I

J

The Thin Line Thinking back, I believe I can remember being

awakened by a tremor or something that morning­but I might have just made that up in telling all those people about that horrible day. At any rate, I woke up unusually early. Perhaps I had just had a bad dream, I don't know. But I had been getting up early -before Jim and Ted (my husband and young son) -ever since we'd been on Laokuo Island. I loved the sea and fresh breezes in the mornings, and I would always put on my bathing suit and sometimes go for a long walk down the beach toward the great coral bluff just after the sun came up, or sometimes just sit on the sand and watch the natives leave their village in fishing boats.

The sea is usually calmer in the mornings than it gets later in the day. I guess the tide is going out or coming in, or something, then. One can sometimes see a school of small fish as a wave lifts them up, silhouetting them against the trough beyond. Every now and then the water will refract the image of a scuttling sea crab, making it look as though it is crawl­ing along just under the surface. The breakers are usually small, come almost up to the beach, then stop for a moment and teeter precariously before rolling over to come rushing in as a froth of white foam. The roar is quickly swallowed by the muffling sand.

That morning, though, the water was rough. The waves came in at irregular intervals and seemed to come from all directions. And the little white ghost crabs had already scuttled into their holes. They usually waited until the sun drove them in. How Jim and I had laughed just the day before when Ted had been building a sand castle and scooped one of the funny little creatures out of his hiding place. He had held it in his hand a moment before realizing what it was, then he had shrieked, dropped it, and come running to me, his bright blue eyes streaming tears. As I say, though, I didn't actually think about these things until later.

The sun was just peeping over the whitish-pink coral bluff along the sea to the east as I left the cot­tage and walked the fifteen feet onto the sugary white beach. The sand glowed in the soft, warm rays of the rising sun, so different from the dazzling white bril­liance of noonday sand. The water was still barely tinged with the purple of night, but that was rapidly being replaced with blues and greens. I could still feel a damp coolness in the sand as I ran my toes through it. It always made me happy to see Ted enjoying the beach and sea, but it was nice to be away for a while

9

Jimm'! Clemmer from his shrieks of joy as he dashed in and out of the surf and found shells. He was a glorious reddish-tan color-the color of . once-a-year vacations, and his face always wore an excited, laughing expression, just like he was finding a shiny gold bar every time he found a new shell or spotted an unfamiliar bird.

Far to the west down the beach I could see the long, knife-like shapes of the big fishing boats leaving the native village. They pitched up and down quite vio­lently in the rough sea, and I felt sorry for the poor, ignorant fishermen who had to take them out so that their families could eat. I wondered if they were afraid -but then I decided that they were probably less afraid of the sea at its worst than the land at its best. The larger boats were usually followed by some small­er ones, but that morning I didn't see any of them. I watched until they were out of sight, noticing that they didn't stay in view as long as they ordinarily did. They went over the horizon on a straight course. It was as though they were traveling somewhere far away in­stead of going to the fishing grounds close to shore.

Then I went back up to the cottage to get my binoc­ulars, for I liked to watch the younger natives going about their net-mending and boat-caulking far up the beach. Jim and Ted were still asleep, as I had ex­pected-I always let them sleep until late in the morn­ing. I tiptoed silently to my suitcase and slung the binocular strap over my head. But when I returned to the beach and lifted my binoculars toward the area where the repair work was usually going on, all I could see was the shimmering sand and a few of the poles on which the spare nets were sometimes strung. The nets weren't there, and neither were the extra boats, usually turned upside-down like dead whales waiting to be skinned. And there were no natives running around with tools and stitching.

I then focused on the tiny village, at least what I could see of it through the tall, scraggly palms which looked like skinny boys who had neglected combing their hair for a long time. I was hoping to catch a glimpse of the short, dumpy little native women who walked around with big baskets full of fruit and things on their heads. But neither were these in sight. It was very odd, I thought, that the whole settlement would be deserted on a working day-a fishing day. The men would probably be returning with boats full of red snapper and big black grouper later in the day, and someone had to help them take the fish off the boats and clean them.

Lowering my binoculars, I carefully spread out Iny

big orange beach towel and sat down to spray my legs with suntan lotion. As the aerosol can hissed and my legs began to take on a glistening sheen of liquid, I began to feel a slight tinge of anxiety. But nothing seemed really wrong. Although the sea was rough and the natives were gone., the sun was bright, the sky cloudless, and the little cottage looked unusually peaceful and dreamy as the flickering shadows of the tall palms slid back and forth over it. It was the only cottage on the beach, and its isolation made it even more appealing. I lay down to take a sun bath.

