The Biologist As Exemplary EssayistThe Medusa and the Snailby Lewis ThomasViking PressBy Stephen A. SchwartzThe Medusa and the Snail is the second published col¬lection of essays by Lewis Thomas, currently presidentof Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in NewYork City. The previous collection, The Lives of a Cell,won a National Book Award in 1974, and those delight¬ed readers who made Lives a national bestseller willnot be disappointed in Dr. Thomas’s latest work. Thehumor, irony, geniality, and enthusiasm which madethe first book so successful are all the more abundantin the second.There currently seems to be a resurgence of publicinterest in science, especially among college under¬graduates. Carl Sagan, a highly visible advocate of thistrend, has welcomed the renewed interest in the ro¬mance of science, but bemoans contemporary misguid¬ed outlets for expression such as astrology, uninspiredscience fiction, and various popular pseudosciences. Itis therefore imperative, especially during tais era ofdiminishing political enthusiasm for the support ofbasic scientific education and research, that experi¬mental scientists themselves reveal the inherentbeauty, elegance, and mystery of twentieth-centurybiology to imaginative individuals upon whom the nextgeneration of scientific advancement depends. It is inthis regard that Medusa is as valuable as entertain¬ing.It is indeed rare that someone with such an extensiveknowledge and appreciation of basic biology and medi¬cine is able to relate his observations and insight insuch an articulate and enjoyable fashion as does Dr.Thomas. His twenty-nine brief essays include topics asdiverse as the novel interaction between a particulartype of medusa and snail in the Bay of Naples, a re¬freshing appraisal of cloning a human being, a delight¬ful discourse on the nature of warts, a logical interpre¬tation of the “hazards” of recombinant DNA research,provocative reflections on natural death, committees,origins and derivation of language, thinking, and athorough if not controversial dissertation on how to fixthe premedical curriculum. Without exception, theseessays impress the reader with Dr. Thomas’s sincereconcern for the present and future status of man andhis endeavors on this planet.One of the more worthwhile feelings which Dr. Thom¬as conveys to his readers is that of reassurance. In the“Tucson Zoo” essay, we are easily convinced thathuman beings are normally endowed with genes whichcode for usefulness and helpfulness. Indeed, usefulnessmay turn out to be the hardest test of fitness for surviv¬al, more important than aggression. Dr. Thomas’s briefencounter with beavers and otters was more than suffi¬cient to help him rationalize his apparently instinctiveurge to become closer to the astounding behavior ofthe water creatures he observed at the zoo. A similarlyhopeful vein is gleaned from an essay entitled “TheYoungest and Brightest Thing Around”. One learnsquickly that human beings are the subject of the essaytitle, and that nothing absurd at all exists about thehuman condition. In fact, Dr. Thomas is not surprisedthat we have come as far as we have in so short aperiod of time.An enjoyable and concise evaluation of the evolu¬tionary driving force is found in “The Wonderful Mis¬take”. In fewer that four pages, Dr. Thomas has writtenwhat should be the preface of every textbook of Gene¬tics. Indeed, the important ingredients including nu¬cleic acid (DNA) properties, single-celled and multicel¬lular animals, mutagens, viruses, and chance have allbeen properly considered in this most definitive expla¬nation of the molecular basis for evolution of all living things. The essay dealing with recombinant DNA fur¬ther reassures us again that we are too preoccupiedwith our frequently overestimated powers to modifyor even destroy the natural order of things. A warningis made here to avoid legal and political suppression ofscientific exploration of the basic questions which haveintrigued us for generations. Dr. Thomas warns that ti¬midity and ignorance may prevent aggressive explora¬tion and inquiry into questions to which we have everyright to seek answers. For Thomas, to not question, orto suppress curiosity, is by far the more grevious of¬fense.There are several essays in Medusa which will bemost appreciated by those readers actively engaged inbasic biological and medical research. “On Embryo¬logy” consists of only six short paragraphs, but con¬tains all the reasons why developmental biologists andembryologists have been fascinated and mystified by their subject matter. If any imaginative young mind re¬quired inspiration to pursue an interest or career in in¬vestigative biology, the last paragraph of this essayshould be more than sufficient. Similarly, many facultymembers of academic medical centers will surely smileand nod in agreement with Dr. Thomas’s assessment ofthe premedical curriculum. For example, in order to ed¬ucate physicians to appreciate the human condition,the author would require a knowledge of classicalGreek and Latin, English, history, the literature of atleast two foreign languages, and philosophy. Appli¬cants for medical school would be notified in advancethat grades in these disciplines would count more thanothers during student selection. Furthermore, summerwork as volunteers in hospitals as aides or technicianswill not necessarily be held against them, but neitherwould it help. Dr. Thomas is convinced that societywould be the ultimate beneficiary when practitionerscontinued on page sevenlokiivRms vSuimer Issue.: Roosevelt &rvd the PressSides oi\ Didiorv • Short Storv ReviewsThe D.H. Jzmewce Circle DecadenceSPURS: NIETZSCHE S STYLES/EPERONS: LES STYLESDE NIETZSCHEJacques DerridaTranslated by Barbara HarlowSpurs in ciprK titled, lor Derrul.i s *\kviin¬structions” «t Nietzsche's meanings will actas spurs to further thought and controv ers\.CJtith I~(rgjg es SS.fi t railabteDAGUERREOTYPESand ()//><’> / >s.n>Isak DinesenWith a Foreword by Hannah A rendtDinesens wise and delightful comments onclothing, social classes, and ornithologs,among other topics, enable readers ofEnglish to appreciate her talents as anessayist.(.'loth 254 pages SI2.fi SeptemberNow in PaperCARNIVALEntertainments and Posthumous 7alesIsak DinesenPaper 3S0 pages $4 95 SeptemberHENRY JAMES—THE LESSONS OF THE MASTERPopular Fiction and Personal Stylein the Nineteenth CenturyWilliam VeederPaper 304 pages $6 95 AvailableTHE POEMS OF ST. JOHNOF THE CROSSA Bilingual EditionThird EditionTranslated by John Frederick NimsPaper I6H pages $195 (btnlrerBYRON: A PORTRAITLeslie A. MarchandPaper 574 pages lllus $7 95 \nrembei STRUCTURES AND LIMENarration, I’ot'try, ModelsCesare SegreI ranslated by fohn MeddennnenCombining a variety of semiotic techniqueswith brilliant critical invention, Segrestresses the temporal and historical natureof the narrative act.( lull’ 104 page.- $21 io SeptemberTHE WOMAN TAKENIN ADULTERY amiTHE POGGENPUHL FAMILYTheodor FontaneI rails Lit ed by (iabrtele AnnanWith a>i Introduction hx I nch HtilerCi.ibriele Annan has earned kudos on twocounts with this translation of two of Theo¬dor Fontane's short stories. Not only doesshe bring Fontane's work to an unaccus¬tomed audience, but her canny and respon¬sible ear promises to send them aw ay happyi,om cris to the w mings of the first masterof the German realistic novel.(lull- 2 its paves SI 2 ill OctoberTHE WISDOM OF THE SANDSAntoine de Saint-ExuperyIntroduction by Wallace Fouiiet ranslated by Stuart GilbertPaper 162 pages $6 9 5 OctoberON METAPHOREdited by Sheldon SacksOn Metaphor, a collection of fourteen essays byeminent philosophers, literary critics, theologians,art historians, and psychologists, illustrates andexplores a striking phenomenon in modern intel¬lectual history : the transformation of metaphorfrom a specialized concern of rhetoricians andliterary critics to a central concept in the study ofhuman understanding.Paper 20H pages $i 95 September Cut-Out Design by Barbara Jones-HoguThe ChicagoLiterary ReviewThis Summer Issue of The Chicago Literary Review marks the first time that the LiteraryReview has appeared during the University’s summer quarter. The Fall Issue will of coursebe a much longer issue, and in our next issues we hope to have not only book reviews,creative writing, and art work, but features on literary subjects as well. The LiteraryReview will no longer take on a single-theme format, but will strive for a literary offer¬ing of wide variety. Next year’s Co-Editors Richard Kaye and Molly McQuade welcomeanyone who is interested in contributing to the Literary Review, to contact us in TheMaroon office, Third Floor, Ida Noyes.Summer Literary Review Editor: Richard KayeContributing Editor: Molly McQuadeProduction and Design: David Miller, Nancy Cleveland, Jake Levine, Leslie Wick.Notes on ContributorsDavid Buschelle is a student in the College.Mary Cash is a fourth-year student in English and a member of the fiction staff of theChicago Review and the staff of Primavera. £he works in binding and mending in theRegenstein Library.Timothy Erwin is a doctoral candidate in English and has often thought that this busi¬ness about Voltaire and Johnson could make part of an interesting dissertation.Katie Greeno is a student in the College.Manjula Haksar is a graduate student in the Masters of Fine Arts program.Barbara Jones-Hogu is a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She hastaught in the Chicago Public School system and at Malcolm X College. Ms. Jones-Hogu hasexhibited her work at several major universities and in over eleven cities.Claudia Magat is a fourth-year student in Anthropology.Bobbye Middendorf is a fourth-year student in English and former editor of the CollegeYearbook.VThe UniversityofChicago PressChn ago 606 17 Ted O’Neill is an advisor in the College and a doctoral candidate in English.Michael Schudson is an assistant professor in the Sociology Department and the authorof Discovering the News (Basic Books).Stephen A. Schwartz is an assistant professor of biology and pathology.Carol Wolff is a third-year student in the College.* * * ♦ *This is the last Maroon of the quarter. Publication will resume with the special Orienta¬tion Issue, September 28. Editorial and business offices are located in Ida Noyes Hall, 1212East 59th Street. Phone: 753-3263. Advertising rates upon request. Subscriptions availableat 12 dollars a year.2—The Chicago Literary Review—August 24, 1979 ^Copyright 1979 The Chicago MaroonOut of Darkest AfricaCut-Out Design by Barbara Jones-Hogu.North of Southby Shiva NaipulSimon and SchusterBy Carol WolffNorth of South deserves a place in our li¬braries, on shelves where fiction and non¬fiction merge. In this travelogue of anec¬dotes and essays, this ‘‘montage of people”,Shiva Naipul aims to reveal how the so-called “socialism” of the East African coun¬tries of Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia affectstheir inhabitants. It is one of the great para¬doxes of this highly contradictory book thatNaipul claims objectively while also claim¬ing that his book is neither fiction nor non¬fiction. But more disturbing than Naipul’sperpetually self-assured voice is that heends up not simply dooming all Africa, butexposing himself as well.Naipul hints that Africa’s major leadersare the pawns of white developers, and thateven petty bureaucrats are corrupt and self-serving. Maintaining that there is no placefor socialism in African culture since classeswere formerly non-existent, Naipul writesthat, unlike China’s patriarchy, Africa is nei¬ther disciplined nor nationalistic. He goes onto pick apart the African constitution, whichhe shows to be riddled with cliches aboutjustice, as well as having been translatedtoo many times to allow for national growthor understanding.Naipul chooses to decribe the most con¬fused and hypocritical of Africans. There arehis humorous if unsympathetic caricatures;Mrs. Wampala, a beautician turned publicrelations person turned farmer who goesbankrupt as she sits in her mock-Tudor man¬sion, surrounded by uncomfortable chairs, agrand fireplace, and a good number ofRubens reproductions. Fearing the stereo¬type of the uneducated African primitive,she lies about her exploits and complainsabout her chauvinistic first husband whowanted her only to have babies. Lonely andand truly desperate, she spends her timelooking for someone richer to marry.There is Steve, who boasts that he workedfor the BBC as Othello but who now sits in adilapidated house, displaying his new bar.He yearns to have a cultural club of respect¬able citizens who will read poetry and listento concerts, but can find no members. Thereare the Palmers, plantation owners whokeep their workers “unspoiled”, hungry, un¬educated, and controlable in unventilatedbarracks and unsanitary straw huts. Theseex-expatriates have more than just theircolor to fall back on: their quick cash-produc¬ing tea plantation dwarfs the native’s poor¬ly-developed subsistence farm plots.Naipul blames Africa’s complex racial re¬ lations for much of Africa’s problems. Whiteexpatriates apply darky stereotypes to theblacks they exploit (and manage to do itguiltlessly by likening blacks to apes). Unas¬similated Indians, according to Naipul, limitthemselves through their rigid caste systemand their short-sighted view of their future.Happy with their roles as “outsiders”, theystay satisfied as “communalists” and so re¬main scape-goats in a system which is nottoo distinguishable from apartheid. Mean¬while, Westernized blacks have lost theircultural identity, having exchanged it for amaterial success which puts little value onintellectual achievement or even a Western¬er’s concept of virtue.But somehow in Naipul’s eyes, all of Africa appears condemnable. The author says of hischaracters,“None of them could, properly speaking,be said to have a stable personality. Theywere made up of a number of separate andwarring selves. Hence the wild veering be¬tween farce, piety, and up-to-date cyni¬cism.”One cannot help but feel that Naipul isnot very far above the Africans whom hetakes to be so deserving of his contempt. Areader must seriously question the good in¬tentions of a man who, upon arriving in Tan¬zania, says, “I was already falling into thatstate of depression which arrival in astrange place nearly always arouses in me.A new town meant new faces to become ac¬ customed to; unknown ‘contracts’. . .1 wasweary of it all, weary of the suspicion, themisunderstandings, the broken promises.”Again and again Naipul betrays his poseof being a serious traveler, only to emergeas an ordinary, pleasure-seeking touristwho complains about the “best hotels” inEast Africa or crowded buses on pot-holedroads. It’s difficult to sympathize with a nar¬rator who cannot avoid condescending nar¬ration, who calls someone high on pot an“idiot boy”, who belittles a helpful womanas “the guru” when he isn’t referring to heras the “buxum girl”. And I thought I had en¬countered some proud chauvinist or the au¬thor of a trashy novel when I read one shortsketch:“There is something peculiarly pulpy andcharacterless about her. I feel that if I strikeher, my fist will embed itself in bonelessjelly.”When Naipul spews out his harsh criticism,it's rather like some ulcerous gourmet react¬ing to a disagreeable exotic dish. And it's asif Naipul has no idea of the repulsive picturehe draws of himself. Not so much ethnocen¬tric and egocentric, Naipul’s arrogant andsardonic tone helps him appear on top ofevery encounter, the wisest person in everyconversation.Naipul condemns Africa as if it were somewax museum where the figures are only hor¬rifying, where all is plastic and nothing canchange. From the very first chapter, wherethe author vividly recreates his arrival at anAfrican airport, we are made aware of thecountry’s decaying technology — the static onthe loudspeaker, the rattling luggage belt.Airport workers are not only incompetent,but they hate their jobs. And although Nai¬pul can mourn the Indians from his owncountry who traded their culture in for pros¬perity, he is only able to condemn the Afri¬cans he sees wearing modish clothing, be¬decked with Japanese cameras and cassetterecordings of Christmas songs. He ignoresthe possibility of any improvement througheducation (most of East Africa is illiterate)and never remarks on Mrs. Wampala’s andSteve’s concern (however naive) with im¬proving their lot through self-schooling.What he does emphasize is that they havelost their culture, that “progress has beenconfused with progression.”As he flees Africa, Naipul is forced to suc¬cumb to the rampant corruption by bribingborder inspectors in order to escape.