Washington Wire

## Something but the Truth

THE NATION wants to back Eisenhower. It yearns to. In the new crisis over Berlin the cry is, "Be calm and firm and support the White House!" Fine.

Meanwhile the White House moves to cut 70,000 from the armed forces and the Pentagon orders an economy slowdown in the intermediate-range ballistic missile program. The cuts are just a start —"we must balance the budget." The nation shudders. Maybe the cuts are justified. Can we trust the Administration?

Well, when Eisenhower took office he promptly cut Truman's inadequate budget of $1.6 billion for research and development to $1.3 billion; then in June ordered a further 25 percent slash. Humphrey, Wilson & Dodge, the insular innocents, were at work.

On Eisenhower's desk, January, 1953, were hold-over reports showing the impending loss of America's defense lead and the ghoulish danger of the new H-bomb. They led to a bold White House proposal. Why shouldn't the President frankly tell the nation the concealed story; urge it to tighten its belt, unite behind his leadership? Again—fine! Robert Donovan in his official book *Eisenhower: The Inside Story* tells how the secret project was born and nicknamed "Operation Candor." But the President never made the speech. The idea whimpered out. The President did not wish to dwell on "the single, gruesome theme of human destruction." Donovan tells how Operation Candor was supplanted after months of vacillation by another one, this one called oddly "Operation Wheaties."

Robert Cutler, secretary of the Security Council, later said of Operation Candor, "the thesis was that the American public could take bad news; officially apprised of the facts. . . . But other and, I think, wiser counsels prevailed." So Sputnik told the bad news after all. Even then the Administration (with the

notable exception of Nixon) tried to minimize it.

Eisenhower's former top economist, Arthur F. Burns, in a poorly reported speech in Washington last week, said the Administration had bungled the job of meeting the 1957-1958 recession. It is exactly the point made by the liberal Democrats. Burns did not say it straight out to the Joint Conference on Economic Education but it was there, between the lines. Burns, you remember, advocated a tax cut — the remedy Eisenhower and Nixon denounced as "radical" and "socialistic" in the election just finished. Burns politely noted that instead of a tax cut the government launched random spending projects, the sum total of which "came to a much larger total than had been planned or advocated." Most of these projects were too late to affect the recession; ironically he said they are just now coming into force, when the crisis is over and all the government's endeavor is to cut down spending! "This is precisely the condition that responsible advocates of a general tax cut sought to prevent," says Burns daily.

What licked the recession? As much as anything a group of "built-in stabilizers," says Burns; these kept national income high when employment and profits slumped; one example: unemployment insurance, which gave workers a buffer in their spending. What should be done now? Burns advocates, among other things something from which Eisenhower and Anderson recoil: blanket unemployment insurance extended to workers on a much more generous scale. At the moment he calls this "the most useful step."

## Bill White's Burden

AGREEABLE, Lyndon Johnson-loving William S. White, who tries to be fair-minded about civil rights in spite of his Texas upbringing, fears the forthcoming Senate fight to end the filibuster will split the Democratic Party. White is a sincere Democrat and he hates the

thought. Paul Douglas and Hubert Humphrey, it appears, are "advanced liberals" (presumably Lyndon Johnson is just a "liberal") and they are demanding an alteration in Senate cloture rule says columnist White "so extreme that its adoption would end the Senate as a unique deliberative body." Can you guess what their proposal is? Why, to let majority rule prevail in ending debates!

In his remarkable frank and honest discussion White really gets to the heart, we think, of the pro-filibuster argument. Boiled down it is in his words that "the Senate is fundamentally a non-majority institution." He doesn't say so but what he means is that it is our House of Lords.

End the right of filibuster, White says, and you "would make the Senate only a somewhat slower House of Representatives." We think White has cut through a lot of twaddle and candidly put his finger on the real issue. He has done a service thereby. Our own response is easy enough. We don't like a House of Lords in this country. Even in Britain they have curbed the Lords' veto power. It has become a picturesque but impotent anachronism. The fight to preserve the Senate as an American House of Lords is going to be fierce. There is a better chance of a reform bill passing next year than at any previous time in history. If majority rule splits the Democratic Party, well—too bad.

## Notes

IT ISN'T generally realized that besides the 19 states which have accepted a right-to-work law three states, New Hampshire, Delaware and Louisiana, have repealed it; only one industrial state, Indiana, now has the provision and the fight to repeal has begun. . . . AUPI Moscow dispatch says ex-premier Bulganin is seriously ill in Moscow but that the "nature of his illness" was not disclosed; we suspect the affliction is located between the shoulders with the marks of a sharp instrument. . . . The almost universal current assumption here that some kind of an entente will continue between Eisenhower and a Democratic Congress seems to rest wholly on the expectation that Ike won't do what he says he will do: make war on the "spenders."

T.R.B.

DECEMBER 15, 1958

17

BOOKS & COMMENT

History and the Distrust of Knowledge

by Bernard Bailyn

IN THIS lively and polemical book on the colonial period of American history, Daniel Boorstin, Professor of American History in the University of Chicago, tells a story that is highly relevant to contemporary concerns. Too little, perhaps; for the weaknesses as

Americans: The Colonial Experience, by Daniel J. Boorstin (Random House; $6.)

well as the strengths of the book flow from the author's urgent desire to link the past in all detail to the present, to make each episode yield direct meaning. Thus on the one hand there is vividness and vigor in the writing, and originality in the selection and analysis of topics in cultural history; but on the other hand there is a continuous foreshortening of the history presented, a disconcerting bobbing from then to now.

The relevance Mr. Boorstin seeks has a special character. The colonial period provides necessary support for a view of American life he has been arguing now for several years. *The Americans: The Colonial Experience* is, in fact, a 400-page footnote to *The Genius of American Politics* written six years ago.

In that book Mr. Boorstin argued that not only has America lacked a political theory but that the success of our public institutions has rested upon this very

Far from noting with alarm America's failure to produce "a political philosopher . . . or a systematic theoretical work" to rank with Europe's best, Mr. Boorstin rejoiced in our avoidance of "extravagant and presumptuous specifications," "blueprints for remaking society." Boorstin in a "revolution without dogma," bred in "the spirit of compromise," our political life defies system, theory, and logic; those who think otherwise can only be seeing America through the dilated eyes of European intellectuals who cannot understand the nice, necessary balance between the "marvelous

success and vitality of our institutions" and "the amazing poverty and inarticulateness of our theorizing about politics."

The purpose of the present work is to prove the rightness of this interpretation.

From the very first of our history, he argues, the unique American environment, social as well as physical, has defeated all efforts to live by a system or to reform the condition of life by deducing social theory from principles and applying it. The New England Puritans, he argues, did not really attempt to create from theology a religious

utopia: hence their success as community builders. Lacking "the speculative vigor of English Puritanism," they lived a down-to-earth religion of action. In view of their passion "to build Zion on this earth . . . it is remarkable that there was so little of the Utopian in their thinking." Their orthodoxy was "sterile of speculative thought."