About ten minutes later, as I was watching some sea gulls darting about the sky, tinted green by my sun glasses, I became aware of something moving down by the water. I sat bolt upright and was sur­prised to see a little boy pacing slowly up the beach toward the great bluff. He looked like one of the native children I had often seen through my binocu­lars, and I supposed him to be about the age of my ?wn son, for he was about his size. He wasn't playing In the surf, though, and he even stepped right over some of the beautiful conch shells the waves had washed up on the beach. But I knew the natives were probably so familiar with all the beauties and wonders of the sea that they had ceased to be attracted by them. It seemed such a shame to waste the glories of nature on those who didn't appreciate them.

I waited until he was about a hundred feet past me down the beach, then I got up and began following him. I didn't know whether or not he would be able to speak English-I had been told that most of the natives could-but I wanted to ask him if something out of the ordinary was going on in his village. I grad­ual~y clo~ed the distance between us and was walking b~sIde hIm before he noticed me. Without stopping hIS slow pace, he gave me a quick scrutiny, then turned his head and again focused on the sand swish­ing past under his feet. Though he was young; his face was faintly lined with the wrinkles of a hand-to-mouth existence, a peculiarly mature look of resigned sad­ness. His skin was a light brown-not a reddish­brown, but the color of an old coconut. The sun, I thought, couldn't affect these people's color.

We walked in silence for a few minutes I occa-. ' slonally stooping to examine an unusual shell more closely. Then I turned to him and said, "Beautiful day, isn't it!" Without taking his eyes from the sand, he replied, "How would you know, white woman."

His voice and answer both shocked me. It was not a boy's voice, and yet it was not a man's. And I was annoyed at having a boy speak impudently to me. I

10

had trained Ted not to do that. At least, I thought, this brat speaks English.

We were getting farther and farther from the cot­tage now, and closer and closer to the glimmering pink and white coral bluff which rose in front of us, replacing the beach as a barrier to the surf. I asked him, "Why are you so sad?" He abruptly turned his head and looked at me with cold blue eyes. I had never seen a blue-eyed islander. I knew I shouldn't have asked such a question, yet I resented his attitude and was determined to find out what had happened to his people that day. After all, no one had asked me to make friends with this black boy, child though he was-he couldn't have been more than seven. I re­peated my question and received an even icier stare.

"Where have your people gone?" I asked, "I've been watching the men work on the nets and boats and they weren't there this morning. Where are they?" We were getting closer to the bluff. He stopped still in his tracks. Then, suddenly, he swept his left hand towards the mountains rearing abruptly about five miles behind the flat coastal area. "In the hills!" he said, in a tone of voice which indicated that my question had been stupid. I was becoming more ex­cited and angrier. "Why? What for? And why aren't you with them?" I asked.

With a deep sigh he swept his right hand embrac­ingly towards the sea. "Wave's comin'," he said, with a distinct inflection of pride and anticipation.

I had always thought that tidal waves were things read about in newspapers. "No! You must be wrong!" I screamed. The little brat doubled up and went tumbling down the beach, laughing as hard as he could. I wanted to chase him and choke him until he turned blue, but I turned and ran as fast as I could back toward the cottage. After running about fifty feet, I tripped over a large chunk of driftwood and went sprawling into the sand. Then I got up and looked toward the sea.

On the horizon lay a long, thin line, a mountain of water. Fear gripped my legs and I couldn't run. The cottage was about half a mile away, and I knew I couldn't run that far before the wave hit. Wheeling, I saw the glaring bluff several hundred feet in front of me, looking now like a giant block of melting vanilla ice cream with strawberry syrup streaming down its sides. I forced my legs into motion and dashed to its foot. The wave was closer now. The water was sucking away from the beach, being drawn, I supposed, into the 'great ridge of water gaining more and more momentum as it charged relentlessly for the beach

and bluff with a drumming, oppressive roar. Searching the steep side of the bluff for some way to get to the top, I spotted the boy threading his way nimbly sky­ward in a narrow crevice which apparently had hand­holds in it. I followed him up and stood at his side as the great wall of water bore down upon the bluff.

We were both held spellbound as the bluff reeled and shuddered under the terrific blow. Before I rea­lized it, the little boy had his arms around me and was crying pitifully. I couldn't hear him for the deafening roar, but I could feel his hot tears streaming down my side. He looked up, and the iciness was gone from his blue eyes. In its place was a look of fear, of terror,

that I had never before experienced seeing. I hugged him to me and stroked his head as the second and third waves dashed against the bluff.