“I stared at the cans of South African meatstacked on the shelves behind the bar,” hecurses bitterly. “Black and white deservedeach other. Neither was worth the sheddingof a single tear: both were rotten to thecontinued on page twelveEssays From a Feminist PoetOn Lies, Secrets, and Silenceby Adrienne RichNortonBy Bobbye MiddendorfAdrienne Rich’s latest book, On Lies, Secrets, and Si¬lence, is a rich, complex and often difficult collection ofessays. For those who know her only as a poet, this vol¬ume enlarges the scope of that perception. Others, fa¬miliar with her prose, (most recently, Of Woman Born:Motherhood as Experience and Institution) may findtheir understanding fleshed out: In these chronologi¬cally arranged essays from 1966-1978, we witness thegrowth and development, both personal and profes¬sional, of Adrienne Rich. In reading this collection, weare constantly aware of Rich’s personae: woman,mother, feminist, lesbian, teacher, poet and activist.The roles coalescing in these essays are diverse, as isthe spectrum of publications in which the writings ini¬tially appeared: from Harvard University books to fe¬minist and lesbian journals.“When I thought of publishing these essays, and ofhow they might be read, I was faced with a significanteffect of cultural passivity: that for many reades thefeminist movement is simply whatever the mass mediasay it is. . . willful ignorance, reductiveness, caricature,distortion, trivialization — these are familiar utensils,not only in the rhetoric of the organized opposition.We encounter them in the mindless reviewing of femin¬ist books, and in the fear of feminism prevailing in thescholarly and academic world.”Clearly, Rich is aware of the difficulties her volumeposes. For an honest reader, used to the "willful igno¬rance, reductiveness, caricature, etc.” of the media,Rich's essays provide the basis for some serious con¬frontations with traditional beliefs. She is a good writ¬er, even persuasive at times. (At other times, she ap¬pears to address an audience of the already-converted. and her rhetoric does little to convert the uninitiated.)She speaks forthrightly of lesbian feminism; blasts pa¬triarchy and higher education; takes pot shots, andwell-aimed ones, at those institutions which we soreadily accept as a necessary part of our world. Rich’shonesty demands that the reader neither blindly ac¬cepts nor rejects her theses, but instead encourages usto examine them scrupulously. And it is Rich's insis¬tence upon the reader’s full, devoted participationwhich makes this collection such an arduous undertak¬ing, and so worthwhile.The essays even tenuously connected to literatureseem to be her strongest, when a critic can instill in herreaders the desire to read the original text, that is themark of a good critic, the highest compliment she canpay to her source. And Adrienne Rich consistently aimsto instill this desire in her audience.Her tribute to Anne Sexton upon the poet's suicide in1974 is neither cloying nor sentimental. Rather, in theface of a talented artist’s self-destruction. Rich’s essay-seeks the life affirmation in Sexton and her work.In “Jane Eyre: Temptations of a Motherless Woman”Rich does what might be termed a feminist analysis ofthe text. "Jane Eyre has for us now a special force andsurvival value.” She sees Jane as the recipient of fourtemptations, which, by surviving them, make her into astrong and independent woman. As Rich points out:“The wind that blows through this novel is the wind ofsexual equality — spiritual and practical.” Rich’s analy¬sis takes her reader beyond what is often thought to bethe “core” story — of a governess in love, into the realmof greater art: woman coming of age. just as Joyce didfor young men in Portrait of the Artist.Her genuine enthusiasm about Emily Dickinson andher poetry in “Vesuvius at Home: The Power of EmilyDickinson” is infectious. Rather than focusing on herbetter-known lyrics, (often mincingly lyric in typicalnineteenth century female fashion) Rich points outmore compelling poems among Dickinson’s 1,775. Rich Adrienne Rich: Poet, Feminist, Essayist.also points out the error of many years of Dickinsoniancriticism — in seeing the man behind Dickinson’s passion¬ate poetry:“First, Emily Dickinson did not marry. And her non¬marrying was neither a pathological retreat as JohnCody sees it, nor probably even a conscious decision; itcontinued on page twelveThe Chicago Literary Review—August 24, 1979—3BeforeThe Extinctionof the Day AfterEdvard Munch’sThree PoetsCold and dark summer day.The clouds heavily muddle the hourlywindows, in the shape ofa whole life holding onto it anklesagainst a corner, drunk.You try and rest because the windfrom the lake transformingclam-shells into bronze stoneson the deserted beach, ispart of the street’s rasp and your words.You have heard ice such the sap from barkwhile the sun’s spirit is sharp.So you prayed for sleep’s dreamand retreat, evening whisperingon the sidewalk around the bums old shoes,you see the robin landingon the telepone wireand support a ballet from one view' to an¬other.For a moment, you enter into her view.David Bushelle Cut-Out Design by Barbara Jones-Hogu.Letter to Mercy Hospital 10/25/78Dear Mom,From my 400 mile distance perch all I can seeis the tubeto your vein. On the telephone wires I bal¬anceabsence for absence against the new hole inyour belly. The coilsare crowded with disease, Mom. There’s atube runningsupport to heal the wound you hold.I shake down Chicago floors whileyou swim the anesthesia. Dad’s wire voicecreaks white to me for you; you moan the “Night”Landscape cf a soulIn grey and blue and mourning,Death of afternoon, alone,Saint-Cloud gliding by,Anonymous fish boats,Faceless familiesBehind dots of lightGetting toilette in order,Pristine, from topHat to cufflinks, waitingTo go nowhere.Darkened grate,(Dead as father)Perhaps a table,A hard benchIn a rented room.Stranger beholdingAnother’s flux:Inert, trapped in the fogsOf his own dusky canvas.Practices i-love-yousIn the too late afternoon.grit out.I shake and rattle gravel like morracas, andthe pain,the pain is deeper in you than I can know,I,I am your measure, the light shines thinlythrough the liquid you poured in my cup.The cut and absince in you breaks me.It is for us I sing and shake in Chicago.YourKatieKatie Greeno Bobbye MiddendorfMOST MAGNIFICENT HOUSE JUST LISTED. Kenwood's choicest block bet¬ween 49th & 50th on Kimbark. Super kitchen, super woodwork, super space,call for appt. and price.ALMOST ONE-HALF ACRE OF LAND with this Two Family Mansion. YES. Afull apartment (nice income) on third floor - gracious, spacious family living onfirst and second. If you don’t need the huge yard, sell it off. Entire parcel only$215,000.DREXEL SQUARE CONDO (51st & Drexel) over 2.000 sq. ft. designed anddecorated by professionals. Ready to move in condition, well establishedbuilding. Two bedrooms plus study. Kitchen and baths are beautiful. All ap¬pliances. $67,500HYDE PARK’S NEWEST LAKEFRONT CONDO (4800 Chicago Beach).Owner transfer necessitates quick sale of choice high floor 2 bedroom apart¬ment. Panoramic Views. Garage stall assured with apartment. Total package,$79,500.A SLICE OF THE PIE IN THE SKY. One bedroom, but a view of the world5401 Hyde Park Blvd. High floor, perfect for singles, $48,500LUXURY HI-RISE 5 ROOM CONDO. Narragansett at 50th & Chicago Beach.Traditional beauty. Apt. has own formal reception hall with beautiful beamedceilings. Views are spectacular from high floor in all directions. Woodburningfireplace. In the $70’s. Ask about Assessment Rebate plan.5000 EAST END - PANORAMIC VIEW. High floor, 5 rooms, 2 baths. Im¬mediate $39,000.FOR RENT - BRAND NEW - lovely large back yard near 55th Cornell - 6 rms 2baths. This is a condo with all new appliances, country kitchen, perhaps couldbe purchased at end of lease period. $575. Central air, own heat control.Vikstrom Real Estate 493-0666For Sales Information, Call...CHARLOTTE VIKSTROM, BROKER493-0666Kathy Ballard, Sales Associate (res. 947-0453)Ken Wester, Sales Associate (res. 947-0557)4—The Chicago Literary Review—Ausut 24. 1979 DESKS:SALEFrom 5995 jRoll52”x24”x45”Reg. 294.50SaleFINEUNFINISHEDFURNITURE Campaign Desk40”x18”x29”Reg. 107.5024950 Sale ... 8995Open 7 days • Delivery AvailableNEW TOWN • 2631 N. Clark • Chicago248-0540HYDE PARK • 1365 E. 53rd St. • Chicago288-6200OAK PARK • 1036 W. Lake • Village Mall386-5200 on all ourdesks thruSept. 23rdwhile supplieslast!•All desks constructed ofsolid wood andready to finish.•Other stylesavailable atsale prices.Why They Tell LivesBarbara Tuchman: In Defense of BiographyTelling Lives: The Biographer’s Artby Leon Edel, Justin Kaplan, Alfred Kazin, DorisKearns, Theodore Rosengarten, Barbara Tuch¬man and Geoffrey Wolffedited by Marc PachterNew Republic BooksBy Timothy ErwinThe punning title of this collection of essays on biog¬raphy vibrates uncertainly between description and ac¬tion, and underscores the biographer’s need for accura¬cy. Writing biography, the title implies, means firstthat one must find a life worth writing about, a tellinglife, and then find a way of telling that life as truthfllyas possible.Most of the essays here belong to that cottage in¬dustry, become skyscraper industry, literary biogra¬phy. It take a moment to realize how very modern thenotion is: those lives most worth writing about are notthe lives of writers.Before Dr. Johnson’s time literary lives were notthought worth the telling. Izaak Walton’s seventeenth-century life of John Donne owed itself far more toDonne’s clerical orders than to his poetical powers.Renaissance biographers looked to Horace for their for¬mula, to Plutarch for their model. Biographers were tobe ‘useful,’ meaning pious and didactic, and were torepresent their subjects as positive examples in whomvirtue regularly triumphed over vice. As proper sub¬jects for'this sort of biography, writers then, as now,lacked a sense of proportion, of fair play.Samuel Johnson thought that anyone’s life would beworth telling, could make a telling life. We are allprompted by the same motives, he wrote. Yet it’s hardnot to feel that it would take a keen psychologist tomake interesting biography from the lives of most ofus. It was for this reason that critics often attackedGeoffrey Wolff with his choice of Harry Crosby as thesubject of his recent biography, Black Sun. In his essayincluded here, “Minor Lives’’, Wolff justifies his choicealone roughly Johnsonian lines.“Harry Crosby walked the earth thinking of himselfas a major poet in the making.’’In his intense self-deception and finally in his suicide,Crosby was “interesting.” His life wasn’t paradigmatic,nor was it particularly illustrative of Parisian Bohemi-anism in the twenties. Instead, it had novelistic inter¬est and lent itself well to what Wolff calls “narrativedesign.” Crosby's was in fact most a literary life in thesense that it was fictive, a life led as a work of art,trailing behind a convenient comet’s tail of diaries, let¬ters and notebooks.With Johnson, Wolff believes in the intrinsic interestof the writerly life. He feels that a life lived in the ut¬most singularity can bear meaning for us if we will inAuden’s terms, and Forster’s, only connect. Isn’t it alsotrue, however, that in art and life simple singularityusually stands in the way of meaningful connection,and that in biography we expect the biographer tohelp us make the connections? Johnson thought so, anda difference between Johnson’s defense of biographyand Wolff’s lies in their divergent understanding ofnarrative design. For Johnson and his literary forbearsthe term design spoke to the plasticity of the arts, toan emotional conduit that could be forged betweengenres, providing biography with the catharsis of trag¬edy in this instance.For Wolff, who isn’t helped by the general scarcity ofcritical vocabulary with which to talk about modern bi¬ography, narrative design is something more easilyachieved in a documented life like Crosby’s than in oneless well recorded, simply. Taken together, Wolffs apo-logeticsDlace too great a burden on the reader, and hisargument from narrative design jars awkwardlyagainst the special pleading for found biography.The most compelling pages of Wolff's essay are thefew he devotes to a forthcoming father-son memoir, ala J. R. Ackerley’s of a decade or so ago, to be calledThe Duke of Deception. Wolff’s father was a great pre¬tender, and it’s a rare son who can revisit the sites ofhis father’s sinning, as Wolff has done, with Wolff’s un¬derstanding.In a large and graceful essay, “The Figure Under theCarpet”, Henry James’ biographer Leon Edel writesthat biography is essentially a question of scope andsynthesis. Although the modern biographer can’t nor¬mally play Boswell to his subject’s Johnson, sitting asamanuensis and stimulating his subject to witty dis¬course or pronunciamento, he yet has Boswell’s dilem¬ma. “The nature of the work . . . has occasioned a de¬gree of trouble far beyond that of any other species ofcomposition,” wrote Boswell, and today with thesprawl of archieves we can sympathize in spades. Noless than Boswell the modern biographer must face thenature of the work, but not, according to Edel, in theway Boswell did.Rather, the modern biographer should borrow hismethod from Freud and Holmes, seeking “the evidencein the reverse of the tapestry,” the myth that under¬lies the author's public mask. The idea is to interpret the facts first, and then to find psychological evidencethat extends and confirms them, to peer out throughone’s own empirical synthesis for the grail of the sub¬ject’s self-concept.Briefly and by way of illustration, Edel deftly ex¬plores the other, hidden side of the patterned myth inthe lives of Hemingway, Thoreau and Rex Stout. Hecommends Johns Berryman’s biography of StephenCrane, and Virginia Woolf’s or Roger Fry; but thereader has the feeling that there is as yet no fullfledged example of the sort of biography he is propos¬ing.Justin Kaplan is the author of Mr. Clemens and MarkTwain and here of “The Naked Self and Other Prob¬lems.” Kaplan’s essay discusses literary nominations,the inner meaning of the nom de plume, asking Juliet’sticklish question of Mark Twain and Walt Whitman, andanswering eloquently. Clemens first used his pen namein a travel letter to his newspaper from Carson City,Nevada, signing the piece, “Yours, dreamily, MarkTwain.” Kaplan suggests that Clemens at twenty-sevenwanted to establish a distance between himself andthe reading public, and that he could hear the call ofliterature over the din of journalistic demands onlywhen the name Mark Twain was pronounced.The role of Lyndon Johnson's biographer fell to DorisKearns, who in “Angles of Vision gives us an informa¬tive account of her years at the White House and lateat the Johnson ranch as a presidential assistant. Shesaw Johnson in several guises, and she now thinks thather Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream wouldhave been better if she had written the book back¬wards rather than forwards, changing the plot but notthe story. That way she and the reader could have ac¬companied Johnson in his personal search for a past during the last reminiscent days in Texas. A more sym¬pathetic biography might have resulted, she feels, onethat might have contrasted better with Johnson’s ownrather formal memoirs.Other essays in Telling Lives take more or less obli¬que stances on the problems of choice and organiza¬tion, of distance and selectionln “Biography as a Prismof History" Barbara Tuchman emphasizes the need fordiscerning concision.