The Pennsylvania Quakers, on the other hand, were truly devoted to the precision of dogma, Mr. Boorstin writes. In fact, these sticky literalists were so blinded to "the most obvious facts" by their "preoccupation with their principles" that they went down in defeat before the blows of actuality when in 1756 they withdrew from the Assembly rather than compromise their pacifism. Similarly, the Georgia settlers "suffered from the fact that they were in the hands of benefactors [pursuing] an abstract purpose"; the colony began to prosper only when the proprietors gave up their plan for an ideal community.

How different, Mr. Boorstin con-

The Mind is an Ancient and Famous Capital

(Passage from *The Studies of Narcissus*)

THE MIND is a city like London,
Smoky and populous: it is a capital
Like Rome, ruined and eternal.
Marked by the monuments of ages which no one
Now remembers. For the mind, like Rome, contains
Catacombs, aqueducts, amphitheatres, palaces,
Churches and equestrian statues, fallen, broken or soiled;
The mind possesses and is possessed by all the ruins
Of every haunted hunted generation's celebration.

"Call us what you will: we are made such by love,"
We are such studs as dreams are made on, and
Our lives are ruled by gods, by Pan,
Piping of all, and seeking to grasp or grasping
All of the grapes; and by the bow-and-arrow god,
Cupid, piercing the heart through, suddenly and forever:
Dusk we are: to dusk returning, after the burning,
After the gold fall, the fallen ash, the bronze,
Scattered and rotten, after the white null statues which
Are winter, sleep, and nothingness: when
Will the houselights of the universe
Light up and blaze?

For it is not the sea
Which murmurs in a shell,
And it is not only the heart, at harp o'clock,
It is the dread terror of the hooves of the uncontrollable
Horses of the apocalypse, running away in wild dread
Toward Arcturus—and returning wildly and as suddenly.

DELMORE SCHWARTZ

18

THE NEW REPUBLIC

tinues, was Virginia's history in the Eighteenth Century. Here, if there were mistakes they were "mistakes of men of affairs rather than of visionaries, reformers, or revolutionaries." Free from "violent passion inspiring men to rebuild Zion or to make a City of Brotherly Love" they enjoyed a religion of "quietly pervasive sentiment," immune "to the dramatic appeal of extremists." To the Virginians, "the bookish spectacles of English or French political theorists" were irrelevant, and the fact that they had "no particular genius for the abstractions of closet-philosophy... was to prove one of their greatest strengths." They lived not by "corrosive absolutes" but by "sentiments." Thus they found the good life. Slavery? By "sharp contrast" it probably increased "the value they placed on their individual liberties."

FROM these four examples, which together comprise over one third of the book, Mr. Boorstin derives a moral for our time. The history of the colonial period warns us against "garret-spawned European illuminati like Lenin, Mussolini, and Hitler," for our unique achievements have rested upon a distrust of abstract thought, upon the dislodgement from influence of an intellectual elite, and upon the belief that "a man's mind was wholesome not when it possessed the most refined implements for dissecting and ordering all knowledge, but when it was most sensitive to the unpredicted whisperings of environment."

On these grounds, at least, no charge of unwholesomeness can be brought against Mr. Boorstin, for his book is more a sensitive reaction to the unpredicted whisperings of our present political climate than it is a result of the

careful dissecting, ordering, and interpreting of knowledge. Of knowledge Mr. Boorstin has a staggering quantity, as his 46 double-columned pages of bibliography indicate; and those who are familiar with his earlier writings, especially his dissection of Blackstone's *Commentaries*, will know the intellectual refinement of which he is capable. But seeking in history proof of the necessity and immemorial rightness of his present political views, he has sketched a colorful, occasionally brilliant, but lopsided image of the past. The wonder of the Puritans was not their failure to produce a theologian of first rank, but the extent to which a passion for theology was shared by them. Georgia's early history does indeed demonstrate the failure of a philanthropic utopia, but would it have worked any better in Devonshire, in Provence, or in the Ukraine? There is nothing unique in the capacity of the American environment to defeat Utopian planning. And if Mr. Boorstin does not think the "distant example and abstract teachings of the European Enlightenment" were central to the political thought and action of Eighteenth-Century Virginians, Thomas Jefferson did.

The theme and tone of this first section, on the four colonies, are carried over into the remaining parts. Mr.

Boorstin introduces to the reader an American concept of knowledge born in the colonial period; it was based not "on the monumental accomplishments of the few" but "on the novel, accreting ways of the many." "The American did not need to begin with explicit premises or with precise definitions and propositions; he began with the first novelty that came to his attention." The alterations in professional life Mr. Boorstin skillfully traces are used to demonstrate the progress that resulted from the destruction of intellectual elites and from imprecision of thought. He praises superiority of "crude, fluid experience" over "the conceit of learned specialities and argues that Franklin's success achievement was a "triumph of over learning."

In the course of writing an extensive apologia for his disillusionment, Mr. Boorstin has brought a vigor into historical thinking which all those interested in American history will appreciate. But the historical vindication of the distrust of knowledge and of the mind presented by so learned an intellectual as Mr. Boorstin will appeal to another public whose intellectual poverty is at least a sign of consistency, and who will, no doubt, fail to recognize that Mr. Boorstin's book is itself a refutation of the theory it proposes.

## Sufficient Unto the Day

by Gilbert A. Harrison

HOW GENEROUS of Simon and Schuster to give those of us with a taste for Herblock this Christmas feast of 430 cartoons and 30,000 words. One a day satisfies, but how pleasant to be able to turn the pages of a book and find almost forgotten favorites and the few we've missed in the newspapers. We

many events for just one picture." His problem is not what to say, it is what to leave unsaid. Herblock is a journalist, fascinated by right now. "Odd as it may seem," he writes.

> ... The cartoons I do—even with all the faces and physical exaggerations in them—are not essentially personal. And I don't really care how charming or forbidding characters may be as individuals. Where public figures are shown, they are nearly always related to some current situation—some issue that they're dealing with, or that I think they *should* be dealing with.

The *should* is important; there's a wide, fine prophetic streak in Herblock. He doesn't thunder or summon to crusades

*Herblock's Special For Today* (Simon and Schuster; $3.95).

say to ourselves, as we said throughout the year, "How does he keep it up?" For Herblock proves that mass production does not compel mediocrity.