Lifting my binoculars, I spotted the cottage as it was swept off its foundation and pulled into the sea. I knew it was horrible, yet I was too dazed then to comprehend just what was happening. It helped to have the boy with me.

As I watched the remains of the cottage disappear in the boiling water, each time reappearing as smaller fragments, I felt him pull away from me. When I looked, he was gone.

The Reviewer's Eye The Work of Saint Francis S, Ie k by MacKinley Kantor, re- _

viewed by . . . ue entC

MacKinley Kantor's The Work of Saint Francis is the story of a miracle. Today miracles are so rare that one should not miss the experience of reading this book. In its brief pages Kantor describes with beautiful simplicity the image of faith that stirs the slumbering integrity in Blanco Sanz's soul.

Blanco, a fourteen-year-old Spanish orphan who has known little about honesty, escapes one moonlit night from the Capuchin reformatory where he is serving a sentence for theft. He fervently longs to become a contrabandisto but the vision of Saint Francis and of Brother Marco restrain him. He might easily steal the money belonging to a rich French couple who have crashed their sports car against the Malaguanan coast, but from among the mist-hung rocks the Brother-whose vigorous faith inspires the work at the reformatory-and the patron saint of the institution appear to Blanco. With their gaze upon him, how can he desert the Frenchman pinned under the tortured metal of the car and the beautiful woman bleeding, helpless in the road?

There is a strange charm in the thoughts of a good legacy, or the hopes of an estate, which wondrously alleviates the sorrow that men would otherwise feel for the death of friends. Don Quixote, Miguel de

Cervantes

11

In many scenes Kantor portrays the earthy hard­ness which characterizes the Spanish hill people. Blanco, with "hair the color of limestone, . . . small, blank, hard eyes" the "color of an eroded Malaguanan hillside, sun - parched, red - brown;" his father Jose Sanz, who fought the communistas beside his admired

master, Don Miguel Poveda, and who gives his dying

body to the sea that he may save his ill wife and young

son the expense of a burial; and Brother Marco, who

mends the screens, punishes the boys with his long,

black belt, and plays futbol barefoot-all these peo­

ple live with a fierce dependence on necessity and on

their simple, intense faith.

Perhaps we would not have seen Brother Marco

and Saint Francis standing among the rocks. But

Blanco sees then1 and we acknowledge his belief in

their reality because MacKinley Kantor so adeptly

describes the almost primitive life among the barren

Spanish hills that the miracle becomes acceptable.

Thoughts on Various Subjects, Alexander Pope It is with narrow-souled people as with narrow­

necked bottles; the less they have in them the more noise they make in pouring out. Thoughts on Various

Subjects, Alexander Pope

September Roses a novel by Andre Maurois, ~ //J I t~anslated by Ger~rd Hop- ~ue '<enick krns. reviewed by

Andre Maurois's September Roses catches the bit­ter-sweet flavor of a sensitive, mature man's realiza­tion that he will soon be ' "old." It depicts also, in a lightly satirical tone, the intricacies of Parisian literary and cultural society. Through the contrast between the passionate, free-spirited South American actress, Dolores Garcia, and the refined French author, Guil­luame Fontane, Maurois highlights his satire.

The story of Fontarie's autumnal years is also the story of his marriage to intellectual, domineering Pauline Fontane, whose love has remained unshak­able through the twenty years of their life together. This woman, whose emotional relationship with her husband has grown almost cold, suffers through his flirtation with a young painter, Wanda Nedjanine, and his passion for Dolores.

Mauriois's portrayal of Fontane's love affair with Dolores expresses the unreal beauty in which they live for three weeks. Set in the Andean cities of Lima and Bogata, the incident assumes the quality of a moment out of time. For Fontane, as for this strange country, the seasons are reversed and September is spring.

Madame Fontane learns from Dolores, who visits Paris with her drama company, that buying Guil­luame's railway tickets and securing his favors from her intellectual friends has not given him the love he demands. For all his classical ideals, Guilluame Fon­tane is, as Dolores says, "a sensualist." Love of form is for him both abstract and concrete.

Maurois writes this gentle satire of love and society with skillful sensitivity. Although this is not a great novel, its charming lightness of tone overlays a mean­ingful insight into human character.