“Selection is the task of distinguishing the significantfromthe insignificant; it the test of the writer as histori¬an and artist.”With emphatic prose, Alfred Kazin muses about au¬tobiography as history, the modern schism of individu¬al from historical consciousness and the current voguefor literary confessinalism, arguing that “identity be¬comes the condition of life as we get mashed into shapeby the same corporations, shopping plazas, ranchhouses, mass universities, television programs, instantreplay of the same public atrocities.”The real value of this lovingly edited collection,which began as a symposium at the National PortraitGallery in Washington, isn’t that it advances the stateof biographical theory. It doesn’t pretend to. It doesn’tlie in the finely worked prose of the contributors. It’sthe wonderful over-the-shoulder glimpses of distin¬guished biographers at work solving practical problemsof interpretation in a field where life so often impingeson art that makes these pieces well worth reading.The drawback is a certain lack of historical aware¬ness. of an awareness that in past times mysteries aresolved here, may lesser ones are given tentative andentertaining solutions, making this book not an openand shut case, ^>ut an interesting caseof open and shut,open and shut.The Chicago Literary Review—August 24, 1979—5Franklin Roosevelt: Pressing IssuesFranklin Roosevelt addressing the Joint Session of Congress, 1941.F.D.R. and the Pressby Graham WhiteThe University of Chicago PressBy Michael SchudsonIn Heywood Broun’s famous line, FranklnD. Roosevelt was “the best newspapermanwho has ever been President of the UnitedStates.” Roosevelt’s actual journalistic ex¬perience was confined to a stint on the Har¬vard Crimson, but this did not prevent himfrom telling reporters how he would write astory if he were the reporter. The WhiteHouse had never known a man as interestedin the press or as interesting to it as FDR. Hemet twice weekly with the Washington cor¬respondents, gave them plenty of news, andawed them with his detailed knowledge ofpublic affairs. He charmed them, of course,with his wit and style, but Graham J. Whiteargues in FDR and the Press that “the sheerrange of his information” won them morethan anything else. He offered informationnot as a bureaucrat but as a stage actor. AsWhite puts it, Roosevelt had a “capacity formaking politics absorbing and vital” and an“unusual talent for dramatization.”Graham White, lecturer in American histo¬ry at the University of Sydney, centers hismonograph on Roosevelt’s oft-asserted be¬lief that the press was against him. The firstthird of the book discusses FDR's general re¬lations with the press. The center of thebook demonstrates that the press was not asanti-Roosevelt as Roosevelt imagined. HereWhite offers a detailed examination of edi¬torial endorsements, press coverage ofmajor White House speeches, and front¬page attention to Roosevelt’s press confer¬ences. In the final third of the book, Whitetries to explain FDR’s antagonism to news¬paper publishers as part of a political philos¬ophy.Roosevelt repeatedly held to three propo¬sitions about the press. First, the press wasdominated by right-wing businessmen. Sec¬ond, the reporters were obligated to writethe way the publishers wanted them to.Third, interpretive reporting — and particu¬larly the work of columnists — was a banefulinfluence on the press because the properrole of the press was to simply lay out thefact before a scrutinizing public.That is not much of a philosophy, yet it isWhite’s aim to make it seem so. His main ef¬fort is to explain why Roosevelt felt thepress to be hostile, despite the fact, whichWhite meticulously establishes, that thepress — though often hostile — was not nearlyas antagonistic as Roosevelt made it out tobe. Why should Roosevelt have so badly mis-percieved reality? White offers several ex¬planations. Perhaps Roosevelt was just apolitician thwarted in his cherishedschemes. Or perhaps,even if quantitativelythe press was not hositle to him, the “oftenviolent and personally abusive tone” of theopposition press, including such influential publications as the Chicago Tribune and thepapers of the Hearst empire, affected him.Or perhaps Roosevelt’s political intuitiontold him he could gain public support bypainting the press as his enemy. Or, per¬haps, Roosevelt’s resentment against thepress “was both related to, and rationalizedin terms of, his own conception of its neces¬sary role in the democratic system, and itsfailure, in his eyes, adequately to fulfill thatrole.” White sees some merit in all thesepossibilities, but he explores only the lastone.A single key text shapes White’s positionon Roosevelt and the press — a review Roo¬sevelt wrote in 1925 of Claude Bowers’ Jef¬ferson and Hamilton for the New York Eve¬ning World. In the review, Rooseveltsympathized with Bowers’ presentation ofthe drama of American history as a contestbetween Hamiltonian elitists and Jefferson¬ian democrats. Roosevelt ended the reviewasking, “Hamiltons we have today. Is a Jef¬ferson on the horizon?” And White arguesthat FDR saw himself as the 20th century’sJefferson. For Roosevelt, the world was di¬vided between a majority with “reasonabledecency and democratic instincts” and apowerful minority with “unremitting self¬ishness and autocratic tendencies.” For FDR,the press lords were part of that minority.They had to be opposed. The Jeffersonianpresident had an obligation to appeal to theintelligence of the average voter over theheads or between the lines of the presslords. The president had an educative func¬tion and FDR celebrated as one of the greatachievements of his first term a “rebirth ofthe interest and understanding of a greatcitizenry in the problems of the Nation.”The idea of the president as an educator isimportant, and it is true that FDR was an ed¬ucator as no president has been since. But anappeal to the memory of Jefferson is scarce¬ly a political “philosophy.” It is more a self-dramatizing romanticism on Roosevelt’spart. There is not much originality or depthin seeing politics as a fight between vestedinterests and the poor, honest majority. It isthe conventional Progressive vision. FDRmay well have believed in it. But that doesnot explain his hostility to the press. Whiteis insistent that FDR’s ideas about the presswere “stereotyped, inflexible, and resistantnot merely to substantial revision, but even,over the period of his presidency, to detect¬able modification.” That sounds less like phi¬losophy than pathology. If White is correct,FDR was out of touch with the reality of thepress’s feelings about him and he denied re¬ality when advisors pointed out to him thatthe press was not as antagonistic as hethought. That is not something that can beexplained by FDR’s adherence to a Jeffer¬sonian vision. The problem White deals withis ultimately a psychological one. Intellec¬tually, there is no explaining Roosevelt’spassions about the press. White’s efforts todo so are not plausible.A word about what White takes to be Roo¬ sevelt’s “curiously inconsistent attitudetoward ‘interpretation.’” What White seemsto be unfamiliar with is that debate aboutinterpretive reporting and about politicalcolumnists raged in journalism in the 1930s.“Interpretive reporting “was not altogethernew, but it was newly named, newly legiti¬mated, and newly institutionalized in TimeMagazine and in political columns. Therewas nothing “inconsistent” in FDR’s attitudetoward it. He was against it, period. He wasnot against the press’s reporting his versionof the facts but that, of course, was not thenor now regarded as interpretation. Statingthe President’s view of a matter, whetherascribing it to the President or to a “sourceclose to the President” is within the canonsof journalistic objectivity. FDR was not in¬consistent. More suprisingly, perhaps, FDRdid not understand that interpretive report¬ing and political columns offered a counterto the prevailing powers of the publishers.Interpretive reporting was a way for the re¬porter to spout off (though this could hap¬pen) but to speak forth and to develop astronger sense of professional indepen¬dence. FDR’s assertion that the job of the press was just to lay the facts before thepublic seems curiously naive or else disin¬genuous in a decade when journalists them¬selves debated how to handle news where“the facts” were too complex to be con¬sumed in the raw.Journalists thought theyshould take some responsibility for inter¬preting the facts; Roosevelt thought healone would have that responsibility, that isnot political philosophy but political ag¬grandizement.White’s final pages string together keyRooseveltian comments on the press — two ofthem quoted earlier in the book, a thirdquoted twice before. This is indicative: thematerial from which White develops his per¬spective is thin. The wit and worth of thebook is that it asks a question that no onesystematically asked before — was the pressreally as hostile as FDR claimed? The answeris, convincingly, no. Then why was FDR so re¬sentful of the press? White’s effort to turnRoosevelt’s personality and political savvyinto philosophy fails though, along the way.White’s book reminds us of FDR’s genius inturning personality and philosophy into pol¬itics.During Summer Quarter InterimThe Student Health Servieeswill he open Mon. - Fri.8:30 - 4:30 p.m. Only.Closed on Saturdays.Sept. 1.8. 15 and 22.Open Saturday. Sept. 29and thereaftervmxmucmmMcmscmBz*Photographer Neededto help film U.C. footballgames. Equipmentprovided.Call Coach Kurucz at753-4683 for details. USED FILES2, 3, 4 and 5 drawerletter, legal and lateralBRAND EQUIPMENT&SUPPLY CO.8600 Commercial Ave.Open Mon.- Fri. 8:30- 5:00RE 4-2111 HEAR AGAIN STEREOSells guaranteed name brand usedand demo stereo components at 40%to 70% off regular prices.SPECIAL SPRING CLEARANCE SALESTOREWIDE SAVINGS INCLUDINGEQUIPMENT LIKE :SANSUI 9090DB $359.00SHERWOOD 7110 99.00MARANTZ 2245 225.00TEACA100 110.00PIONEER SX828 189.00GARRARD GT55 99.00YAMAHA CR1000 399.00BIC 1000 165.00DOKORDER 7100 179.00TECHNICS SA5150 115.00Complete systems from $75 to $750.60 day trade back privilege. Namebrand components for limited bud¬gets. PLUS MUCH, MUCH MORE.HEAR AGAIN STEREO7002IV. California 338-77376—The Chicago Literary Review—August 24, 1979What MadeThe Rise of Theodore Rooseveltby Edmund MorrisCowardBy Claudia MagatLate at night on the second floor of theWhite House, President Theodore Rooseveltwould often read magazines. Roosevelt’s ap¬proach to periodicals reflected his generalvigor: upon finishing each page, he wouldtear it out and throw it on the floor. Roo¬sevelt absorbed words quickly; in additionto the magazines he generally read onebook every day. But enough is enough!After all, the President had to get up thenext morning. When the periodicals hadbeen reduced to a large pile of crumpledpages, Roosevelt would jump up from hischair, perform various bedtime rituals, and,as Edmund Morris writes, “energetically fallasleep.”The depth and breadth of a single life, likethe wide course of history, is subject to in¬terpretation. A good biographer offers aninterpretation based on a lucid, thoughtfulvision of his subject; the presentation offacts should explain as well as chronicle. Ed¬mund Morris has been intrigued by Theo¬dore Roosevelt since he was very young, andhas figuratively spent enough time with himto develop a fine vision of Roosevelt as thecomposite of many men, destined to becomeour youngest President at age 42. However,what underlay that destiny was an extraor¬dinary, almost eccentric energy, which Roo¬sevelt himself termed “the strenuous life.”The man had exceptional drive, coupledwith an enormous capacity for work — somuch that today we would probably labelhim a “workaholic,” give him a prescriptionfor Valium, and tell him to please be careful,maybe you need a vacation.Morris does not, nor does he need to, referexplicitly to Roosevelt’s mental and physicalvigor; it shines through as the author moveswith Roosevelt from his birth in New YorkCity in 1858, to Europe, through Harvard, outto the Badlands, through two marriages,into the Governor’s mansion in Albany, andso on, until they reach the climax of thebook, as it were: Roosevelt perched on amountain in the Adirondacks, watching amessenger approach with the news thatMcKinley had died in Buffalo.Morris’s is a kind vision of Roosevelt,which might prompt even a reader preparedto despise our 26th President for his milita¬rism and imperialism feel a tiny bit ofwarmth for a man who accomplished thingsso joyfully and thoroughly. His hyperacti¬vity somehow never becomes offensive hus¬tling, mostly because Morris’s detailed docu¬mentation reveals that Roosevelt wasdownright unique, even eccentric. This ex¬plains his manner of making others aware ofhim in the New York State Assembly: flashydress, a distinctive (and grating) voice, dra¬matic entrances, performances and exits.Such exhibitionism, though ultimately polit¬ically sound, appears as a function of theman’s character, not as a calculated attemptat notoriety. Furthermore, Roosevelt’s hu¬manism receives equal time in this