The book's title is apt. "Each day," he tells us in his text, "there are too

Golosov

This Christmas give
The New Republic

Narcissus, speaking in the first person -- or at times in the
third person (in retrospect) describes his passion and the various
forms of misunderstanding which others have committed, regarding
his behavior. Others -- all the others, including the nymph, Echo --
thought Narcissus was moved by self-love and looked in the river
only to see his own beloved face. They forgot that his father was
the river god; and they misinterpreted the devotion and concentration,
excluding all other things, with which he gazed upon the river's
surface as a love of his own which rejected the offered and eager
love of all the others, remaining unaware of the meaning of his gaze
upon the river at night or when the sky was so clouded over that
he could not see his own face. Echo, like all the others, believed
that he had fallen in love with himself so much that, being in love
with him and misconceiving the nature of love, she imitated his voice
and his very words, thinking that this was what he desired and what
would make her desirable. The truth was that he was entirely dis-
satisfied with the image of his own face, yet the river, continuously
changing under the continuously changing light

was more and contained more than
and promising so much to Narcissus that it nurtured an inexhaustible
hope in him, and hopes: the hope that he would be satisfied, and
beautiful enough, as an image, a face and a being, to be able to be
loved by a truly beautiful being. But the river itself was the most
beautiful of all the beings he had ever beheld.

Overture

Love is destiny: childhood is an illness
Which lasts throughout a lifetime
-- With, perhaps, certain intermissions,
Intervals regarded as flowering heights,

The mind is a city like London,
Smoky and populous: it is a capital
Like Rome, ruined and eternal
Marked by monuments of ages which no one
Now remembers, containing catacombs,
Arenas, aqueducts, amphitheatres, church and palace,
equestrian statues . . .

"Call us what you will: we are made such by love:
"We are such stuff as dreams are made on and
Our lives are ruled by the gods: by Pan
Piping of all, and grasping all grapes,
And by the bow-and-arrow boy god
Cupid, piercing the heart suddenly,

Dusk we are to dusk returning: when
Will the houselights of the universe
Light up

... for it is not the sea
Which murmurs in a shell

NARCISSUS

It is not only the heart
But the fearful hooves of the uncontrollable
Horses of the apocalypse, running wildly away
Beyond Arcturus -- and returning as suddenly

* * * * *

One, obsessed as the devout, I waited:
Under the mast of my head, my eyes sailed forth,
Fed by an abundance so multitudinous
I knew it must be infinite:
Between the sleek, rippling and glittering silks
Delight in the light mounted and mounted in me
and doubt itself
and doubt
Fathered the dolls of possibility
Until they shone as the progeny of hope,
The dazzling diamonds my demon denied and loved
-- Distant or hidden sources nurtured the sorcery
And miracles of radiance, flowed out of depths
Or struck, like lightning from heights I merely guessed

....

How the sky shone: look how my leaves are curved
And black, how they possess and are possessed
By every brilliance, radiance, and vividness --

NARCISSUS

-- How could they know I had discovered the self?

By studying the marvels of my hope

And all the variety and poverty of my face

Within the supple marble where the leaves

Of swirling waters were more numerous
as various

As falsehood, more found than fantasy

And infinite as numbers . . . space was a colosseum,

And infinite as numbers . . .

The silence was the drum, and drums, of space,
Waiting and beating

Throbbing, expectant, before all triumph, all miracles
to come. . . .

Within the river's folds and folding fields
I gazed until I looked for the rippled dream

Of seeing myself at last a being I loved

Loved by a being beautiful enough to love --

... The river holds the summer's pride, the sum
Of sun and summer, gold and golding glow:

Love is reality -- as in the beginning it was --

And love is destiny. The reality of the ecstasy

NARCISSUS

Riding into the womb begot the city,
Planted or sowed the future's flowers and powers

... again, again ...

Inmost was utmost:

Under the mast of my head
My eyes sailed forth and searched

The sleek silks and curving softnesses:

The river was reality and various plurality
And made me other than I was at each

Ripple of its irresistible flowing:

I thought: God is in love, in love with possibility,
His love are his loves, his love is enough
To make the promiscuity of actuality ...

-- The river was full of bells as the sun rose,
Shuddering ripples grew to the radiance
Of chandeliers at noon, the blazing sun
Became a jewel of inexhaustible opulence. ...

* * * * *

The blazing sunlight is the world itself:

The black heart of the ego shines and shines in vain,
Weak as the moonlight, like a kind of moonlight --

* * * * *

The river rose from sovereign sources, secret steeps

NARCISSUS

Until, under the sun, it was a dream of diamonds
Or in the winter, frozen, within
The snows hushed infinite
It was a kind of moonlight
A pathos of white silence, white
And silent, lighted by the moon's white silence --

* * * * *

How blond the light of summer is, how round
And how profound the blue ~~he~~ contained and loved
Within the river's flowing glass, glinting and glittering --
Brightening and darkening, freshening, shadowing
In its irresistible going and going holding
Glowing and glowing being's immense plurality!

* * * * *

The game of the mystery of reality
Began when the first thought concealed itself,
When the speech of ripened lips
Hid what was already hidden, or not yet known
...
For long as lore, desire was narrative,
Gratified in imagination's will,
And longer still I read the handsome story
Venus as absolute in joy's full glory!

...

NARCISSUS

Eternity is the roar you hear

When you hold a sea shell close to your ear

It is not the sound of the knock of the pounding heart,
It is not the roar of the insatiable sea, erupting upon
the shore,

It is the eternal roar of eternity, the lightning and the
thunder

Each moment's subjection and rejection -- the eternal
roar of judgement and resurrection --

... After utter forgiveness, what knowledge
Can be possessed by consciousness?

Forgive: do not forget. Remember and live,

For life is rooted in memory's damnation and blessedness.

Look: I looked at the dancers, swaying,

Under the lanterns, in the olive garden,

the fat vineyard, the apple orchard,

Or very near the river where the boats are anchored,

Bound to the shore and lolling, like the dancers:

They do not know the secret of summer,

They do not possess the natural knowledge of the river,

Yet they sigh and quicken, murmur to the music,

NARCISSUS

Delighted that they exist, for all love's agony
and all love's ecstasy,
They are not ashamed they touch each other, nor afraid
They are beautiful enough to touch and love,
They wish to touch each other, touching and touched,
Before the cause because the truth, before the root
Becomes the fruit, because ...

* * * * *

We are all -- look! -- the figments of the imagination's
aspiration!

Are the follies or followers of intense and hot infatuation:
Each heart is liege to Venus, queen and empress of the
seas and ports of consciousness;

And thus, as Venus from the sea arose and came to be,
The self I know, Narcissus as he is known, was born,
within the river, arising shocked --

Gazing or gaping at the river's ever-being, ever-becoming:

The river was my mother: it was my school

And was and is the only school because

Knowledge is only the knowledge of love,

And every story is the story of love,

And every storyteller is a ghost!