The sorrow for the dead is the only sorrow from which we refuse to be divorced. Every other wound we seek to heal, every other affliction to forget; but this wound we consider it a duty to keep open; this affliction we cherish and brood over in solitude.

The Sketch-Book, Washington Irving

Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world. Studies in Pessimism,

Arthur Schopenhauer

12

Inoperancy of the Spirit Tennessee Williams' Sweet ~ //J . I Bird of Youth. reviewed by ~ue '<entck

The distintegration of the individual as revealed in Tennessee Williams' Sweet Bird of Youth results from the failure of the characters to see beyond the physical attractions of life. The main characters - Chance Wayne, the Princess, Heavenly Finlay and Heavenly's father, Boss Finlay-have dissipated the glamour and power of youth and are helpless. Williams portrays the total disintegration of the individual by creating a situation in which the characters' inability to accept reality ends in violence and ruin for them. He height­ens the impression of futility by using fluid scenic representations, which he describes in the production notes, to suggest the thematic relations of the main characters' fates.

The setting of the play is the Gulf Coast town of Saint Cloud, a small community dominated by Boss Finlay, who, at the time of the play, is campaigning for the United S~ates Senate. We first see Saint Cloud from Chance Wayne's hotel room. The sound of church bells and the shadows of birds moving across the drawn blinds suggest the freshness and purity of the town with which Chance's dissipation contrasts. This illusion is maintained as Chance remembers his idealized youthful love affair with Heavenly. The memory of his first love is in sharp contrast to his brutal relationship with the Princess, a movie star whose beauty and fame have decayed.

In the turbulent climactic scene, which recalls by its violence the almost tranquil opening of the play, St. Cloud is seen in truer perspective. The sancti­monious Boss Finlay, who exploits the race question to win votes, and his white-gowned daughter, who gave herself to Chance when she was fifteen and then tauntingly denied him when he failed as an actor, are stripped of their affectations of honor by a hillbilly heckler. Chance and the Princess have reached the end of the line. Her decision to attempt a come-back in Hollywood and his refusal to leave St. Cloud rep­resent complete escapism-although she is no longer beautiful, and he will lose all manliness, they choose old illusions rather than accept reality.

Tensely dramatic, concentrated action, facilitated by fluid scenic devices, make Sweet Bird of Youth a drama of emotional impact as well as of penetrating character revelation. It catches individuals in a mo­ment of change-from partial to total dissolution as human beings-thus' furnishing a fruitful situation for dramatic representation and character study.

The Adding Machine A Reviewofaul'aJean (fOdd "Expressionism," Ludwig Lewisohn once wrote,

"has two chief aims: to fling the inner life of the dramatic figures immediately upon the stage; to syn­thesize, instead of describing, their world and their universe into symbolic visions that shall sum up whole histories, moralities, and cosmogonies in a brief min­ute and a fleeting scene." Those people who witnessed the performances of The Adding Machine by Elmer Rice had the rare privilege of seeing this expressionism skillfully presented by The University of Tennessee Theatre.

A play in seven scenes, The Adding Machine tells of the tragedy of Mr. Zero, a clerk who has frittered away his life adding figures for a department store. The initial scene takes place in the Zeros' bed­room where Mrs. Zero is preparing to retire. Through­out her monologue there is an acid tone which betrays a life wasted in wearisome conformity. She prattles about the neighborhood movies, and harangues her husband about her unending domestic chores.

In an office the following day, Mr. Zero sits oppo­site a drab office girl, his assistant, who has also grown faded over the twenty-five years of their em­ployment. As they mechanically rattle off figures, their thoughts rise above the deadly monotony; hers full of yearnings for what might have been, his full of dreams of what might be. She might have gotten married, "You could look a long time before you'd find a sensible, refined girl like me." He might get a raise in salary, "I wonder if the boss remembers about it bein' twenty-five years." Each is a human being; yet each is an island, an integer in a vast machine-made civilization. The evening whistle blows; returning to reality, they automatically rise to leave. At this moment the boss enters; Zero is to be replaced by machines more efficient than men, he says. The scene ends in a whirl of confusion and noise for the shocked employee.

Zero returns home to his sharp-tongued wife and a party composed of Messrs. One, Two, Three, Four, Five, and Six with their respective wives. The impli­cations of this scene are appalling. From their dress and actions down to their platitudes which pass for conversation, the uniformity of the guests emphasizes their likenesses to the machines which have enslaved them. They are so preoccupied with material pursuits and with keeping up with the Joneses that they have little time to devote to being individuals. As each man in succession crosses his leg and puts a cigar in his mouth with identiCal actions, one sees plainly their

13

similarity to a non-thinking automatic machine. In the midst of this tragicomical scene, Mr. Zero is arrested for the murder of his boss.