book. Hisself-imposed exiles in the Dakotas, his liter¬ary endeavors, and his romantic affinitiesTeddy Risefor places and faces are explored as com¬pletely as his charge up San Juan Hill, andhis famous purging of the New York City Po¬lice Department. Morris conveys, as no pre¬vious Roosevelt biographer has (includingHenry Pringle, author of a Pulitzer Prize¬winning biography), Roosevelt’s love ofwildlife, his longing for his lost youth, andhis keen interest in reading and writing po¬litical and natural history. This man was nos¬talgic, he felt things historically and deeply,all the more because, as Morris demon¬strates, he was moving so damn fast on a ca¬reer trajectory. It is nice to learn that Roo¬sevelt was not moving so fast that the sparelandscape of the Badlands, the works ofCharles Dickens, and the intelligence andwarmth of his wife Edith did not pass over him.Roosevelt was a “Renaissance man,” as wesay. His many and diverse interests explain,more than his sheer political and militarypresence, why we consider him (as Morrispointed out in a recent article in Newsweek)a real American hero. Of course Rooseveltwas not good at everything he was interest¬ed in — his biography of Gouverneur Morriswas a disaster, while his Winning of theWest and history of the naval war of 1812 re¬mained standard works. But what matteredin terms of the image of Roosevelt, in termsof Morris’s vision of the man, was simplythat Roosevelt was fascinated by, and thusrepresented, so very many things. If he oncesported a silk hat and a gold-headed cane,he would later shoot rabbits at Oyster Bay; if he attended exclusive salons at the homeof Henry Adams, he would also recite a Bad¬land tale to President Benjamin Harrison: Ahunter, confronting a grizzly, prayed toGod, “Oh Lord, please help me kill that b’ar,and if you don’t help me, oh Lord, pleasedon’t help the ba’r.” Therefore, it is difficultto conceive of Roosevelt solely as a politi¬cian. Even before he announced his politicalambitions to horrified friends and family,Roosevelt’s heart had been captured by thephysiology of lobsters, and the beauty andcharm of his first wife, Alice Lee (who died inchildbirth); his mind had been lured by thedisciplines of literature and law; his bodyawed at the prospect of climbing the Mat¬terhorn.But this book aims to Roosevelt’s rise as apolitician, and it does so in a careful reen¬actment of political style and process andpersonalities which seem far away to usnow, but which, by virtue of Morris’s finepen, come back, smelling faintly of dust in aMidwest town where Roosevelt, unob¬served, listened to William Jennings Bryan;so clearly that we can discern the dim officesof the nineteenth century White Housewhere Civil Service Commissioner Rooseveltclashed with Postmaster General John Wan-amaker over enforcement of Civil Servicerules; so naturally that we hear the laugh¬ter of a black audience as Roosevelt cam¬paigns for mayor of New York City. “I like tospeak to a colored audience,” he declared,“for that is only another way of saying that Iam speaking to an audience of Republicans.”Roosevelt the imperialist-expansionist doesnot really emerge until the chapter, “TheHot Weather Secretary,” wherein he makeshis first public address as Assistant Secre¬tary of the Navy. The speech included thesentence, “No triumph of peace is quite sogreat as the supreme triumphs of war.” In¬deed, the Roosevelt who is truly destined tobecome President makes his debut here. Heis highlighted by the weak characters ofmen like McKinley, who appear as relics ofanother age, uncertain of how to control acountry which is rollicking rapidly, seem¬ingly of its own accord, toward world-powerstatus.It sounds foolish to say this book readslike a novel, but really, it does. That is dueas much to the literary graces of EdmundMorris as to the raw material with which heworked. Even some of the chapter titles aregorgeous: “The Man with the Morning in hisFace”; “The Universe Spinner”; “The WolfRising in the Heart.”The chapter ending with Roosevelt’s sec¬ond marriage notes: “He stood there alonewith his orange gloves, waiting for Edith towalk out of the mists behind him”; and is fol¬lowed by a short description of Roosevelt’strip west in 1886 where he discovered theBadlands ravaged by a remarkably badwinter, "The Winter of Bad Snow." Flora andfauna were destroyed forever. “Patientlythey began to sort and stack the skeletonsof what had been one of the greatest rangeherds in the world.”Edmund Morris is at work on a sequel toThe Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. If it fulfillsthe promise of his first book, the sequelshould not fail to explain how Roosevelttranslated his unique energies and interestsinto that supreme political power sphere:the American presidency.A Biologist’s Essayscontinued from page oneof medicine have finally learned how human beingshave always lived their lives.Although Dr. Thomas continuously emphasizes the in¬herent beauty and elegance of the natural state of af¬fairs of living things, an amusing acknowledgement tothe psychological and other poorly defined influencesover basic biological events is related in “On Warts".Despite the fact that the detailed molecular biology ofthe causative agent (the wart virus) has been recentlystudied, generations of dermatologists and grand¬mothers have long observed that warts can be made togo away by thinking. The author is fascinated by theuntapped powers of the “unconscious", and muses onthe inner intelligence which knows how to rid us ofwarts seemingly by self-suggestion. Even a War onWarts, a Conpuest of Warts, and a National Institute ofWarts and All may be worth establishing in Dr. Thom¬ as’s opinion, in order to find out more about the un¬derutilized super-intelligence within each of us. But allhumor aside, Thomas makes it very clear that twen¬tieth century man, despite his impressive technologicalprowness and advancement, is plainly ignorant of eventhe most basic and fundamental aspects of his own biol¬ogy and behavior.The concluding work. “Medical Lessons from Historyis by far the longest and most serious essay in thebook. Dr. Thomas emphasizes the importance of re¬sponsible health care and research as a necessaryhuman endeavor. Rational treatment and investiga¬tion of disease depends upon an objective and realisticappreciation of basic pathologic mechanisms. The histo¬ry of medicine is unfortunately replete with examplesof how ignorance and superstition have influenced pro¬fessional as well as public attitudes toward medicalcare and investigation. As a concientious citizen, ad¬ministrator, physician, and basic scientists. Dr. Thomasargues effectively for the increased financial and intel¬lectual support of basic biomedical investigation to as¬sure the future of human progress. By frankly admit¬ting that “we are dumb", the author concludes that we need science “not for its technology, not for leisure,not even for health or longevity, but for the hope ofwisdom which our kind of culture must acquire for itssurvival".Biological scientists will immediately find pleasureand satisfaction in reading this book. But the non-scien¬tists should derive the greatest benefit, for Dr. Thomashas elegantly revealed all of the joys and beauty webiologists have long been aware of, but were too inar¬ticulate to relate very effectively. Dr. Charles Hugginshas written of a distinguished scientist with whom hespent a productive learning period during his earlytraining as a cancer biologist. Upon being asked whatthe senior scientist Robison would do if he found an en¬velope left by an angel labled “cure of cancer is statedwithin", he replied, "I'd tear it up without opening. I'minterested only in my own thoughts." No motivatedbasic biomedical scientist today needs further explana¬tion of that remark. For it is learning through originalinvestigation and discovery that gives the greatest in¬tellectual satisfaction. That satisfaction is what Dr.Thomas so effectively radiates through his latest offer¬ing.The Chicago Literary Review—August 24, 1979—7Strange Days: Decadence, and DidionAlbum cover of The Doors’ “Strange Days”.By Ted O’NeillDecadenceby Richard GilmanFarrar, Straus, and GirouxIn 1975, Richard Gilman wrote an essayabout the misuse of the woTd “decadence”.He was then, and continues to be, angeredby the way a word with a rich history hasbee i trivialized by thoughtless fashion. Theessay is now incorporated in a short book,Decadence, in which Mr. Gilman, with out¬rage in his voice, attempts to show that theword has been carelessly, meaninglesslyused. Moreover, there is no such thing as de¬cadence, according to Gilman, because it isnaive to pretend that there are standards tofall away from. Civilizations and art formssimply do not grow and decline as organismsdo. Gilman claims that words such as “de¬cadence”, “Classicism” and “Romanticism”are the result of fanciful Platonizing, andthat it is reprehensible to use mere epthetssuch as “decadence”, “sex fiend”, “Yellowperil”.If most readers pick up this book becausethey would like to read about a very fash¬ionable intellectual topic, they need not bedisapointed while learning that decadencedoes not exist. In fact, half the book consistsof a thoughtful discussion of Baudelaire,There is no such thing as decadence,because it is naive to pretend thatthere are standards to fall away from.Gautier, Huysmans, Wilde, and Swinburne,who are for Gilman, as for many peoplethese days, the heroes of Decadence in itsfullest flower. To say that Gilman has writ¬ten an interesting, salable book on a subjectthat does not exist is not to suggest dishon¬esty or careless thinking. He has followed afamiliar procedure in tracing the history ofthe uses of a word, and if the “reality” ofdecadence can be denied, the uses of theword remain.Gilman has written a polemical book, notas a semantic, historical or metaphysical in¬quiry but as an attack on those people whoobscure a word which Gilman thinks shouldhave retired at the end of the nineteenthcentury. He knows, of course, that words canbe thought of as having no meaning fixed toany object or concept, and he refers towords as a matter of very serious game¬playing. And although this knowledge per¬mits him to write a history of the varyinguses of the word, Gilman never adequatelyanswers his own question; why should wenot use the word today? Our maneuversshould be just as legitimate as Baju’s gambitwas in 1884. Should we be denied the use ofthe word, as needy or inspired or brilliant aswe may be, because the word is archaic'.'Somehow, that is not right. Of course, we re¬alize that Mr. Gilman’s taste is offended bythe trivial, chic, uncontemplative misuse ofthe word (at one point he bothers to attackWomen's Wear Daily for its carelessnesswith the word “decadence”). But Gilmanbases much of his discussion on a belief thatno standards exist which allow us to deter¬mine when a culture or art is in decline, andhe fervently opposes the idea that an indi¬vidual’s moral choices can be dictated byeconomics, history, or, as is implicit in his ar¬gument, fashion.Gilman proposes very clearly that weshould not use “decadent” today becausethe period of decadent fruition (when he*chooses to recognize its existence) was thelate nineteenth century in France, and to alesser degree, in England. Today, accordingto Gilman, we are in a period of linguisticdecadence, when our decadents merely apethe full-blooded decadents of a more vigor¬ous generation.This is not a foolish book, nor unusuallyreckless. Gilman has approached unanswer¬able questions and believes that he hasfound answers, and everyone does that.That he does so with such confidence is dan¬gerous. But why enter a fight unless you canexhibit confidence (even if your opponent isWomen's Wear Daily)?8—The Chicago Literary Review—August 24, The White Albumby Joan DidionSimon and SchusterReaders of Richard Gilman’s book will notuse the word “decadent” without thought,but many of us wiil continue to believe inour own mythology of the rise and fall ofcultural energy. The prevailing mythology,hence the current tendency to spot signs of“decadence”, has us in an epicycle consistingof the quiet and dull Fifties, the noisy andexciting Sixties, and now the Fifties repeat¬ed in the Seventies, but worse, because welive the Fifties over again self-consciouslyand cynically. (Anyone who listened to thespeakers at the MacNamara demonstrationsknows that the Eighties will be a newer, lessinnocent version of the Sixties. RememberJudy Garland, in “Meet Me in St. Louis, "whosaw America embarking on a new centuryand breathlessly realized: “And to think ithappened right here in St. Looie.” The Eight¬ies, the Revolution, the Golden Age, wewere told over and over again, were begin¬ning right here in Chicago.)This mythology is proposed much too con¬fidently (remember Gilman) and undeni¬ably, there is at least a residue of unpleas¬ant embarrassment about our owninvolvement in the Sixties; nonetheless, theembarrassment is connected to the raisedspirits and hopes that were manifested inpolitics and social arrangements and thearts. Philip Larkin captured the foolish faiththat many of us preserve when he wrote ofthat “Annus Mirabilis,” 1963:Then all at once the quarrel sank:Everyone felt the same,And every life becameA brilliant breaking of the bank,A quite unlosable game.So life was never better thanIn nineteen sixty-three(Though just too late for me) -Between the end of the ChatterlybanAnd the Beatles' first LP.Joan Didion writes very well of the natureand cycles of the popular culture that bothrepresents the age and attempts to advancethe state of various popular arts. In the TheWhite Album we must make what we can ofthe title's unexplained allusion to the Beat¬les. The Doors, in fact, is the group thattakes an important role in the key, titleessay. Of The Doors Joan Didion says:On the whole my attention was onlyminimally engaged by the pre-occupa¬tions of rock-and-roll bands (I had al¬ready heard about acid as a transi¬tional state and also about theMaharishi and even about UniversalLove, and after awhile it all soundedlike marmalade skies to me) but TheDoors were different, The Doors inter¬ested me. The Doors seemed uncon¬vinced that love was brotherhood andthe Kama Sutra. The Doors’ music in¬sisted that love was sex and sex wasdeath and therein lay salvation.We are reminded of her earlier book,Slouching Toward Bethlehem when, in themidst of our memory's Glorious Revolution,she wrote fervently about the decline anddisorder of the times. Then the apocalypsewas at hand, but the San Francisco groupsshe wrote about in the title essay of thatbook, and presumably the Beatles, couldtalk about nothing but the Second Coming.Even then Joan Didion and Jim Morrisonsensed the movement of the rough beastand waited for the message embedded in“Helter Skelter” (a message only intelligi-1979 ble to the most perfect product of commu-nalism and Universal Love) to be understoodby one who would loose the blood-dimmedtide.That Altamont is the tragic end of the so-called Woodstock generation has been ajournalistic commonplace for years, and weexpect