NARCISSUS

The river was the abundant belly of beauty itself
The river was the dream space where I walked,
The river was itself and yet it was -- flowing and
freshening --

A self anew, another self, or self renewed
At every tick of eternity, and by each glint of light
Mounting or , descending to shade and black
-- Had I but told them my heart, told how it was
Taunted at noon and pacified at dusk, at starfall midnight
Strong in hope once more, ever in eagerness
Jumping like joy, would they have heard? How could they?
How, when what they knew was, like the grass,
Simple and certain, known through the truth of touch,
another form and fountain of falsehood's
fecundity --

Gazing upon their faces as they gazed
Could they have seen my faces as whores who are
Holy and deified as priestesses of hope.

-- the sacred virgins of futurity --
Promising dear divinity precisely because
They were disfigured ducks who might become
And be, and ever beloved, white swans, noble and beautiful
Could they have seen how my faces were
Bonfires of worship and vigil, blazes of adoration
and hope

NARCISSUS

-- Surely they would have laughed again, renewed
their scorn,
Giggled and snickered, cruel. Surely have said
This is the puerile mania of the obsessed,
The living logic of the lunatic:
I was the statue of their merriment,
Dead and a death, Pharaoh and monster forsaken and lost.

My faces were my apes: my apes became
Performers in the Sundays of their parks,
Buffoons or clowns in the farce or comedy
When they took pleasure in knowing that they were not
like me

I waited like obsession in solitude:
The sun's white terror tore and roared at me,
The moonlight, almond white, at night,
Whether awake or sleeping, arrested me
And sang, softly, haunted, unlike the sun
But as the sun. Withheld from me or took away
Despair or peace, making me once more
With thoughts of what had never been before --

NARCISSUS

(Fear and hatred of the others)

-- The others were the despots of despair --

The river's freshness sailed from unknown sources --

... They snickered giggled, laughed aloud at last,
They mocked and marvelled at the statue which was
A caricature, as strained and stiff, and yet
A statue of self-love! -- since self-love was
To them, truly my true love, how, then, was I
a stillness of nervousness

So nervous a caricature: did they suppose
Self-love was unrequited, or betrayed?

They thought I had fallen in love with my own face
-- Thinking that I had fallen in love with my own face,
And this belief became the night-like obstacle

To understanding all my unbroken suffering
My studious self-regard, the pain of hope,
The torment of possibility:

How then could I have expected them to see
to me
That being thus seemed as a toad, a frog
a wen,
a mole.

Knowing their certainty that I was only
A monument, a monster who had fallen in love

NARCISSUS

(Endless Sentences)

How many thoughts, like lightning strokes, occurred
And seemed more true than any true I knew!

Came with no concentration, no

Concern or effort, toiling up the path,
Sparkled like the radiance or stood like the oars

Whence all the radiance arrives, the sunlight's swords:

Each thought an intuition, instant,
Spontaneous, coherent in the mind
Of words: and seemed and were and are

-- As first I named them -- endless sentences

Proven abundantly in all the instances
Experience unveiled, although it was

-- In so many other ways -- astonishing!

This was an endless sentence which I learned
Or recognized in the fluent river's school:

Everything is always somewhere else; or it is
Present -- when undesired -- in an embarrassment
of riches, a profusion prolific and inexhaustible,
An oppression of luxury, like Midas' gold.

This is an endless sentence which I saw

As student at the river's universal school:

NARCISSUS

The cause of that boundless ecstacy in which
A man had plunged that screaming girl,
-- A triumph so triumphant all is lost
Save for the sweetness at the source
Within, intense, of such an intensity
That blessed in the loss of consciousness
It seems, at first, a kind of death -- so much
Like death that the fearful self, beholds
beholding
Upon the brink, all of the terror of love,
Draws back and the first time never is endured!

* * * * *

I knew the parable of trying to see
The truth behind the face, the mind behind
The surface, the radiance within
The radiance within the shining radiance
And thus I missed matchless magnificence
So many times! Since, at times,
Appearance is reality and not a mask
neither secret nor masked.
The apple is the apple which is red
And ripe upon the tree -- but only then
During the time of ripening, before

NARCISSUS

The fall, long long after the flower
-- The times of flowering and the flowers are
The scenes of falsehood most of all!
This too is a parable of reality,
It is as well a parable of love,
And love's reality, after the flowers
After the green and growing fruit,

I was for a long time, every kind
Of shining angel: kind of angle,
And kind of light: each point of view
Lighted up something new, or some which
I never knew. Every picture possessed
Four sides, and four thousand sides and sights
Each time I looked or read between the lines
I saw the mount of Venus suddenly
I found myself upon the island named
Cytherea -- the lake of summer capital.

* * * * *

I visited the house of Orpheus,
His house, his garden and his park,
The horses which he loved and which he lost . . .
Finding the beasts of hell, to whom he sang
Not to regain his lost Eurydice,
But to be free of the ice-like pain and stone of loss.
-- The music which he made and sang to gain
That liberty was strange, a strangeness and a mockery.

NARCISSUS

The present is the future. We are there
-- Or going where we wished to be -- the past
Is but a version of the future which
Is likely to be false. The present is
The future twice: first it is the future of the hope
By which we live and die, direct or drive the will
Of toil, the mind of effort; second, it is
The comparison of the present as it is
And as it was conceived by hope, before,
When past was present still, not yet unmasked.

How many structures of reality
I saw within the river: light which was at once
Insight, the sweet access of being which
The radiance of knowledge gives and gives
With a purity and freedom which no other thing,
Consumed, confers, neither the bread nor wine
On which we fed on the dark god's holidays.

* * * * *

Height:
Light:

The river of all rivers, the motion of emotion
The feeling of the real and

NARCISSUS

-- Yet: you would not have found it,
If you had not been able to recognize it!

-- This is the dynasty of discovery:
It is ruled by a dialectic of poles apart
The synthesis is thus:

It is true. It is not real:

You find what you possess: you seek
What you do not know you have
that you possess.

The river sang: there are many truths,
Look: how thy glitter and ripples, radiant,
And the river chanted: many truths -- did you know?
do you believe?

Are better than one truth. This is
The doctrine of the magician and musician:
But reality is magical and musical.

It comprehends the stones and the hearts of men.

And all the variety between these two

Extremes completes the comparison

Which makes all dreams poor and inadequate

Once set in contrast with reality's ingenuity

* * * * *

NARCISSUS

Those who knew passion and compassion after me
Misunderstood my purity, my poverty
The elation through privation, the motion of devotion.

Names: Sisyphus, Oedipus, Theseus, Heracles,
Cupid and Psyche . . .

They never knew -- or knew for the first time,
The of the rain,
nor for the first time
Knew the new flow of the heartbeats of love
A thing -- and experience -- which, never having been
known before
Did not possess the status of what exists
the dusk of doubt
But merely the status of hope, the state of dusk
And doubt, and fear, rising and falling,

... It is not true: it never has been true.
The moon shines on the loved and the unloved
As who should. The music mounted to the minds
Of those who could and those who could not hear
The music blooming, blossoming, flowering and flowing
forth
For those who have fallen or are falling in love
Behold it -- behold that ghost of sentiment --
that ghostly
and
that sentimental ghost.