The place of justice, as seen by Mr. Zero, is a rather distorted courtroom. The judge who hands out the heartless sentence is a headless manikin; the jury who pass judgment is composed of his machine-like friends who rain down chants of "Guilty!" to his unheard pleas. He rushes from one to the other in a vain effort to find someone who will hear his jumbled defense against the advancing machines. The universe remains silent, indifferent to the doom of man's en­slavement.

In the graveyard, appropriately stiff, Zero at last meets an individual, Shrdlu, the typographical error. Ironically he is an individual, that is, different from conformist society, only because he murdered his mother with a carving knife. He is so steeped in guilt that only an eternity of flames could soothe his burn­ing conscience. The Elysian Fields of Paradise is no place for either of these social mutations. Having spent their time on earth frantically chasing some material goal which was always just beyond their reach, they don't know how to appreciate life. Thus both are unable to hear the music of life which con­tinually plays in the Fields, yet is heard only by a certain few. The shabby office girl alone has superior insight and hears the music at once.

Unable to rise above the way of life known to him on earth, Zero returns to his self -made hell, an over­sized adding machine. Twenty-five years and several miles of paper later, Zero is sent back to earth to once again take up his position as the eternal slave.

The entire production presented by The University Theatre was given a modernistic interpretation which was refreshingly original. Charles McMahon was a convincing slave in his well-worn rut as the hen­pecked husband of the sufficiently tart Marjorie Oberne. Carol Jenkins tended to over-play her part as the frustrated office girl, yet genuinely portrayed the carefree spirit of the Elysian Fields. Don Rickard's interpretation of Shrdlu was novel and added much to the over-all effect of the play. However, Bill Holt could have stood a few more rehearsals; his hesitant delivery was all the more unfortunate due to the fact that he was one of the last characters to appear, leav­ing an anticlimactic impression at the finale. Yet, imagination combined with talent to create a novel and polished production. One hopes that U-T Theatre will present more plays of this type in the future.

The Experience Of Flight I was sitting in the DC-3 at the end of the runway

In Cincinnati, feeling the powerful shudder of the plane's engines. I thought of our impending take-off and wondered why I always felt a not wholly logical mixture of peace and challenge during a flight. As our wheels gathered speed on the icy runway, my back pressed into the seat and I seemed not to breathe. For a moment I could feel us hanging heavily with air beneath, then I relaxed as we gained altitude and the labored sound of the engines grew less. Covington, Kentucky lay below to our left, and beyond it darkness because the n100n wasn't up yet. Somewhere between Cincinnati and Lexington we flew over a rather good­sized town, the lights brilliant beneath us, and beyond it I saw cars moving along a highway.

Up here, I thought, you get wider view than from the ground and things look different. The small flaws disappear, leaving you at peace to think about the general lay of the land, and if you are like me, you start comparing what happens to the territory below when you fly and what happens to life when you look at it objectively. All the rough spots don't vanish just because you're a few thousand feet up. Neither do all problems become non-existent with a little objectivity of altitude. But getting the general topography clear always helps you see where a particular landmark lies. An engineer, for example, finds an aerial survey of a river basin useful in determining where to locate a dam. Similarly, I believe, a somewhat detached per­spective facilitates solving personal problems. For in­stance, in choosing a career you must consider more than your own inclinations. You must investigate the fields you're interested in, and see how you would fit into them, just as the engineer must picture his dam in relation to the surrounding territory.

Regarding less material concerns-and flying seems to me to inspire abstract speculation-I think perspec-=' tive becomes essential to knowing what you believe. How can you say with conviction that democracy con­stitutes the best system of government unless you have studied governments in general? How can you judge a poem or a painting unless you understand its art form?

I realized that I had got rather far from my reflec­tions about flying, but the long view which it gives me had opened these windows of thought, and I further could not ignore the significance of aviation to our world. The sky, like any physical frontier, challenges man, and challenge stimulates not only

14

action, but also thought. Aviation confronts our age with the necessity of making international co-opera­tion succeed. As yet we have no sure way of doing this, but when we consider that it takes only seven hours to fly between Chicago and Moscow-and an inter-continental ballistic missile can cover the same route in under one hour - finding a way becomes imperative. Flight, I thought, is not an unmixed bless­ing. It brings us closer, but this forces us to face the problem of learning to live together.