more from Joan Didion and get it.Yeats’s poem, rather than rock-and-roll,provides a better entry into the essay “TheWhite Album”, which is itself the entry tothe new book. The best lack all conviction,while the worst are full of passionate inten¬sity.”The essay “The White Album” is written inpieces (and the Doors are the subject of oneof the pieces) over a period of ten years. Aswe read we remember the initial denial ofnarrativity and learn to appreciate eachpiece for its own sake, to make the connec¬tions she either refuses to make or mocks(“In this light all connections were equallymeaningful, and equally senseless”). But thetension builds from part to part; there is noplot, yet through the pieces a theme contin¬ues, a theme that rests on Joan Didion’s neu¬rosis and paranoia and her growing sense ofdisaster. And finally, in imitation of the re¬versal that is an imitation of life, her neuro¬sis and paranoia are transported to a newand unexpected realm. Then, and only then,can the story have an ending:“Many people I know in Los Angeles be¬lieve that the Sixties ended abruptly on Au¬gust 9, 1969, ended at the exact momentwhen word of the murders on Cielo Drivetravelled like brush fire through the commu¬nity, and in a sense this is true. The tensionbroke that day. The paranoia was ful¬filled.”In the final words of the essay she willdeny again the possibility that writing, andinterpreting, can help us to see what it allmeans. But the fact remains that she will go on with a new confidence, a confidence thwas lacking in the over-qualified SlouchiiToward Bethlehem.Following that first painful, moving essfare the occasional and travel essays thhave been appearing in various magazimfor the past ten years. The book ends wiitwo essays headed “On the Morning Aftthe Sixties”, in which she comes as close jshe would want to to explaining her owmythology. We should not be surprisedlearn that, after years of passionate intesity in search of transcendent, final answershe is relieved to find the country returniito a time when original sin is recogniz<and, at least among people who thirseriously and modestly, the hope for simpanswers is sacrificed. In one of her rece:essays she writes of “those who remain cormitted mainly to the exploration of mordistinctions and ambiguities.”In the only place where Joan Didion usethe word “decadent” in The White Albunshe writes of Doris Lessing: “She appears fcmeals only to dismiss as decadent the hous<hold’s own preoccupation’s with writinwell.” The household is presided over by Ddion and, it is true (to play the game theangers Richard Gilman) that Didion’s writinis sometimes done so well that her concerwith elaboration and emphasis on style a]pear decadent.In Slouching Towards Bethlehem, her sertences are so fine, so overworked, that foreis taken away from her judgements. In ThWhite Album the writing is fine, but thitime there is less the sense that she is pleacing innocence by virtue of neurosis, morthe sense that she need a very fine instnment to examine moral distinctions and anbiguities. Her concern with certain topic:with stylishness, and with what she callsthe heart of darkness that lay in man’s owblood” reminds me of the real heroes <Richard Gilman’s book. Those were the daidies and writers of great precision anoverwrought beauty, artists such as Huymans and Baudelaire. Joan Didion has a]prehended the final things, and if there aisuch things as decadences to be explained,could very well be her undertaking.The Doors were different, The Doors' music insisted that love was sex and sexwas death and therein lay salvation.■■■■■■■■■■■■Joan Didion: Smug Reflections on the SixtiesBy Richard Kaye“My husband switches off the televisionset and stares out the window. I avoid hiseyes, and brush the baby’s hair. In the ab¬sence of a natural disaster we are left againto our own uneasy devices. We are here onthis island in the middle of the Pacific in lieuof filing for divorce.“I tell you this not as aimless revelationbut because I want you to know, as you readme, preccisely who I am and where I am andwhat is on my mind. I want you to under¬stand exactly what you are getting: you aregetting a woman who for some time now hasfelt radically separated from most of theideas that seem to interest other people.You are getting a woman who somewherealong the line misplaced whatever slightfaith she had in the social contract, in themeliorative principle, in the whole grandpattern of human endeavor. Quite oftenduring the past several years I have felt my¬self a sleepwalker, moving through theworld unconscious of the moment’s highissues, oblivious to its data, alert to only thestuff of bad dreams, the children buring inthe locked car in the supermarket parkinglot, the bike boys stripping down stolen carson the captive cripple's ranch, the freewaysniper who feels ‘real bad’ about picking offthe family of five, the hustlers, the insane . .— “In the Islands’’ by Joan Didion, from TheWhite AlbumJoan Didion has become a cultural andjournalistic darling among a growingnumber of intelligent people, and her latestcollection of essays and reportage, TheWhite Album (Simon and Schuster, $9.95),has received the sort of uniformly exuber¬ant critical support which has one hoping forsome healthy dissent. It is no longer poss¬ible to sumply react to Joan Didion as a writ¬er.Never mind that she and her husband, theauthor John Greggory Dunne, have achievedcelebrity-status as screenwriters and Hol¬lywood party-goers. Never mind that manypeople love to talk about this terribly inter¬esting marriage, that both writers are for¬ever referring to their marriage in the pressand in their own works, that they can’t stoptalking about their adopted daughter Quin¬tana, who is forever filled with the mostadorably perceptive remarks. What seemsclear is that Joan Didion has not only man¬aged to produce characters in her novels,but she has (as Alfred Kazin once remarked)managed to turn herself into a character.The frail, shy, yet somehow hard, and con-stantly-on-the-edge social chronicler JoanDidion has done a magnificent job of whee¬dling her own personality into nearly every¬thing she has written.This technique worked well in SlouchingTowards Bethlehem, her first collection onaspects of her own life and some sensationalaspects of the Sixties. This was because itwas often very moving to read of a frail per¬sonality at the hands of a very harsh andusually turbulent world (mainly, hellish Ca¬lifornia). But the voice running through TheWhite Album has grown callous and biting,until the whole tone of the book is one ofsmugness and mean-spiritedness. Her per¬sonality takes on a pathological intrusive¬ness, as in the title essay where Didion actu¬ally includes her own psychiatric reports inher running narrative on the Sixties — amove which truck me as a perfect Joan Di¬dion parody. Sadly, it isn’t, and what is evenmore disturbing than Didion’s grating self¬advertising is her myopic and downright re¬actionary view of the period, as well as hertotal contempt for the politically commit¬ted. There are passages and entire pages ofThe White Album so fraught with personaldespair and private confusion that onewonders if Didion had trouble deciding to take her manuscript to a publisher — or backto her psychiatrist.The reaction to Joan Didion, to my mind, isnot unlike the cultish response to some ofour other cultural heroines — Sylvia Plath,for instance, or even a great writer such asVirginia Woolf. It is our love-affair with thefemale writer as frail but eminently suc¬cessful, neurotic but — for a while — coping. Itis the artist who achieves moments of highperception through personal catharsis —“while I suffer, you learn”. The differencewith Didion is that she enjoys cultivatingthis fascination which readers have with herlife’s details.What is particularly upsetting about thepromotion of Joan Didion as a fine recorderof the past decade (The White Album willprobably last as an important comment onthe Sixties” wrote The New York Review ofBooks reviewer) is that Didion has a pen¬chant for the histrionic, the sensational. Shesees the Sixties almost entirely throughevents such as the Manson murders or thedeath of Jim Morrison of The Doors and thentries to sqeeze them for historical signifi¬cance. “Many people I know in Los Angelesbelieve that the Sixties ended abruptly onAugust 9, 1969, ended at the exact momentwhen word of the murders on Cielo Drivetraveled like brushfire through the commu¬nity, and in a sense this is true”, she writesat one point.Then there are the simplistic reductions:“This sense that the world can be reinventedsmells of the Sixties in this country, thoseyears when no one at all seemed to haveany memory or mooring ...” Did the CivilRights demonstrations, did the Vietnam Warprotests, did even the drug culture lead orculminate in the Sharon Tate deaths, as Di¬dion implies? Were the people who partici¬pated in these events “without memory ormooring”? Is Didion being at all fair in see¬ing the Manson murders as indicative of theSixties spirit? Even her book’s title, a refer¬ence to the Beatles’ album and the “HelterSkelter” cut which the Manson family bor¬rowed as a badge, is meant to be em¬blematic of the period.In Didion’s bleak view, one nevter gets anysense of some of the truly important aspectsof those years. None of the idealism of thattime comes across, and if it does it is so Di¬dion can expose it as false. Even the Viet¬nam War and its protests get slighted inboth of Didion’s collections. I didn’t see thewar mentioned but once in The WhiteAlbum. What I did see was a list of twenty-six items (shampoo, face cream, powder,etc.) which Joan Didion likes to take withher on trips. Everything gets confused in Di¬dion’s head, and when she writes of the“smell” of the Sixties she reveals her own,not unpopular notion: the Sixties was justan awful mess.But then Didion’s limited view of socialprotest was hinted at in a 1965 essay inSlouching. In “On Morality” she wrote some¬what cynically, “Of course we would all liketo ‘believe’ in something, like to assuageour private guilts in public causes, like tolose our tiresome selves, like, perhaps, totransform the white flag of defeat at homeinto the brave banner away from home. Allthe picket lines, all the ad hoc committees,all the brave signatures in The New YorkTimes, all the agaitiprop” did not confer anyipso facto virtue, she told us. It has nothingto do with “morality”.The only saving grace for Didion's lapses into vacuousness, behind her smart-sound¬ing overstatements, is her much-toutedstyle. (“Joan Didion is the best prose stylistof anyone writing in English today”, gushednovelist James Dickey) in a remark whichsays more about what he reads than whatshe writes. On the Dick Cavett show criticJohn Leonard compared her to Jane Austenin importance). There seems little questionthat the style flows, that it has been la¬bored over, but generally the emptiness ofthe arguments overwhelms everythingelse.Her piece “The Women’s Movement”proves conclusively that one can slay anymovement by dragging out the worst ex¬cesses and remarks made by its members.Who really cares if some woman believesliberation is “wisecracking and laughing andlying together and then leaping up to playJoan Didion: The California Sloucher.and sing the entire Sesame Street songbook”? And since when is Ms. magazine thelast word on Women’s Liberation? Does themovement’s derogation of “machismo” real¬ly mean that there are “several millionwomen too delicate to deal at any levelwith an overtly heterosexual man”? Didion'sdismissal of the Women's Movement as a“symptom” of our cultural malaise becomesher refusal to deal with the Movement’s big¬ger fish — De Beauvoir, Millet, Friedan,Brownmiller — and her preference for shoot¬ing at the sitting ducks.In a piece attacking the British authorDoris Lessing, Didion writes patronizinglythat “the impulse to final solutions has notonly been Mrs. Lessing’s dilemma but theguiding delusion of her time”. You see, JoanDidion is under no delusions, has never feltany pang from discrimination or any need totaint herself with a political thought or a commitment to a social issue.Didion’s defense of the studio system in“In Hollywood” left me mystified. In oneswoop she believes she can eliminate thevalue of movie criticism. (“Making judge¬ments on films is in many ways so peculiarlyvaporous an occupation that the only ques¬tion is why, beyond the obvious opportuni¬ties for a few lecture fees and a little career¬ism at a dispiritingly self-limiting level,anyone does it in the first place”). Lines likethis make Didion’s critical job too easy. Shedoesn’t even bother to argue about the factthat there is already an existing body ofgood, and often great, writing on film. “Re¬viewing moving pictures, like reviewingnew cars, may or may not be a useful con¬sumer service ...” is all Didion will grantfilm criticism since to her, movies are bytheir nature designed for profit and are acollaborative medium (shall we say good¬bye to theatre criticism as well?).It all makes sense when put in cruderterms; as a screenplay writer with her hus¬band of some perfectly third-rate movies(“The Panic in Needle Park”, “Play It As ItLays”, “A Star Is Born”) and as one of thosepeople who regularly and cheerfully droptheir pants for Hollywood money, Didion isin no position to attack movie criticism (oreven good movies). But even here Didion’sview is ambiguous, since she herself recent¬ly wrote a review of “Manhattan”, and did itrather well, although that picture seemed apiece of cake to debunk.There are passages of The WhiteAlbum so fraught with personal de¬spair and private confusion thatone wonders if Didion had troubledeciding to take her manuscript toa publisher — or back to her psychia¬trist.The moment when I threw The WhiteAlbum across the room, however, was whenI came to her piece “In Bogota”, when Di¬dion, after traveling tourist-style to Colom¬bia, believes herself capable of saying some¬thing significant about Colombian society.Two lines into the piece one knows she isgoing nowhere: “In Bogota it would be cool.In Bogota one could get The New York Timesonly two days late and The Miami Heraldonly one day late and also emeralds andbottled water. In Bogota there would befresh roses in the bathrooms at the Hotel Te-quendana and hot water twenty-four hoursa day and numbers to be dialed for chickensandwiches from room service and Xeroxrapid’o and long distance operators whocould get Los Angeles in ten minutes ...” Itwould have been nice if this arrogantly sillytourist had stayed in her hotel room, but sheventures out to make cheap shots at the na¬tives. “The year 1954 seemed an extraordin¬ary year to hve hit on the notion of buildinga cathedral of salt.” she writes after visitingthe famed salt cathedra at Zipiquira, “butthe Colombians to whom I mentioned it onlyshrugged.”Somewhere between the psychiatric re¬ports and the self-satisfied despair in TheWhite Album, Didion tells us that along withNancy Reagan and eleven other women, shewas named in 1968 as a Woman of the Yearby the Los Angeles Times. At first it mightseem ironic, but then it all makes a gooddeal of sense. One could just see Mrs. Rea¬gan traveling to Bogota in the precise fash¬ion that Joan Didion chose to travel. Bothwomen would want the best accomodations,both of them would worry over room serviceand the hotel food, both of these well-heeled Californians would return to theirhotel rooms when the going outside becamerough. And in their owm ways, both Mrs.Reagan and Joan Didion have the same typeof response to the great issues of our day:they shrug.Her personality takes on a pathological intrusiveness,...Didion actually in¬cludes her own psychiatric reports in her running narrative of the Sixties.She sees the Sixties almost entirely through events such as the Mansonmurders or the death of Jim Morrison of The Doors and then tries to squeezethem for historical significance.The only saving grace for Didion's lapses into vacuousness, behind her smart¬sounding overstatements, is her much touted style.The Chicago Literary Review—August 24, 1979—9SPECIAL RATES:First 25 miles FREE on trucks of all sizes.Main Office: 6661 S. State783-0727 - Truck Pick-up here only.Reservations can be made at our two other offices listed below.100 Free Miles on any size carMonday through Thursday ONLYIntroduce Yourself to Budget Rent-a-CarSAVTuP TO $5.00Present this coupon at time of rental for up to $5.00credit on any standard size car in our fleet. Only onecoupon per rental. We feature all 1979 air-conditionedMercurys. Good Mon. thru Thurs. Only.Available at these locations:8642 So. Chicago Ave. 5508 So. Lake Pk. 6661 S. State374-0700 493-7900 783-0727OFFER AVAILABLE FOR LIMITED TIME ONLY. JUse your Sears creditcard at Sears Rent a Carauthorized distributioncenters located inBudget offices.SUNDAYBRUNCHATMallory’s312-241-5600mmvmBarRestaurantTenth Floor1525 East 53rd StreetHyde ParkChicago, Illinois 60615 Spokesmen Bicycle Shop8301 Hyde Park Blvd.Selling Quality ImportedBikes.Raliegh, Peugeot, Fuii,Motobecane, WindsorAnd a full Inventoryof MOFEDSOpen 10-? M-F, 10-5 Sat.11-4 Sun Rollerskates for684-3787 sale or Rent.