NARCISSUS

At first the river was a simple window
Empty, in shadow: immensity was a waste:
How wide the silence was, when I looked up
Beholding the sky's blue capital,
Thinking it empty, although beautiful

... I did not think it was the louvre of the dead,
Nor think it was the palace of the stars' dancers --

-- How could they understand my study and my hope
Or understand the study of hope itself
When all the knowledge came, at last, to this
That all hope is at heart only then hope
That hope is true, or at least true enough,
That hope itself will still be possible
After each new illusion and conclusion,
And after each recognition of delusion!

Since love is reality, reality is love!
And the fear of the fading of feeling
Is the disease of the withering of hope, the hope
That the self will, at last, be born again anew, renewed
-- Will wholly arise

When the living awaken
From the thickets of sleep and the mines of night,
Withdrawing from the death of self-deception,
No longer master nor monster, no longer
Demon nor despot, strong, strong as illusion, stronger ...

* * * * *

NARCISSUS

What blooms after the lisping, lipping dimnesses
When night in all its formless vagueness is over all
The beauty of the body of the river?

The roses are pink because of the weight of fragrance.
The leaves are green because green aspires to radiance.

The river is the ripening or the ripened
Harvest of all the passing shows which move and shine
Between the soil, the sun, and the brilliant or dark sky.

The river is the hymn wherein
The ultimate vineyards of variety
Become the plums and grapes of dawn and dusk
In a penitude so multitudinous
It must be infinite and infinitely generous:
It is the dance in which abundance falls and follows,
forever moving
In all the moods and modes of fertility and fruitfulness.

NARCISSUS

When suddenly all the senses chant,
And the mind, caught in the anthem,

* * * * *

Who but the fallen angel of consciousness
Sings with so much radiance of the clarity of reality?
The mastery of victory? The reality of hope?

I have supped and sucked and sickened in the valley
of desperation.

I have been terrified -- and in the darkness lost,
I have turned and sought despair as consolation
or agony's cessation,

I surrendered or thought I surrendered forever,
drawing the shades

Which shut out the blue rivers of morning, ending
my vigil,

Telling myself that the self was nothing and all was
nothingness

Nature was nothingness, and desire was nothing but
passage,

The passage from darkness to nothingness to dark
nothingness.

NARCISSUS

The river possesses and continually blesses
Dreams of the sky in many disguises
The sessions of its processions discover
All glittering radiance within the exaltation
Of the visual and visible imagination!

Under the meadows of the milky way
Under the marvels of the marble blue
The faint and bonewhite moonlight, faintly shining,
Seemed and sustained the mystery, or apparition
Glimpsed and guessed all day in the sun's glory
And all the stories
Rippled and sparkled momentarily to me

-- For first, I thought, the flowers existed only
In the contemplation of the stars. And then
The stars became the petals of the flowers
Of powers hidden, infinite and generous,
Flowing over, overflowing in boundless plenitude,
Possessing and possessed, blessing and blessed --
All luxury, fulfillment and largesse.

The river's coat -- which half-concealed, and half-revealed
The curves of sleekness, the slopes of suppleness
As the current rode and flowed, promised a tenderness
My face attracted, and an allure which promised me

NARCISSUS

The river sang again of truth's variety,
Which is the light's plurality and ingenuity.
Lighting up, and misleading if too long believed.

The light

Lolling upon the river's flow, descanted
On how all things are magnified and multiplied
How emulation is an exaltation. The trees
Became a grove, a slowly curving orchard,
The river's tree became the HART, immense,
of goddesses.

The river sang and said:

Death is not a spectacle nor a catastrophe,
It is a distant eminence, far off, powerless

Having nothing to do with love and victory

Nor with Dionysus, nor Apollo . . .

Phoenix fulfillment and fatherhood

Are other and otherwise to be understood.

-- The poet is a shepherd of being,
The poet is he who keeps the archives of the stones,
And makes immortal the lady among the rocks
And is the crying of the rocks, draws in his flocks
To the fortitude of the acceptance of experience.

NARCISSUS

Another's face allure and desire, fixed on me,
And that was why I looked and looked,
Was why the others laughed until they shook
Rollicking, looking into their own
Perfected self-deception, dark and sweet as the bone.

-- Other than all the others and my self

The river was
Sleekness and silk and supple,

-- The infinite blue above became, I saw,
Tender and infinite --

An arch, contained yet magnified, within the flow,
Curving and curved, upon the river's face
The beauties of the stream supported my utmost dream!

* * * * *

A simple door opens upon an abyss ...

Commanded reality, or uncommanded?
When I stare with much desire, my face becomes
A squint, a frown, and something falsified by hope
Impatience, eagerness: and what I see
Is neither what I desire now nor what is there
My grasping gaze seizes that is a blur
And makes a hybrid of the blur and my desire,

NARCISSUS

A fiction and distortion of the uniqueness of reality.

...

Art thou not fortunate? Hast thou not seen
The foetus-like, the hideous, the obscene?
Yet equally, the admirable and the beautiful
In the leaves, darkened, but glittering and green
Within the river's glass fallen but supernatural --

... My faces were my apes: my apes became
Idolatrous ...

... The sunlight became canaries in jubilee
Its genius rose in the joy and fury of blaze

Nor mystery nor bitterness

Love's bitter gxxx mystery was gall no more,
but this:

The heart of sunlight's vivid and lucid blaze
Deathless summer, supreme
XMPAAMEXXMXDXKMOIXMXXX

and luminous:

The phoenix is the summer and holds everything
The deathless summer is all, a brilliant ball

And there is nothing more: it is enough:

and it is all.

* * * * *

THE
Studies of Narcissus
-or a History of Love

Narcissus, speaking in the first person--or at times in the third person(in retrospect) describes his passion and the various forms of misunderstanding which others have committed, regarding his behavior. Others--all the others, including the nymph, Echo,--thought Narcissus was moved by self-love and looked in the river only to see his own beloved face. They forgot that his father was the river god; and they misinterpreted the devotion and concentration, excluding all other things, with which he gazed upon the river's surface as a love of his own which rejected the offered and eager love of all the others, remaining unaware of the meaning of his gaze upon the river at night or when the sky was so clouded over that he could not see his own face. Echo, like all the others, believed that he had fallen in love with himself so much that, being in love with him and misconceiving the nature of love, she imitated his voice and his very words, thinking that this was what he desired and what would make her desirable. The truth was that he was entirely dissatisfied with his image of his own face, yet the river, continuously changing under the continuously changing light, appeared always to be more than before: more and more, a moment by moment, then it had seemed to contain and this was so associating and promising so much to Narcissus that it nurtured an inexhaustible hope in him, and hopes: the hope that he would be satisfied, and beautiful enough, as an image, a face and a being, to be able to be loved by a truly beautiful being. But the river itself was the most beautiful of all the beings he had ever beheld.