Flying does more than force me to think objectively. It gives n1e an exciting feeling of adventure, of push­ing ahead into the less well-known. In a world of diminishing frontiers, I seem to have found an ample territory to explore.

As I looked out the plane window I thought again of the present flight. The stars were close. In the whirl of the prop I could see reflected the flashing red light on the underside of the wing. A smallish town glittered in the Kentucky hills below and I felt near it too. I know I cannot fully explain my feeling about flying, for it has in it an intangible factor. There are those of us who love it, feeling richer inside ourselves because we do, and there are those who will never understand our strange love affair.

To my non-flying friends I can only say that I feel challenged by the peace and adventure-spiritual as well as physical-that I find up here above the ground. I can, in part, attribute the peacefulness of flying to its bringing me close to an appreciation of my life and of the world from a wider perspective. I can explain that the seen1ingly unlimited expanse of the air challenges men individually and as members of. the world society. Beyond these attempts at a logica~ explanation of my attitude toward flying still lies an illogical element, which I can perhaps best express by saying that flying, like anything which one loves. is a part of me.

If we were without faults, we should not take so much pleasure in remarking them in others.

Maxim 31, Rochefoucauld

Our repentance is not so much regret for the ill we have done as fear of the ill that may happen to us in consequence. Maxim 180, Rochefoucauld

The Challenging Dramas of T. S. Eliot Carol Collier "Give ... have compassion ... control thyself,"l

speaks the voice of the thunder to the narrator in T. S. Eliot's Waste Land. These commands state the creed by which Mr. Eliot suggests an individual live in a world which he has often characterized as "a place of disaffection" where "strained time-ridden faces" are "distracted from distraction by distraction."2 In three of his dramas-Murder in the Cathedral, The Family Reunion, and The Cocktail Party-he depicts char­acters who accept this martyrs' creed, suffering to live by it. Eliot's creation of characters who seem appro­priate as martyrs, his portrayal of their trials, and his effective use of verse drama make the theme of sacri­fice meaningful. His dramas are among the most challenging works of modern literature.

Perhaps the most surprising of Mr. Eliot's dramatic achievements is his forceful presentation of Thomas Becket's martyrdom in Murder in the Cathedral, which is more religious pageant than play. Mr. Eliot wrote Murder in the Cathedral for the 1935 festival of the Friends of Canterbury, and its austere tone is appropriate for a religious festival. 3 Yet the play's significance extends beyond its original purpose. Thomas Becket reaches out from the twelfth century to declare the freedom of all men when he says,

This [death and suffering] is your share of the eternal burden

The perpetual glory. Freedom for Becket comes through rigorous sacrifice -giving up temporal power as King Henry's chancel­lor to become Archbishop, relinquishing a courtier's life of worldly pleasures for the discipline of Church morality, and finally renouncing the pride of living as a martyr for the humility of dying as one.

Becket is a more fitting symbol of martyrdom than a saint who has never compromised to earn an earthly living and enjoyed fleshly pleasures. Becket has risen by methods often unscrupulous from Cheapside to the Chancellorship of England. As we learn from the First Temptor's speech, he has indulged in wine, in dancing, and in sportive love affairs. He has gained his political power, the Second Temptor tells us, by fawning before his King and by working with the King to subjugate the barons, whom the Third Temp­tor represents. He has even played his role as Arch­bishop with ostentation, as the Fourth Temptor re­minds him. But upon returning to Canterbury to serve

IT. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, "What the Thunder Said." 2T. S. Eliot, "Burnt Norton."

15

the people who have hungered for his guidance for seven years during his exile in France, Becket be­comes the instrument of Christ's Church and of God. He does not pose. He hears the Canterbury women voice their fears of the pain his coming has reawak­ened in thenl-of joy in his return and sorrow in the dark fate of death which overshadows it - and he understands:

They know and do not know, that acting is suffering

And suffering is action. He does not defy the King to assert his personal authority, but to pay allegiance to a Higher Power: "N 0 traitor to the king. I am a priest . . ." In spite of these sacrifices, Becket does not lie down before his fate. He stands committed to it 'and asks his priests to unbar the sanctuary doors to admit the knights, his murderers.