• Eye Examinations• Contact Lenses(Soft & Hard)• Prescriptions FilledDR. MORTON R. .MASLOVOPTOMETRISTSContact lensesand SuppliesHyde ParkShopping Center1510 E. 55th363-6363 ROCKEFELLERMEMORIAL CHAPEL5850 South Woodlawn AvenueSunday • August 26 • 11 A.M.University Religious ServiceCLYDE STECKELProfessor of Pastoral TheologyUnited Theological Seminary ofthe Twin Cities, Minnesota“WALKING”In the world of letters, ours stand out.CHICAGO REVIEWa quarterly of arts and letters.Available at your local bookseller, or through Chicago Review.The University of Chicago, Faculty Exchange Box “C,"970 East 58th Street, Chicago, Illinois 60637Single copies $3.00 Subscriptions $l0.00/year (four issues)10—The Chicago Literary Review—Auciust ?4. 1979Decoding Mary RobisonDaysby Mary RobisonAlfred KnopfBy Molly McQuadeIn some senses Days, Mary Robison's first collectionof short stories, is cipher-like. Though summoned withaustere realism, events, characters and their dialogueemerge from a recondite source. Reading isn’t easy.Mundane lives suggest secret conflicts, expressed con¬flict leads from obscure passion. Informational gaps be¬come conspicuous in Robison’s deceptively accessibleprose. The prose is studded with signals from thedepths, not made of details gathered from surfaces.Meaning hoarded, and poetically expressed, makesDays enigmatic and far more than realistic.Kite and Paint” opens the book with a situation ofimpending disaster. Two elderly bachelors stoicallyawait a hurricane. Though expecting calamity, they tryto stave it off by ritual politeness. They stave off theproblem of their own mortality as well, pretendingthat the storm is the enemy.Details are what make or break realism, even Robi¬son’s kind, and ‘‘Kite and Paint” is full of them. Inad¬vertently coming to the bachelors’ aid, Holly, Don's ex-wife, appears on the scene. Her decorum isundisturbed; she’s dressed for high tea, not for destruc¬tion, and has come to ensure that her piano is safe.She’s come to confirm stability, even though she’s asurvivor of divorce. And indeed, the piano is well pro¬tected: wrapped up on top of a meat freezer, it’s ab¬surdly, gigantically secure.“Last evening, I just decided everything had to beprotected,” Charlie, the second bachelor, confides. Tothis end, he has built a barricade of Don's blank can¬vasses. Don has abandoned painting, but Charlie valuesmaterials more than art. Materials are more reassur¬ing and less irreplaceable than paintings. They are eas¬ily understood and simple to defend. Protecting themoffers him relief from protecting himself and the thingsthat embody him.“What a thing on your head,” Don scoffs, indicatingHolly’s hat. The hat is imperilled as the canvas is not.Holly is vulnerable as Don is not: she exhibits herself tothe storm, inviting destruction, while he hides behindobjects and invented obstructions.Yet the bachelors are braver than Holly, who flees toPhiladelphia. Evasively or not, they remain to protectand affirm the habits they have formed on the site wherethey have formed them. Don picks mint,as usual; Charliecalculates his pulse rate. They consider playing chess.But most foolishly, courageously, and characteristical¬ly, Don unveils his final talisman against the storm: aseries of kites, built the night before in fanciful defianceof the catastrophe to come. Christened like race horses,gaudy as flags, they are obstinate, if ineffectual, expres¬sions of spirit.“Weekday,” another story in the collection, is moreconventional, building unobtrusively to a final epiphanyof unhappy marriage.Guidry’s ex-wife, Christine, enters his apartmentbefore morning, simultaneously to care for him and to prove her independence. She uses his shower, borrowshis clothes, pretends to serve him breakfast, requests acigarette. She displays, without explanation, the ac¬cessories of her new, Guidryless self: French magazineand dictionary, fashionable clothes, and Elizabethanrecordings. She pretends to have recovered from beinghis. She is now her own.Short story collections have been selling rather poorlyof late. Here Mary Robison, author of Days, models asweater.But not completely. Well before the end of “Week¬day,” one senses re-enactments of this couple's pastproblem. Christine takes advantage of her ex-hus-band’s characteristic disorganization. She interprets itas invitational generosity. Since Guidry left his doorunlocked, she walked in. Since Guidry drinks, she’llhelp herself. Since Guidry takes care of their daughter,she contributes quarrelsome doses of affection. Push¬over Guidry will even let his unsteady ex give him ahaircut while they’re both drunk.But Guidry won’t concede to all requests. He toler¬ates Christine’s intrusion because he wants to makesure that she hasn’t changed. Guidry correctly guessesthat the revised Christine is only the outcome of an al¬liance with a new man. Her independence is deceptive.She has earned it by marrying a homosexual. She bor¬rows his intellectual credentials in order to improveherself while pretending superiority to him. She is asunhappily dependent as ever — on her ex-husband forapproval, as well as on her new husband for identity.One of the most powerful of the stories is also one ofthe shortest. In “Relations,” Robison's cool removalfrom the phenomena she describes is devastating.Narrated in the first person, “Relations” concerns the random encounters of two cousins, both adrift anauncertain. The girl, unnamed, has left home. At first,she can't remember when she first saw and spoke toJunior; she has passed through innumerable places. Butthe details return with a clarity that conceals deeperanomie. “It was raining,” she recalls. “I can say that. .Whatever year it was, I remember Max Roach was play¬ing with Miles Davis still.” Her memory is governed byoutside events.Meeting, she and Junior commiserate over love af¬fairs that ended without cause. She trades her water¬proof sweater for his less durable jacket. She meets hismother, bereft of personality, and an unidentified manfriend. While Junior swallows Dexedrine, his cousindozes off, then leaves.But although their repeated encounters seem to es¬tablish a relationship, this is exactly what Robison de¬nies. The cousins are distinguished by their aimless¬ness, by the temporary nature of everything theyundertake. They meet by pure geographical coinci¬dence, passive objects propelled by unfelt forces.Neither one is capable of affirming meaning. Everystatement made, not matter how negative, is quicklyqualified, as if from fear. “He said I had never cared adamn whether my parents were happy or sad,” the girlremembers, unwilling to give away her feelings exceptthrough a secondary interpretation. Junior, too, ex¬empts himself from the commitment of conventionalcommunication, maintaining that he would rather“think in mathematics. . .in camera slides, and some¬times. . .in wallpaper patterns” than in English.At a later meeting, Junior insists that he has foundeda business. His cousin doesn’t believe him. Or rather,she asks him what the business is. (Belief is so precari¬ous that it must never be considered as itself.) Whenshe agrees to drive him to a political convention, hisconviction dissolves, and he asks to be let off in a weedpatch.“He said after that he might run around in the weed-field until he got lost, and maybe he did, too, because Ionly saw him one other time before I saw him dead athis funeral,” Junior’s cousin concludes, with the emo¬tionless resignation that permeates the story. Robisoncaptures the almost perfect indifference of these twoto the movements of their lives with a poetic preci¬sion.Another devastating but more traditional story is“May Queen.” Here Robison exercises her typically icyrestraint in a satire on hubris and religion. The ostenta¬tious coronation of a May Queen, complete with cru¬cifixes, incense, and altar boys, culminates in disasteras the girl's ceremonial skirt catches fire. Benedictionbotched, her parents try to console her with promisesof secular compensation, like vacations on Lake Erie.Although simpler in conception than others, the storyis masterfully launched.At a cursory reading. Days does not yield much. Itwithholds more than it shares, and even after manyreadings, a mystery remains. But originality is oftendifficult to penetrate. Whatever the gnomic qualitiesof her work, Robison has begun to educate us. With hernext book, her rules may become more clear.Historical and Fictional AssemblagesDa Vinci’s Bicycleby Guy DavenportJohn Hopkins University PressBy Mary CashDa Vinci’s Bicycle is Guy Davenport’s sec¬ond collection of short stories, and like thestories in Tatlin: (1974), his first collection,these “assemblages of history and neces¬sary fiction,” occupy the same undefinedarea between fiction and non-fiction. It isnot surprising that a man who has shownsuch wide and varied interest (his previousworks include among many others, a studyof Pound’s Cantos, translations of Sapphoand a book of his own poetry) would find theneed to invent a new form which could en¬compass and integrate the forms and con¬tents of history, philosophy, fiction andessay. Whatever the result is, it is alwaysunique. These stories confirm and demon¬strate the versatility Mr. Davenport’s pre¬vious works suggest. But as would be ex¬pected of anything new, it is not withoutproblems. It makes for very difficult readingfor anyone who’s knowledge does not in¬clude the same vast spectrum as that of Mr.Davenport.Mr. Davenport’s style has often and ac¬curately been described as intellectuallydense. You may want to read these storiesin the reference room of a library with anOxford English Dictionary to your immedi¬ate left and a set of encyclopedias to yourright, with numerous other reference booksreadily available. If you don’t already havea reasonable fluency in classical languages and most modern European ones you willhave to seek help for some passages. This in¬clusion of trivia and use of elaborate vocab¬ulary as well as foreign languages does,however, help to give these stories the au¬thenticity they possess. I found that as I pro¬gressed into each story, it was less and lessnecessary to look up facts and words be¬cause they were later explained or couldeventually be derived.The first story in the collection, “The Rich¬ard Nixon Freidschitz Rag,” includes threehistorical events juxtaposed: Nixon's visit toChina, Leonardo Da Vinci’s completion of thebicycle, and Gertude Stein and Alice B.Toklas visiting Assisi. In it are some charac¬teristic examples of Mr. Davenport’s eye forwhat is absurdly humorous in history.The problem of synthesis of the three eventsis left to the reader. As in the most of thestories, the separate events are justchopped up and served in pieces layed outalternately, with no connecting commen¬tary. The fragments and stories themselvesare intricately related and reflective of oneanother. And gradually, Davenport's inten¬tions become clearer.The second story, “C. Musonius Rufus,” isthe life story of the stoic philosopher, en¬compassing his enslavement, coronation asemperor, and assassination, as told by hisspirit. Here Mr. Davenpot has entirely in¬vented his story, since very little is knownabout the philosopher’s actual life. In thestory are passages of rather remarkablelyric beauty speculating on the nature andsubstance of the spirit. “Spirit must be a sub¬stance very like light. Old polarity of head and butt no longer maintains. I find that it issweet to flow through water. Is this thirst?”The story also contains some of Mr. Daven-Edgar Alan Poe and Friends, by Guy Davenport.port’s more obscure passages;“Who, seeing a mother on her knees be¬fore the mammillaria of Cybebe the Arvalsflouring a calf for the knife, the standards ofQuirinus in white mist around the watch-fires, could believe that the gods are as in¬different as gravity?”But, what is most confusing is that in the midst of this we suddenly flash to fascistItaly to hear a speech by Mussolini (in Ita¬lian) and witness his meeting with EzraPound.