The Studies Of Narcissus

########

At first the river was a simple window
Empty, in shadow: immensity was a waste:
How wide the silence was, when I looked up
Beholding the sky's blue capital,
Thinking it empty, although beautiful
...I did not think it was the louvre of the dead,
Nor think it was the palace of the stars' dancers--

How could they understand my straight
--How could they understand my study and my hope
Or understand the study of hope itself
When all the knowledge can, at last, to this
That all hope is at heart only then hope
That hope is true, or at least true enough,
That hope itself will still be possible
After each new illusion and conclusion,
And after each recognition of delusion!
Since love is reality, reality is love!
And the fear of the fading of feeling
Is the disease of the withering of hope, the hope
That the self will, at last, be born again anew, renewed
--Will wholly arise
When the living awaken

From the thickets of sleep and the mines of night,
Withdrawing from the death of self-deception,
No longer master nor monster, no longer
demon nor despot, strong, strong as illusion, stronger....

The Studies Of Narcissus

Alone, obsessed as the devout, I waited:

Under the mast of my head, my ripening eyes ripened

I knew it must be infinite:

and doubt in

The diamonds, like my demyodeoms, demon denied

--Distant or hidden sources nurtured the sorcery

Or struck like lightning from heights I merely guessed

......

Phone

are curved

How to the sky change: look how my leaves are arranged

By every brilliance, radiance, and vividness--

--How could they know I had discovered the self?

Eyes

?

As falsehood more found than fantasy

And infinite as numbers ... space was a colosseum,
and infinite as numbers...

Waiting and beating, expectant, before all triumph, all miracles to come...

Throbbing, beating

1949

11/17/50

The Studies Of Narcissus

###

Under the meadows of the milky way
Under the marvels of the marble blue
The faint and bonewhite moonlight, faintly:shineng,
Seemed and sustained the mystery, or apparition
Glimpsed and guessed all day in the sun's glory
And all the stories which the river's slowness
Rippled and sparkled momentarily to me
--For first, I thought, the flowers existed only
In the contemplation of the stars. And then
The stars became the petals of the flowers
Of powers infinite and generous,
Brewing overflowin in boundless plenitude,
Possessing and possessed, blessing and blessed--

ALL LOVING, FULL FULFILLMENT &LOVE-LESS.
The river's coat --which half-concealed, and half-revealed
The curves of sleekness, the slopes of suppleness
As the current rode and flowed, promised a tenderness
My face attracted, and an allure which promised me
Another's face allure and desire, fixed on me,
And that was why I looked and looked,
Was why the others laughed until they shook
Rollicking, looking into their own
Perfected self-deception, dark and sweet as the bone

--Other than all the others and my self
The river was
Sleekness and silk and supply above became, I saw,
Tender and infinite
An arch, contained yet magnified, within the flow,
Curving and curved, upon the river's face
The bauties of the stream supported my utmost dream!

The Studies of Narcissus

########

The balzing sunlight is the world itself:
The black heart of the ego shines and shines in vain,
Weak as the moonlight, like a kind of moonlight--

########

The river rose from soereign sources, secret steeps,
Until, under the sun, it was a dream of diamonds
Or in the winter, frozen, within
The snows hushed infinite
It was a kind of moonlight
A thousand of white silence, white
And silent, lighted by the moon's white silence--

######

How blond the light of summer is, how round
And how profound the blue heart's hard and love'd
Within the river's flowing glass, glinting and glittering--
Brightening and darkening, frexsehening, shadow ing
In its irresistible going and going holding
Glowing and glowing being's immense plurality!

###

The game of the mystery of reality
Began when the first thought concealed itself,
When the speech of ripened lips
Hid what was was already hidden, or not yet known
...

For long as lore, desire was narratite,
Gratified in imagination's will,
And longer still I read the handsome story
Venus as absolute in joy's full glory!

.....

The Studies of Narcissus//

The river sang/again/ of truth's variety,
Which is/the light 's plurality and ingenuity.
and
Lighting up/, misleading if //too long believed.

The light
Lolling upon the river's flow, descented
On how all things are magnified/and multiplied
How emulation is an exaltation. The trees
became a grove, a slowly curving orchard,
The river's tree became the icles, immense
Of goddesses/

The river sang and said:

Death is not a spectacle nor a catastrophe,
It is a distant eminence, far off, powerles
love and
Having nothing to do with/dictory

Nor with Dionysus, nor Apolbo
Phoenix fulfillment and fatherhood
otherwise
Are other and/to be understood

--The poet is a shepherd of being,
The poet is he who kweps
the archives of the stones,

And makes immortal the lady among the rocks/
And in the crying of the rocks, draw his flock
To the fortitude of the acceptance of experience //

The river possesses and continually blesses,

Dreams of the sky in many disguises
The uses of its processes discover
All glittering radiance within the exaltation
Of the visual and visible imagination!

The /Studies of Narcissus/

I knew the parable of trying to see
The truth behind the face, themind behind
The surface, the radiance within

So many times! Since, at times,
Appearance is reality and not a mask.

And ripe upon the tree--but only then
During the time of ripening, before
The fall, long long after the flower

--The times of flowering and the flowers are
The scenes of falsehood most of all!

I was, for a long time, every kind
Of shining angle: kind of angle,
And kind of light: each point of view
Lighted up something new, or somewhat
I never knew. Every picture possessed
Four sides, an

I saw the mount of Vesta suddenly
I found myself upon the island named
Cytherea--the lake of summer capital

neither secret
nor masked.

Passages from The Studies of Narcissus

Eternity is the roar you hear

It is not the sound of the knock of the pounding heart,
roar of the

It is not the/insatiable sea, erupting upon the shore,

It is eternal roar of eternity, the lightning and the thunder

Each moment's subjection and rejection--the eternal
roar of judgement and resurrection--

...After utter forgiveness, what knowledge
Can be possessed by consciousness.

Look: I looked at the dancers, swaying,
Under the lanterns, in the olive garden,
the fat vineyard, the apple orchard,
Or very near the river where the boats are anchored,
Bound to the shore and lolling, like the dancers:
They do not know the secret of summer,
They do not possess the natural knowledge of the river,
Yet they sigh and quicken, murmur to the music,
Delighted that they exist, for all love's agony and all love's
ecstasy, AND FOR ALL THE TERROR OF ECSTASY!
They are not ashamed they touch other, nor afraid
They are beautiful enough to touch and love,
They wish to touch each, touching and touched,
Before the cause because the truth, before the root
BECOMES THE FRUIT, BECAUSE OF THIS.