In a similar way, Celia Coplestone in The Cocktail Party and Harry Monchensey in The Family Reunion are martyrs. They have experienced life on its materil­istic level, found it unsatisfactory, and have committed themselves to a spiritual command. The purpose and accomplishment of Becket's sacrifice, in an age of religious emphasis, is clearly stated in Mr. Eliot's drama, but Celia's and Harry's contemporary martyr­dom remains mysterious. In The Cocktail Party the psychoanalyst Harcourt-Reilly tells Celia's friends that she has made her sacrifice, but he does not explain its purpose. We know that she has recognized not only the futility, but also the sin of her love affair with Edward Chamberlayne, and feels that she must "atone" for "failure/Towards someone, or something outside [herself] ." We know also that she accepts what Harcourt-Reilly calls "another way," a way un­known, requiring the "kind of faith that issues from despair," and that this way leads her to Kinkanja where she is killed by the natives she has gone to serve as a member of "an order[,] [a] very austere one." Mr. Eliot never tells his audience precisely what order Celia has joined or what cause she has become the instrument of. The implication is of course there­that Celia, like Becket, submits to death to serve the Christian Church and in so doing suffers the burden of living with greater emotional depth than the women of Canterbury and Celia's socialite friends do, "living and partly living." But there is only the implication-

3E. Martin Browne. "From The Rock to The Confidential Clerk." T. S. Eliot: A Symposium for His Seventieth Birth­day (New York: 1958), p. 58.

"the key" which we hear "Turn in the door once and once only."4 We must peer quickly through the crack in the doorway.

Our glimpse of the passage Harry Monchensey travels reveals even less than we see of Celia's journey. We learn of Harry's setting out to find a way to live, but do not know what this way is. His past and his future are in1plicit in the present, which The Family Reunion depicts. He returns to Wishwood, a home he has left eight years before, and finds himself un­naturally arrested in time. Amy, his mother, has delib­erately kept the house as it was when he left. Even the aunts and uncles have not actually changed, be­cause they have experienced nothing outside the lTIechanical pattern of teas, clubs, garden parties, and occasional slight auto accidents which Harry's broth­ers, John and Arthur, have. Harry says to them, "You all look so withered and young." He has lived a com­pletely foundationless life with the international social­ite he has married, and-reaching the depth of life without meaning - has rebelled - not through him­self alone, but through facing his fate, represented by the Eumenides, and choosing to follow it. Mr. Eliot does not explain this fate. We might assume, as Amy does, that Harry intends to become a missionary. Harry, however, says, "I never said that I was going to become a missionary." Yet whatever his future, it involves a commitment beyond the world of pleasing appearances, which he forsakes. His "business is ... to pursue. ' .. to seek" answers to his soul's questions about life's spiritual significance. The following speech implies the martyrdom of such a commitment:

(Harry tries to explain that he does not yet know where his fates will lead him):

Somew here on the other side of despair. To the worship in the desert, the thirst and

deprivation, A stony sanctuary and a primitive altar, The heat of sun and the icy vigil, A care over lives of humble people, The lesson of ignorance, of incurable diseases.

Although this speech seems to suggest a service such as Celia undertakes, considering Mr. Eliot's frequent use of language on two levels of meaning, its real import may be its implication of a devotion to more altruistic ends than the lordship of an English estate.

Thomas Becket, Celia Coplestone, and Harry Mon­chensey commit themselves to martyrdom. Had they no choice, they would not deserve the title of martyr. But Becket could have ruled in England surpassed in power only by King Henry; Celia could have married Peter Quilpe and lived comfortably, meeting the artis-

-IT. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, "What the Thunder Said."

16

tic people she has enjoyed; and Harry could have inherited Wishwood. They all have given themselves to higher concerns, fully aware of the pain to be endured.

Mr. Eliot's dramatic form suggests the extended meanings which his plays imply. The most untheatri­cal work is, of course, Murder in the Cathedral. It is composed of two episodes separated by Becket's Christmas Eve sermon. In the first part Becket arrives in Canterbury, where the four Temptors come before him. In Part Two the Knights come, first conciliating, then murdering. The three priests represent a level of religious commitment above the Knights' and below Becket's. They would hide their Archbishop from the Knights. Throughout the play, Mr. Eliot uses the Chorus of Canterbury women to express the general feeling of fear which pervades the Cathedral until after Becket's murder. These women, the "living and partly living," fear the uprooting of their winter lives -the pain of sacrifice, even if it be another's. The two contemporary plays are more realistic. The Cham­berlaynes and Peter Quilpe in The Cocktail Party are somewhat like the Canterbury women-preferring not to disturb the pattern of their lives with too much reality. Julia, Alex, and Harcourt-Reilly are similar to Becket's priests-they show Celia the way she may go, but they remain somewhere between her world of decision and the Chamberlaynes' realm of illusions. Their function in the play, however, is conventional. Not quite so conventional are the roles of the aunts and uncles and of Mary in The Family Reunion. The aunts and uncles express in chorus their bewilderment at Harry's strange behavior, while Agatha and Mary speak as prophetesses: turning the key which opens the door, showing the past-Harry's carefully ar­ranged childhood that differs little from Amy's cur­rent plans for him-and intimating that the future lTIUSt be faced, although facing it will entail great pain. These formal speeches effectively strengthen the spiritual challenge which the play presents.