“—Why do you write poetry? he asked. —Toput my ideas in order. Ezra Pound said."However, taken out of context, this con¬versation is of utmost importance since werealize that this is a purpose of Mr. Daven¬port’s as well. Davenport expresses a veryclear identification with the artists and cre¬ators in his stories: Fourier, Stein, Picasso.Da Vinci, Joyce, Pound and others. He seemsalso in a kind of awe, fear and often disgustat politicians such as Nero, Mussolini andNixon. Mr. Davenport claims that all of hischaracters have “the instinct to forage,"that they are all historical figures who areout of place among their contemporaries.And although politicans and creators areplaced in two groups, they are not very farfrom one another. Stein is associated withRoman emperors several times and Pound,naturally, with fascists.Davenport has illustrated his collectionwith his own graphics, most of which arederived from photographs and other draw¬ings. Well-executed and often very funny intheir own right, they go far towards enhanc¬ing this beautifully written and always pro¬vocative collection. Da Vinci's Bicycle is verymuch in the modernist vein, with frequentnods to Pound and Joyce (who themselvesappear as characters again and again). Andlike Joyce's work, these stories are not sim¬ply entertaining, they are challenging inthe way that a convoluted puzzle annoysyet also demands to be solved.The Chicago Literary Review—August 24, 1979—11Feminismcontinued from page threewas a fact in herlife as in her contemporary Christina Rosset¬ti’s; both women had more primary needs.Second: unlike Rossetti, Dickinson did notbecome a religiously dedicated woman; shewas heretical, heterodox, in her religiousopinions, and stayed away from church anddogma. What, in fact did she allow to “putthe Belt around her life” — what did whollyoccupy her mature years and possess her?For “Whom” did she decline the invitationsof other lives? The writing of poetry.”As a political activist and educator. Richtouches a sympathetic chord. In one of theearlier essays, “Teaching Language in OpenAdmissions,” Rich combines her two grea¬test strengths of these politically-mindedessays. At several points in this selection,Rich-the-polemicist allows Rich-the-poet tohave free rein. It is then apparent thatAdrienne Rich is, first and foremost, a poetof high order, able to express herself invivid, memorable prose:“But there was, and is, another relation¬ship with the city which I can only begin bycalling love. The city as object of love, a lovenot unmixed with horror and anger, the cityas Baudelaire and Rilke had previsioned It,or William Blake for that matter, death inlife, but a death emblematic of the deaththat is epidemic in modern society, and alife more edged, more costly, more chargedwith knowledge, than life elsewhere. Loveas one knows it sometimes with a personwith whom one is locked in struggle, energydraining but also energy replenishing, aswhen one is fighting for life. . .”This personal, poetic evocation of NewYork is a far more riveting piece of prosethan a Marxist analysis of the neighborhoodwould be.In another essay, “Women and Honor:Some Notes on Lying,” Rich the poet joinsRich the essayist in coining a new style. Itsbrief paragraphs and carefully chosen wordsindicate its debt to poetry. Yet they are,again, paragraphs and not verses, in whichthe general and political are most impor¬tant than the personal. Still it is an admira¬ble attempt at synthesis, in which Rich actu¬ally overcomes the arbitrary (and perhapspatriarchal) assumptions about genres of lit¬erature as she creates the structure of afeminine form.In “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision,” Rich warns of being “special”women (i.e., token women) under patriar¬ chy, which is one of the reasons she says, “Ihave hesitated to do what I am going to donow, which is to use myself as an illustra¬tion. For one thing, it’s a lot easier and lessdangerous to talk about other women writ¬ers.” Yet this is clearly one of the strongestpoints in Rich’s political writing: She knowswhen to invoke the "I”.The later essays seem to invoke the “I”less and less, while turning more and moreto political topics. When I read the bookonce through, I found the final chapters ex¬hausting. This is probably due to the rigorwith which Rich treats her topics. Later, inrereading these chapters apart from theweight of the entire book, they becamemore comprehensible.The essays collected in this book indicatethe extraordinary breadth of Adrienne Rich.She fashions a utopia of sorts in “Toward aWoman Centered University”. She writes anenlightening commentary on Anne Brad-street, the Puritan poet. She elucidates acalm, nearly sympathetic rejoinder to MidgeDecter's diatribe against feminism. Shespeaks eloquently of motherhood, lesbian¬ism and working women. Maybe women willnot save the world, as Rich belives. Perhaps,on the other hand, they will:“I believe we must cope courageously andpractically, as women have always done,with the here and now, our feet on thisground where we now live. But nothing lessthan the most radical imagination will carryus beyond this place, beyond the merestruggle for survival, to that lucid recogni¬tion of our possibilities which will keep usimpatient, and unresigned to mere surviv¬al.”North of Southcontinued from page threecore. Each had been destroyed by contractwith the other — though each had been de¬stroyed in his own way.”North of South leaves the readers with abitter taste, alongwitha good amount of con¬fusion. For how could this narrator be so un¬aware of his own haughty patronization andyet be so sensitive to all of the subtlenuances in the conversations of others, asNaipul is? Naipul does not want anyone toforget his grim portrait of Africa (“Hopeless,doomed continent!”), but what one neverforgets is the arrogant and cynical voice run¬ning through this book. And what is mostdisturbing is that Naipul’s voice, and Northof South, have been terribly distorted bywhat were probably genuinely painful mo¬ments in darkest Africa.SALEdPjEF PJRICLKOF THE BO0KS I£EA7IKW33£i>IN TUT& Iggtfjg -MSjI'T'BEBS ON3QT *SOTPJEIES“ OFFER BKD* 2? Avc^T*5^5 tzmivo^*■fey'"•mu» QJP.rjpo ^00 D.H. Lawrence: WaitingD. H. Lawrence’s Nightmare: The Writerand His Circle in the Years of the GreatWarby Paul DelanyBasic BooksD. H. Lawrence: Novelistby F. R. LeavisThe University of Chicago PressIf, after reading D.H. Lawrence's Night¬mare, one had to answer that always pro¬vocative but possibly irrelevent question,“Can a great artist also be a son of a bitch?”,one would probably have to answer yes —and, well, no. Because as Paul Delany’s scru¬pulously researched biography ofLawrence’s tormented years during the FirstWorld War makes clear, to read ofLawrence’s life can be both moving and yet acuriously sobering experience for anyonewho has ever been excited enough by thenovelist Lawrence’s work to want to admireLawrence the man.As Lawrence plummetted deeper into per¬sonal despair, he was producing his greatestnovel — Women in Love. And while England’sfashionable artistic society, Bloomsbury,made clever conversation amid what nove¬list Cynthia Ozick dubbed “the fake casualn¬ess, the heartbreaking attention to the mo¬mentariness of the moment”, Lawrencestruggled against censorship, conscription,ill health, police investigation, and thesteady loss of close friends. It is this portionof Delany’s story which is moving. The partwhich can only anger is the great portion ofthis book — the grim accumulation of letters,diaries, excerpts, and memoirs which tell ofLawrence’s formulation of his fascistic anddownright looney ideas.Delany is careful to point out that Ber¬trand Russell overstated the case when hewrote that his off-and-on friend held notionswhich “led straight to Auschwitz.” But Rus¬sell, like Lawrence’s other friends such as Katherine Mansfield and John MiddletonMurry, were forever finding Lawrence to bea friend of arresting contradictions. Kath¬erine Mansfield could write “Oh, there issomething so loveable about him and his ea¬gerness, his passionate eagerness for life”,and yet before her death by tuberculosis hewould tell her in a letter, “I loathe you,stewing in your consumption, the Italianswere quite right to reject you.” At times it isas if there are two Lawrence’s travelingthrough Delany’s book; the gentle Lawrencewho worked at small chores around his cot¬tage, barely surviving on small publishers’advances after The Rainbow was bannedfrom London bookstores. Then there isLawrence the prophet, ranting against theWar but, incredibly, seeing it as necessarypurge of England’s decaying culture. It was atheory he would transform into the dreamy,poetic logic of Women in Love, and which be¬came the substance of his cherished symbol —the phoenix.What is especially valuable about De¬lany’s work is that it reveals, in a way whichother biographers of Lawrence have not, ex¬actly how Lawrence drew upon his acquaint¬ances and private obsessions in order tocreate his fictions. It has been generalknowledge among those who have studiedLawrence’s life that Mansfield became Gu-drun of Women In Love, that her husbandMurry was the character of Gerald, thatFrieda Lawrence was Ursula, and that LadyOttoline Morrell, the exotic patroness andlong-time intimate of Lawrence, was thewomen who was brilliantly and savagelyparodied as Hermione Roddice (and who sub¬sequently dropped Lawrence and pushedpublishers to ignore the novel). All of thiswas dealt with rather blandly in Harry T.Moore’s much over-hyped biography, ThePriest of Love.Delany conveys not only how these real-life individuals were transformed into char¬acters for a novel, but how Lawrence’s de¬spairing state of mind was responsible for_&IA2 '10% off -on all pizza..... to goMediciGallery and Coffeehouse1450 East 57th Street, 667-7394■2-The Chicago Literary Review—August 24, 1979For the ApocalypseKatherine Mansfield andJohn Middleton Murry:Models for the charactersof Gudrun and Gerald inWomen In Love. D.H. Lawrence: “Alone in a world gone madfatal glamor of militarism.” with theWomen In Love being his most despondentnovel, his most searing and apocalyptic vi¬sionary work. To read D.H. Lawrence'sNightmare and to then return to Women InLove for a new reading is to leaveLawrence’s favorite novel with a new assur¬ance that literary biography need not jus¬tify itself. Delany’s work, although fre¬quently too terse and unimaginative in itsstylistic design (as if it had been tamperedwith by an overzealous editor), is neverthe¬less an important addition to Lawrencescholarship for what it says about the pivo¬tal war years. By now it’s been estimatedthat there are more biographies writtenabout the enigmatic Lawrence than anyother literary figure but Shakespeare. Andit’s a sign of Delany’s talent that by the endof his story of Lawrence's nightmare, hissubject keeps his mystique intact: one wantsanother biography, one yearns for morenews about Lady Cynthia Asquith and JohnMeynard Keynes and the rest of the Circle.As if to remind us that literary criticismcan be exciting, provocative, and refresh¬ingly anti-Establishment, the University ofChicago Press recently reissued F.R. Leavis’sD.H. Lawrence: Novelist, certainly one ofthe two or three most important criticalevaluations (some would say trumpettings)of Lawrence. Leavis’s work is always espe¬cially intriguing, since not only was he a dif¬ficult critic to decipher, but his stature as agreat critic is still open to debate (as it wasat Cambridge where he taught before hisdeath two years ago) despite his wide influ¬ence.Leavis’s exuberant support of Lawrenceoften seems ludicrous now that Lawrence isfirmly accepted as worthy of entrance intoEnglish Literature classes, but when Leavispublished his book in 1955 Lawrence was stillbeing maligned by the ruling literary classes(given respectability by T.S. Eliot) as an ig¬norant, muddle-headed miner’s son de¬prived of a proper education. Leavis devotesa good portion of his defense of Lawrence to attacking Eliot’s snootiness, but often hishigh appraisal of Lawrence becomes a bittoo wild even for the most avid admirers ofthe author’s work (“He was a very remark¬able literary critic — by far the best critic ofhis day” or the mystifying statement, “...the plain fact is that Lawrence is one ofthe great masters of comedy.”) One re¬members the parody of Leavis as “Simon La-cerous” in Frederick Crews’s spoof of liter¬ary criticism, The Pooh Perplex:“There was an undergraduate just last week asking me which of Shakespeare’splays he should start with, to work up Sha-kesDeare for his examinations. ‘Shake¬speare!’ I said. “Why man, you haven't readThe Rainbow yet! Don’t talk to me of Sha¬kespeare until you’ve gone throughLawrence twice and made a list of every¬thing he has to say against the Establish¬ment.”But Leavis’s lapses appear minute whenhis critical judgement is seen in operationand he avoids the spectacular general evalu¬ation he’s attempting to make. According toLeavis, Lawrence was searching for a newtype of intelligence when he createdWomen In Love, and that it is Lawrence'srestless, searching intelligence and sense ofmoral responsibility, coupled with his greatfeelings of urgency, -which makes Lawrence“still the great writer of our own phase ofcivilization.” Lawrence often wrote excessi¬vely, he was indeed prone to deliver long-winded pronouncements about the “cult ofthe primitive”, but to Leavis this is an aspectof Lawrence's work which has been undulystressed by careless readers. How manycountless times do people laugh about LadyChatterly when one mentions Lawrence’sname, as if that notorious, faulted novelwere the height of Lawrence's achieve¬ment.In a time when there are so few enjoyableliterary feuds, the reissue of Leavis’s studyis something of an event. Who cannot take acertain amount of pleasure in seeing Leavismake bold maneuvers against that literaryfixture, T.S. Eliot? Most literate peoplewould today agree that Lawrence was agreat writer, and so it is not in its rousingdefense of Lawrence that grants D.H.Lawrence: Novelist its present distinction.Its power lies in its reminder that there wasonce a figure on the critical landscape whowas willing to take the iconoclastic chanceswhich made Lawu-ence the highly original ar¬tist we now know him to be.—Richard KayeLooking for late summer reading? Please come in andbrowse through our large selection of titles in poetry,literature and literary criticism. Recent arrivals include:A Door to the Forest by Jon SwanSelected Poems by Richard HugoThe Passion Artist by John HawkesThe Old Patagonian Express by Paul TherouxThe Poet’s Work edited by Reginald GibbonsCritical Understanding by Wayne BoothThe University of Chicago BookstoreGeneral Book Department5750 S. EllisHours: 8 - 5, Monday - FridayWe accept Visa and Master ChargeThe Chicago Literary Review—Auaust 24, 1979—13Southwest AMC/JEEP RenaultimRjmu£Ms_ Le CarTwo prepaid Plitt theater ticketsjust for stopping in to say Hi! ^W Licenseadrivers only. 1m Offer expires 9-1-79. .estimatedmpg*•Better Fuel Economy than Chevy•Front Wheel Drive (Renault began ^r*ve ^ar Today!this innovation 18 years ago) .•Independent Rear Suspension T.K.O. Deals (Tunney Knockout Deals)]•More Comfort at Less Cost Than Most On A Wide Selection of Renaults!Other Small CarsDoily 9-9Suturdiiy 9-5(ilosod Sundnythru l.nhor Dny Take 55th St. westto Western Ave.Go South 2 miles toSouthwest AMC/Jeep/RenaultAM C/dl,RENAULT. _ .. vf Pat Tunney*sO « 2442 w- Columbus^OUlllWCSl (Southwest Highway)AMC/JEEP Renault^ 434-211014—The Chicago Literary Review—August 24, 1979CLASSIFIED ADSSPACESpacious 1 bdrm. CO-OP APT, newlyremodeled, safe well-maintainedbldg., low assess., good location.$30,000. Call Paula 947-0277, 753-2719.Responsible male student seeks rm. InHyde Pk. Apt., etc. for 79-80 (orlonger). Quiet non-smoker, likes cleanplace, does hsewrk. Can move In9/1-10/15. 752-0798, 947-1923, Kevin S.Lg. condo for rent 9-79 for l year. Has 3brms 2 baths 24 hr doorman good loca¬tion. Call 947 6451 days 684-6549 eveweekends.5405 Woodlawn - 2 rm. and 2 rm. turn,apts. October. 