The Studies of Narcissus//

Height:

Light:

The feeling of the real &

The feast of reality &&

Your holy word

An infinite bliss, given as
infinitely as

It is infinitely gifted:

Let it be, let your kingdom

Described in all splendor

When we ring

The bells of morning & the bells of mortality
swinging and singing

as the ever freshness

Which flowers forever / in/ the dark patience

Of the strength of hope & the truth

Of the heart which the heart itself

Seldom knows, and never wholly believes.

DELMORE SCHWARTZ

Studies of Narcissus

#####

We are all--look!--the figments of the imagination's
aspiration!

Each heart is liege to Venus, queen and empress of the seas,
and ports of consciousness;

The self I know, Narcissus as he is known, was born,
within the river, arising shocked--

....

The river was the abundant bellly of beauty itself

The river was itself and get it was, --flowing and freshening--

Mounting or fasing, descending to shade and black

Taunted at noon and pacified at dusk, st starfall midnight

Jumping like joy, would they have heard? How could they have?

Simple and certain, known through the truth of tough,
another form and fountain of falsehood's fecundity--

Studies of Narissus

2) (after: falsehood's fecundity)

-- the sacred virgins of futurity--

And be, and be beloved, white swans, noble and beautiful

Bonfires of worship and vigil, blazes of adoration of

hope

--Surely they would have laughed again, renewed their scorn,

Giggled and snickered, cruel. Surely have I said

Dead and a death, +Pharaoh and monster forsaken and lost.

...

My faces were my apeas: my apes became

Performers on the Sundays of their parks,

...

-- I waited like obsession in solitude:

The sun's white terror there and roarded at me,

But as the sun, withheld from me or took away

With thoughts of what had never been before--

one

Studies of Narcissus

At dusk

Placidly --In hushed serenity

The hushed serene

Arose above the green

The waters were choirs w erein the sunlight chanted

The silence of space was a great blue balloon

Mounted aloft, waiting and attentive

The great blue bell, the dome which holds

The daylight and the night

The noon of turquoise diamonds diamonding
& gold golding
and radiance entranced and ringing
dancing in all the kinds of lances

...Thou art confessed!--

The rootsof river hood

are not in rain

A brass of gleaming

A pewter reticence

A luceacy a transparency

The passing shows of

plangent passions /starlings.

Tapered

star-winged

starwings

...Had there other lovers? how, since I
Discovered the self or--to vary again
Invented it, by staring in a glass
And conceiving the image of my face:
Of those who have fallen in love
since then,

Studies of Narcissus

O the brio, opretheopallergro of the river when the sun
Blazes down on it, and it sang, mingling brights and blues;
What ghost a sovereign ruled the sources, distant, concealed,
Changing the depths under the merrying light,
so furious: so joyous:
so spontaneous'.

.....
A suave bush.

I was in the presence of the mystery
Of the amplitude of abundance, dancing,
Multitudinous abundance, the majesty
Of ample infinitude, flowing and overflowing.

I was in the presence of the mystery
Of the plenitude and the majesty
Of the gifts and the giving and the grant
Of the ever-flowing process of reality,
Love is knowing in unknowing
Love is the majesty of the mystery
Of the abundance of surrender
When suddenly all the senses chant,
And the mind, caught in the anthem,
almost antiso and ishappéys polytheist!

Studies of Narcissus

The feasts of identity

Once far from me, in the distance, in a grove,
Hidden, concealed she thought, I heard a girl
Screaming with joy: joy absolute;
Joy unheard of before, and never known to me
And given to me or given
By me to girls: I had never been
The cause of that boundless ecstasy in which
A man had plunged that screaming girl,
--A victory so triumphant all is lost
Save for the sweetness at the source
Within, intense, of such an intensity
That blessed and possessed in the loss of consciousness
It seems, at first, a kind of death--so much
Like death that the fearful self, beholding
Upon the brink, all of the terror of love,
Draws back and the first time never is endured!

Studies of Narcissus

....

The river was itself and yet it was,--flowing and freshening--

Mounting or facing, descending to shade and black

--Had I but told them my heart, told how it was

Taunted at noon and pacified at dusk, starfall midnight

Studies of Narcissus

Eternity is the roar you hear

It is not the sound of the knock of the grasping heart,
roar of the
It is not the/insatiable sea, breaking upon the shore,

It is eternal roar of eternity, the lightning end the thunder

After suffer forgiveness, what knowledge
Can be possessed by consciousness.

Under the lanterns, in the olive garden,
the vineyard, the apple orchard,

They do not know the secret of愛's agony and all love's
ecstasy,

The light of their eyes, touch of their hands, fear and joy,

Yet they sigh and quiver, murmur to the music,

Becomes the cause

S. Narcissus

/History of love/

I heard:

"The engine sighed softly"

I listened to the machine spersistent drone/ moon/
"He commanded real fear",

"And felt the stage fright of guilt"

The sweat of sympathy....

Smersh shpion : death to dpez

The gods demanded ///required// commanded

Instead of n / a cock, a pigeon,
a dog, a goat, or a pig

The sacrifice of a culprit, a cipid

"she ruffled the cards: she shuffled them
she shuffled them agayne///" (

"Those who deserve to die,
Die the death they deserve"

drums: white drums: the white round drums
ing
Of the slowly sway butocks of drunken girls,

Narcissus

The hope that I was wrong, hope that became
Joy by the river ceaselessly renewed
And by the very plenitude
Of falsehood's shades, the shades of light imbued
With a new kind of energy of possibility
For every passing flashing fancy of the rivered light
Sustained, increased and magnified
All possibility, and all imagination

//The faces are not the faces one would expect
: Something that taught me how surprise might be
constantly persistently insistently a true

Surprise, and yet a disappointment too,
However irrational hope might be come, //
Q3 by mathematical (similarity: of
rm probability and

There was no glass, no light, nowaking hour which failed
SORELY HAD REALISED

If - as the others thought with so much vulgar obvious
Lack of slack of imagination // is better so is slick
 slack of imagination, --I embraced myself, kissing the
if I were

As a face worthy of all the passions, hope and hope ful

patient infatuation I had lived

Studies of Narcissus

########

The mastery of victory, ?the reality of hope?

I have sunned and sucked and sickened in the valley of desperation.
I have sicke

I have been terrified--and in the darkness lost,

--Then I was almost glad that it/ was thus, thinking it must be thus,
Thinking
Thinking that all my other thoughts had been (how else must it seem
, light it seem, must it be?) to most of us

Deceptions, illusions, delusions, satanic imaginations, hideous
In the end, asthe snake-like convulsions of the brain
Which was the source and force of halucination?

And I knew the rise and the return after the failure and the fall

I knew and now I know the tone and the chant of rapture, surprem e
and sweeping all, of the lost, the saw d,
the odreoded from the dream by the dream's
conclusion.