Undoubtedly significant is Mr. Eliot's use of poetry in drama. Mr. Elio't is a poet first and a dramatist second; therefore, he writes with the poet's concen­tration of rhythm and image. His verse is most form­alized in Murder in the Cathedral, where he uses it to convey the emotional impact of Becket's murder, and to contrast this with the glib prose statements which Becket's killers mouth in explaining their deed. The smugness of the First Knight's conclusion to the apology falls with alarmingly quiet logic after the violence of the murder scene:

FIRST KNIGHT: Thank you, Bristo. I think that there is no more to be said; and I suggest

that you disperse quietly to your ht)lnes. Please be careful not to loiter in groups at street corners, and do nothing that might provoke any public outbreak.

The poetry in The Family Reunion has greater variety than that in Murder in the Cathedral. In the scenes dominated by Charles, Gerald, Ivy, and Violet-the aunts and uncles-the rhythm of the verse darts rap­idly over the change in speakers, giving their conver­sation the bright vapid quality of a Moliere comedy:

VIOLET: Harry was always the most likely to be late. AMY: This time, it will not be his fault. We are very lucky to have Harry at all. IVY: And when will you have your birthday cake, Amy, And open your presents? AMY: After dinner: That is the best time. IVY: It is the first time You have not had your cake and your presents at tea. AMY: This is a very particular occasion As you ought to know. It will be the first time For eight years that we have all been together.

Mary's and Agatha's speeches, as well as Harry's, are usually complete units not intermingled metrically or sensibly with the others' speeches. At the conclusion of the play, Mary and Agatha dominate the scene, walking about the table, blowing out the candles on Amy's cake and chanting:

MAR Y: A curse is written On the under side of things Behind the smiling mirror And bellind the smiling moon

Follow follow AGATHA: This way the pilgrimage Of expiation Round and round the circle Completing the charm So the knot be unknotted The cross be uncrossed The crooked be made straight And the curse be ended By intercession By pilgrimage By those who depart Tn several directions For their own redemption And that of the departed-

May they rest in peace.

17

U. T. Archives

Amy's speeches lie between these extremes. Her lone­liness and age have whetted the dull edge of her life into slight comprehensiveness. This deepens her speeches, as it does the one in which she tells the others:

At my age, I only just begin to apprehend the truth

About things too late to mend; and that is to be old.

But the clock has stopped for her. Her death is the final incident of the play.

The verse in The Cocktail Party, is subtler than that in the other two plays. It unobtrusively underlies all the speeches. Only in the speeches of Harcourt­Reilly do we recognize a strong rhythm. This is appro­priate to the nature of the characters. The other characters, even Celia when we see her, represent the current of society: they are the givers of cocktail parties. Harcourt-Reilly brings them a chance for understanding and, therefore, the deeper meaning of his words is reflected in the poetic tone of his speeches. For example, regarding Celia's commitment, he says to the Chamberlaynes and their guests:

I saw the image, standing behind her chair, Of a Celia Coplestone whose face showed the

astonishment Of the first five minutes after a violent death ...

So it was obvious That here was a woman under sentence of death. That was her dfestiny.

Through his dramatic treatments of the martyr theme, T. S. Eliot challenges his generation from the stage as he has done in his poetry. The martyr rises from the decay of his own time, accepting its inade­quacies, yet seeking beyond it a tinleless spiritual commitment. Through his characterizations of Becket, of Celia Coplestone, and of Harry Monchensey and through his symbolically structured verse dramas, he gives emotional force to this thenlatic statement of sacrifice.

The learned are seldom pretty fellows, and in many cases their appearance tends to discourage a love of study in the young.

The New Webster International Dictionary, H. L. Mencken

Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice. Prejudices, H. L. Mencken