643-2760, 667-5746 Mrs.Green.Unlv. Park condo one bedroom apt.avail. Sept. 1979. Call Chlen 955-7241 or947-6352.Mature, responsible nonsmokingfemale law student without pets withexcellent references seeks house orapartment sitting job, preferably inthe vicinity of Hyde Park. Write Box120,746 E. 79th St„ Chicago, II. 60619.Looking for person to share 3 bdrm.apt. starting Sept. 1 On 16th fl. ofRegents Park, 5050 S. Lake Shore Dr.Great view of lake, 3 baths, modernclean kitchen, laundry in basement,doorman, regular bus service to cam¬pus. $150/mo. Call Beth eves. 324-5447(days 744-4481).WOMAN STUDENT WANTS ROOM Inprivate home close to campus for’79-'80. Can houseslt. Leave messageIn box 606 at 753-2220 9AM-10PM dally.Ogden Dunes - Writer's Paradise -two bedroom, two bath home.Raisedbeamed celling living room,dunetop 1 Va acre scenic view, furnish¬ed. Lease and rent negotiable. 45minutes from the 59th Street Stop ofthe South Shore. 312-975-0458.HYDE PARK, Deluxe 1 bedrm. apt.new w to w carpeting overlooks thepark and lake, utilities free. 24 hr.sec./doorman. Call 734-0170 ater 6p.m.$385/mo.Rooms available in Hyde Park- Ken¬wood home. Common room, sharedkitchen and bath. Parking, privategrounds, garden. Expenses: $160-200-I- utilities. Call 624-0073 P M. andweekends.Condo for Sale, East Hyde Park 3bdrm., 2 baths, 2 porches. Washer,dryer, D.W., oak floors '/j blk. campusbus. Excel, cond. $74,000 by owner.667-4672, 753-2823.Responsible roommate wanted 57 andMaryland $150/mo, newly refln apt.Sept 1 occupancy we're two LovelyFriendly 2nd yr students 964-1229955-5748 leave a msg.BEDROOM APT FOR RENTNew appliances, good location.5450/month. 667-4388.Rent garage near Regenstein andLutheran school. Call 643-8965.Garden Home 4 blocks to Loop. Newunique in Dearborn Park. 3 story, 4bedrm., 2V6 bath, with 3 terraces.$150,000. Call Mr. Levin 782-8338.COACHHOUSE TO SUBLETSept. 1-Oecember, 4 rooms, completlyfurnished, off street parking. $170/mo.Call 753-8423, 493-6582,924-0891.2 bedrm. Condo low 40's for sale493-3822 or 493-2179.E. Hyde Pk. 2 bedrm, l bath w/frp-l.$425. 493-3822 or 493-2179. E. Hyde Pk. 3 bdrm 2 bath w/frpl $600.493 3822 or 493 2179.Medical student seeks roomate inHyde Park apt. fully furnished movein condition. 324-9225.Male grad bus std seeks housing cleanquiet nonsmkr will consider anything772-5134.HISTORIC HOUSE-SOLD BY OWNERCharming house, ideally located inCentral Hyde Park, 3 BR’s, LR,Kl/study/famlly rm., full bsment.,laundry fac., 2 full baths, 2 wdbrgnfireplaces, parquet floors, modernplmbg. and elec., new furnace. Newlypainted Inside and out. Attractivelylandscaped front, back yards. Idealblock for children. Warmneighborhood. Move In condition.$130,000. 324-2418.PEOPLE WANTEDEarn money this summer-Sub|ectsneeded for experiments on memoryand language processing. Studies con-ducted by faculty and gradstudents in Behavioral Sciences, Com¬mittee on Cognition and Communica¬tion. Hours flexible, evenings andweekends generally OK. Call 753-4718,8am-5pm.Is your job Interfering with yourschool work? Reporter writing articleInterested In information, stories,gripes or ecstatically happy tales ofwhat It means to have to work while at¬tending school. Please call RichardKaye between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m.753 3265.RIGHT-HANDED MEN wanted forperception experiment. $2.50/hr. Call753-4735.Clerk-typist full-time or part-time 55wpm. minimum. Part-time hours areflexible. For apts., phone personnelmanager 684-1414. Museum of Scienceand Industry, equal opportunityemployer.To operate video portrait equipment atshopping center. Will train. Big com¬mission. Call 324-5852 eves.Healthy males needed for semendonors. Reimbursement of $25.00 Ismade. For more Information call947-5364 - Dr. George B. Maroulls or947-1739 - Dr. Richard Blake.The Blue Gargoyle needs a creative,enthusiastic Individual to work as kit¬chen manager. 30 hrs. weekly. Senddescription of experience, Interest to:Patricia De Jean, 5655 S. University.955-4108.Openings for "Telephone Inter-vewers" at the National OpinionResearch Center at the University ofChicago, 6030 S. Ellis. Part time $4.00an hour (3 shifts available) Call PatVance 753-1173.SECRETARY/RECEPTIONIST:Full time premanent position. Dutiesinclude routine typing, filing andduplicating. Light bookkeeping,telephone, general reception. Previoussecretarial experience useful. ContactJohn Hurley, Calvert House, 5735 S.University, 288-2311.Part-time secretary-lntersting workfor professor of psyshology engaged inresearch and editing of professionaljournal. 15 hr/week conveniently ar-ragned. Neat, fluent typing required.Compensation commensurate with ex¬perience. Applicants who seek steadyand pleasant association call 493-1181wkdays 8am-lpm. jaqueiine Lots363-0027 7p.m. - 10p.m.Yoga lessons by experienced teacher.Write Jaqueline Lois, 5407 Hyde ParkBlvd. Specially designed to yourneeds.Typist/editorial work. Student com¬pleting dissertation wants short-termwork. Foreign langs; University Pressexperience; dictaphone. Call 643-8965.Loop CPA firm needs part-time help.At least 2 yrs. of acctng. courses re¬quired. Salary open. Lite office dutiesalso. For more info call 346-8944.Dental Hygienist and/or dental assis¬tant. Experienced. Excellent op¬portunity and conditions. Call 752-0600.Bale cardbord for local recyclingcenter. 5-6:30 pm, must be dependable. Start at $3/hr. More hourspossible. Call Ken at 493-1466 or241-6616.Babysitter wanted for Infant. Weekday afternoons and some evenings, ca.15 hrs per week. Near campus, steadywork. Call 955-9572.Assistant Teacher-tor a preschool program in the Kenwood-Oakland com¬munity. part-time (Tues. and Thurs. ~~—9am-4pm, fri. 9am-12 noon). Training , . , —and experience required. Call Mrs. HOUSE SALEWhite at 944-3313. SCENESPatterns of sexual response can bechanged. Pre-orgasmlc women'sgroup now forming, led by two M.A.'swith special concerns for women'sIssues. Call Linda at 338-2163 or996 1467.FOR SALEFine Oak End Table 6 mos. old. $25.Call NANCY 324-1820. Eves. Must sell everything. Furn., lamps,refrigerator, dishes, rugs, chairs,couch, desk, piano, hardware. Sat.Aug. 25,10am-3pm 5428 S. Dorchester.We'll sell an Encyclopedia Brltqnnica CHILDCAREwith yearbooks and membershipright, deluxe edition 90% new, call263-1730 or eves after 6 pm 538-8390.We'll sell at a sacrifice. MOVING EASTShare driving, tolls, gas, and rental of12’ truck. Leave Chicago 9/6 to,Phlladephla-NYC area. Call Francois753-8192 (day) or 624-6424 (eve).Moving to Boston. Need people toshare rental/driving of RIDERTRUCK or person with car to share U-HAUL. Leaving Sept. 7. Call Mike:7-0777,955-244).U OF C BOOKSTOREPHOTO DEPT.2ND FLOOR. 753*331723 mm f 3.5 Zlvon Nikon Minolta mountlist $148.50 special $99.50 current stockonly,28 mm f 2.8 Zlvnon Nikon, Minoltamount list $133.50 special $89.95 cur¬rent stock only.38 95 mm f 3.5 Nikon Minolta, Canonand Olympus mount list $371.95 special$249.95 current stock only.Nikon EM w/50 mm f 1.8 special$2)8.95. TECHNICIANWRITERThe University of Chicago Computa¬tion Center Is seeking a Technicalwriter to work full time In theDocumentation Services group. Thejob is writing program and systemdocumentation for the DEC system-20,which includes using the programsthat you are documenting. Applicantsshould have good oral and writtencommunication skills. Somebackground In computing Is extremelydesirable but not essential. If you areinterested In this position, please contact Merri Boylan, Manager ofDocumentation Services, 5737 S.University, 753-8424. The University isan affirmative action equal opportuni¬ty employer.MOVING SALE-dry sink (sml. hutch)dining rm table anc chairs, dresser,twin bed. Very cheap. Call 241-6048.72 Oldsmoblle Delta 88 AC, AM FM,53,000 ml. Best otter. Call 667-1092.Complete darkroom, $275.241-5314.Piano-Walnut console exc. cond. $700.947-0331.Table-can pull out to 6 leaves stored incompact console. Great for dinner Insmall apt. $95. Call 947-0331.HALF FARE DISCOUNT COUPONAmerican Airlines $40. Call 10am-10pm. 752-1555. Bruce,Classic camera: Contax Ilia w/f/1.5Sonnar lens; shutter to 1/250 sec; long-base rangefinder; Zeiss quality. CallRon. 753-4185.Moving Sale-Oesk, dresser, kit.table/chairs 9x12 rug much more. AlsoDodge Dart 6 $550. Call 955-8432.70 VW Bug. Runs very well. $900 orbest offer. 684-4830.Moving sale: living room furniture forsale. Good condition. Best offer. Callevenings 288-0123.Living rm. furnitue-84" Striped Her-culon Sofa $150; 2 walnut and glass endtables $65 ea; 1 -gold and white filigreeaccent lamp $50; Gardner 753-3033 bet.8:30-5:00.PEOPLE FOR SALETyping done on IBM by college grad; \i#/’\AA C K|/Cpica type. Term papers, theses, WvyiYlCiN Omanuscripts, resumes, etc. LincolnPark West. 248-1478. Hyde Park Preschool Center formerlyUnitarian Preschool. We still have alimited number of places In our fullday progam. Fall term starts Sept.4th. We wish to announce our afterschool program for 1st grade andkindergarten children, open 2-6 pm allyear. Call the director at 667-7269 or753-0250 after 6 pm.TELEPHONEOPERATOR/RECEPTIONISTBusy community non-profit healthcenter needs full-time Individual fortelephone reception. Ability to workunder pressure, pleasant manner,previous telephone experience prefer¬red. Call Cathy Wright. 643-0478. HydePark-Kenwood Community HealthCenter.FIELD ASSISTANTNORC needs several Field Assistantsto perform a variety of tasksassociated with the data collectionportion of a survey. Duties Includeediting questionnaires and light typ¬ing. Some college and previous ex¬perience preferred. Accuracy and at¬tention to detail essential. 37V* hourweek. Project begins In Septemberand continues through April, 1980.$4.00 per hour plus benefits. Call947-2558. Equal Opportunity/Af-firmative Action Employer. LOST AND FOUNDLOST: 8/18/79, Young, med. sizedfriendly black female dog. Reward.Call 752-3356.MAGAZINEFRENCH TUTOR. All levels. Ex¬perience In U of C reading exam prep.Call 684-3131 early am or late pm.TENNIS LESSONS matches too. BradLyttle 324 0654Interested in baby-sitting for the next 2months, especially mornings. ContactVeronica, 288-0994.Spanish lessons grammar, reading,conversation by native speaker. Call RAP GROUPWomen's Rap Group meets everyTues. 7:30 pm at Blue Gargoyle. Forinfo call 752-5655.STANLEY H. KAPLANFor Over 40 Years The Standard ofExcellence In Test Preparation•datlsat!6RE • 6RE PSYCH • 6RE BIO • GMATPCAT • 0CAT • VAT • MAT • SAT I■ NATIONAL MEDICAL BOARDS • VQE • ECFMGFLEX-NAT! DENTAL BOARDSPODIATRY BOARDS • NURSING BOARDSFlexible Program* and Hour*KflPI^NIIIIII Visit Any Center And See ForYourself Why W« Mikt The DttterenceE4*c*ti***i CenterU9 Madlaon A**.> N Y. 10022 (nr. S4 01) TEST PflEOANATIONSPECIALISTS SINCE 1SMCenters « Muor US Cit#$ Puetto $<coTotonto 4 U|»no Svi»U«tl4«4CHICAGO CENTER6216 N. CLARKCHICAGO, ILLINOIS60660(312)764-5151s. w. su3ua;iAN19 S. LAGRANGE HD.SUITE 201LAGRANGE, ILLINOIS60525(312)352-5^40 SPRING, SUMMERFALL INTENSIVE}COURSES STARTINGTHIS MONTH:4 WK/MCAT DATOHE---GMAT—-SATLSATNEXT MONTH:4 JK/LSAT OCATVAT—SATt Mom Than SO Ml or US Ctt.M A AbroadFor )«tO"T»l»»00 ADOwlOUTSIDE N.Y. STATE CALL TOLL IIIIIIJIIIIIIIIIIIJ Young Designs byELIZABETH GORDON•, HAIR DESIGNERS1620 E. 53rd St.288- 2900 FLAMINGO APTS.AND CABANA CLUB5500 S. Shore Drive• Studio and I Bedroom•Fnrni'hed and I’nfuniished•l . of O.. luls stop•Outdoor Pool and Garden*•Carpetin" ami Drapes fuel.•Security•I'nivcrsitv Subsidy forStudent* and StaffM. Snvder-PL 2-3800marianrealty, incREALTORStudio and 1 BedroomApartments Available- Students Welcome -On Campus Bus LineConcerned Service5480 S. Cornell684-5400 VERSAILLES5254 S. DorchesterWELL MAINTAINEDBUILDINGAttractive 11 i and2‘/2 Room StudiosFurnished er t nfvrmshsd$192 - $291Based on AvailabtlitvAll Utilities includedAt Campus Bus Stop324-0206 Mrs. Groak KIMBARKHALLCondominiumsThe developers areoffering model unitsfor inspection everySat. and Sun. between1 and 5 p.m, (ClosedLabor Day Weekend)36 apts:24 - 1 bedroom, 1 bath6 - 2 bedrooms, 1 bath6 - 2 bedrooms, 2 bathsYour inspection isinvited,51 26 S. Kimbark Ave.Phone 643-4489Harry A. Zisookand Sons, Agts.786-9200Prlmavera V is outl On sale In mostlocal bookstores. We need new staffmembers. Call 752-5655 for Info. 0t Ruby's Merit ChevroletSPECIALDISCOUNT PRICESlor all STUDENTS andFACULTY MEMBERSJust present your University ofChicago Identification Card.As Students or Faculty Membersof the University of Chicago you areentitled to special money-savingDISCOUNTS on Chevrolet Parts,Accessories and any new or usedChevrolet you buy from Merit Chev¬rolet Inc.r/Jyl GM QUALITYLs=/| service parts ID ’ krr/> I hut (>rriir0 V/ herhn#trickGENERAL MOTORS FARTS DIVISION Lt.\ll\t(,1//W> ¥Lmm mmMER aCHEVROU ET [V72nd & Stony Island 684-0400Open Daily 9-9, Sat. 9-5 Part* open Sot. 'til Noont 'sm VOLKSWAGENSy SOUTH SHORE f72nd & Stony Island 684-0400Open Doily 9-9, Sol. 9-5 Port* open Sat. 'til NoonThe Chicago Literary Review-August 24, 1979—15noiiunomwwns-soo-summeronthequads-soo COURT TllCATReLAST TWOWEEKENDS FORCOURT THEATRE VALUABLE COUPON3 for you...when youpayfor 2KODAK Color Enlargementsfor Someone SpecialWith this coupon, receive a third enlargementfree when you order two 8x10KODAK Color Enlarge¬ments from colorslides, KODACOLORNegatives or colorprints from anyinstant or con¬ventional camera.Hurry, this offerexpires October 3,1979. Stop in todayfor complete detailsHamlet - Aug. 26, 3:00 p.m.,Aug. 31, Sept. 2 8:30p.m.Rosencrantz and GuildensternAre Dead - Aug.24, 26, Sept. 18:30p.m., Sept. 2 3:00p.m.Way of the World - Aug. 25, 29,30, 8:30 p.m.Tickets available atReynolds Club Box Office57th and UniversityPhone 753-3581 for ticket information i valuable coupon-cut out i H ■ m ,, JjSUMMER ON THE QUADS - SOQ - SUMMER ON THE QUADS - SOQ - SUMMER ONI model camera1342 East 55th SI. 493-6700 ASK FORCOLORPROCESSING■v Kodak CASH FOR BOOKSNEW ARRIVALS:TheosophicalSociety Books,Computer Books,Chess BooksPowell’s Bookstore1501E. 57th St.955-77809 A.M.-11 P.M.EVERYDAYPowell’s Book Warehouse1020 S. Wabash, 8th floor241-074810:30 A.M.-5:30P.M.THURS. - SAT.Take IC to 12th200.000 Soholarlv titles AT DISCOUNT35.000 German. 25.000 French. 10.000 Italian8.000 Spanish. 8.000 Russian. 100.000 EnglishHI HUH CN I til QUADSIII MN FRI. AUG. 24 Go Tell The Spartans 7:1 5 and 9:30 pmSAT. AUG. 25 Smokey and the Bandit 7:15 and 9:30 pm If)If)O(ftIMIIIUINKThe Pub will be closedfrom Sept. 1 - Oct. 1.Reopens Tues. Oct. 2 forStudent Activities Night. Ida Noyes Hall will close for the interimon Fri., Aug. 31, at 1 2:00 midnight.Ida Noyes will reopen on Sun.,Sept. 23 at 3:00 pm.The Frog and Peach will be closed from Sept. 1 -Sept. 30. Regular hours commence Oct. 1.The Reynolds Club Box Office will be closedon Labor Day, Sept. 3.Hours Sept. 4-Sept. 21:Mon.-Fri. 10:30am-5:30pm.Closed Sat. and Sun.Regular hours resume on Sept. 22:Mon.-Fri. 9:30am-9:30pmSat. and Sun. 12:00 noon-4:30pm OZHXIN0e>oQiidooIThe Student Activities Office thanks youfor your attendance at our programs this summer,and for your patronage of the Coffeeshops and Bakery.We look forward to seeing you in the fall.ADS - SOQ - SUMMER ON THE QUADS - SOQ - SUMMER ON THE QUADS - SO SS.4.C.16—The Chicago Literary Review—August 24, 1979