# The Stuies of Nzricissus/H1//

Those who knew passion and compassion after me
Mis und er stood my purity, my poverty
The elation through privation, the motion of devotion//

/Names : Sisyphus, Oedipus, Theseus, Heracles,
Curid and Pysche)

never
They/knew --or knew for the first time,
miss
The rare of the rain,
for
nor the first time

Knew the new flow of the heartbeats of love
: A thing--an experience--which, never having been
known/ Before/

Did not possess the status of what exists
But merely// the status of hope, the state of dusk
And doubt, and fear, rising and falling,

...It is not true: it never has been true.

The moon shines on the love and the unloved
(moonlight)

As who should /the music mounted to the minds
Of those who could and those who could not hear
The music blooming, blooming, flowing and flowing
forth

Not those who have fallen in love

Behold it (behold that ghost of sentiment/
that ghostly
that sentimental ghost)

////

Studies of Naricious

- the s acred virgins of futurity--

Could they have seen my faces were

of hope

--Surely they would laughed again, renewed their scorn,
Giggled and snickered, cruel. Surely have said

I was the statue of their merriment,
Dead and a death, the archon and monster forsaken and lost.

...

My faces were my apees: my apes became
Performers on the Sundays of their parks,
Buffoons or clowns in the farce or comedy

When they took pleasure in knowing that they were out like,
I waited like obsession in solitude:
me

...

The sun's white terror tore and roarded at me,
Whether awake or asleep, at night,
And sang of moonlight, glimmering, unlike the sun
But as the sun, haunted, withheld from me or took away
Despair or peace, making me once more
With thoughts of what had never been before--

Narcissus I (version of 12.18.55. / 229.56

For long as lore, desire was narrative
Gratified in imagination's extravagant will
And long I sought and knew the handsome dancing story
Beholding Venus as she moved towards me in blaze's glory,
Descending from the mountains of my years
Delicate as an eyelid, as delicate thanna a flake
Yet big and voluptuous as summer's white and schooner
cream and sailing clouds....

...Sisyphus invented the Freris wheel, but I
Invented painting or the photograph
disciples/students
My sons are adolescents or furtive old men
Seeking in images to take what only a living being can give

/I am painting's inventor, and-I alone
Discovered in a glass the self itself....

....
Supple.... river.... flowing.... going and ever present
Supple and sinuous and undulant and ever fresh
supple.... river....

Narcissus (1.28.56/)

(3.10.57)

The hope that I was wrong!
Hope that became

joy by the river ceaselessly renewed
and by the very plentitude

Of falsehood's shades, the shades of light--imbued
With a new kind of energy of possibility.

For when I saw how face and faces were, in an instant, wronged
By the river's success and the light's progress

ruffled and swerved
(Saw how the faces of my face appeared, ruffling and curved)

--Mocked by the flowing growing rivers caricatures
this which disgusted me yet raided my hope

Studies of Narcissus

(THE FEAR AND HATRED OF OTHERS)

--The others were the despots of despair--

...The river's freshness sailed from unknown sources--

...They snickered, giggled, laughed aloud at last,
They mocked and marvelled at the statue which was
A caricature, as strained and stiff, and yet
A statue of self-love?!?--since self-love was
To them, truly my true love, how, then, was I
a stillness of nervousness

--Thinking that I had fallen in love with my own face,
And this belief became the night-like obstacle

How then could I have expected them to see
That being thus seemed as a toad, a frog to me

With himself alone, how might I have

Told them what was in me, trembling, and passionate

Within the labryinth of my mind, my heart:

The words for what is in my heart

Do not exist: But I must finally find

Some metaphor, some image, some comparison, although
All substitutes are counterfeit and vague

Or are at most the resemblances

/ a wen,
a mole

Studies of Narcissus' MONOLOGUE

Within the river's folds and folding fields
I gazed until I looked for the rippled dream
Of seeing myself at last a being I loved
Loved by a being beautiful enough to love--

...The river holds the summer's pride, the sum
Of sun and summer, gold and golding glow:
Love is reality--as in the beginning it was
And love is destiny. The reality of the ecstasy
Riding into the womb begot the city,
Planted or sowed the future's flowers and powers
....again, again...

Inmost was utmost:

I thought: God is in love, in love with possibility,
His love are his loves, his love is enough
To make the promiscuity of actuality...

--The river was full of bells as the sun rose,
Shuddering ripples grew to the radiance
Of chandeliers at noon, the blazing sun
Became a jewel of inexhaustible opulence....

DELMORE SCHWARTZ

Studies of Narcissus

#####

...The river holds the summer's pride, the sum
Of sun and summer, gold and golding glow:
Love is reality--as in the beginning it was
And, love is destiny. The reality of the ecstasy
Riding into the womb begot the city,
Planted and sewn into the future's flowers and powers
...again, again...

Inmost was utmost:

The river was reality and various plurality
OF INFINITE VARIETY
And made me other than I was at each

Studies of Narcissus, or/ A History of Love/

How many thoughts, like lightning strokes, occurred
And seemed more true than any truth I knew!

Came with no concentration, no
Concern er effort, toiling up the path,
Sparked like the radiance or stood like the oars
While all the radiance arrive, the sunlight's swords:

Each thought an intuition, instant,
Spontaneous, coherent in the mind
Of words: and seemed and were and are
--As first I named them--endless sentences
Which had thereby tmow the instances
Experience unveiled, although it was
--In so many other ways--astonishing!

This was an endless sentence which I learned
Or recognized in the fluent river's school:
Everything is always somewhere else; or it is
Present when undesired- in an am胸assment
of riches, aprofusion prolific and inexhaustible.
An oppression of luxury, like Midas' gold.

This is an endless sentence which I read
As student at the river's universal school :

The present is the future. We are there
--Or going where we wished to be--the past
Is but a version of the future which
Is likely to be false. The present is

Studies of Narcissus// HL.

Endless Sentences (2)

The future twice: the future of the hope
Which we live, and die, and are still the while
Of toil and the mind of effort; and, and, it is
The comparison of the present as it is
And as it was conceived by hope, before,
When past was present still, not yet unmasked.

///How many structures of reality

These are within our reach: light which was at once
Intangible, the sweet access of being which
Which gives of knowledge gives and gives
With a purity and freedom neither thing, neither thing,
Consumed, confers, neither the bread nor wine
On which we fed on the dark god's holidays //

(Narciso) 1.28.55/?56//

I looked and looked upon the river flowing,
Supple and flowing, flat and deep,
The waters they were soft and strong

quick and unquest ioning
& in all their glittering handsomeness

Was a limpid criticism of all parodies
all caricatures

Within their small midst, upon their surface darenin

quinting, frowning
wrinkled by ripple, warped by wave

Was the face at which I looked and looked

(it might have been an infinite book!)

--Leaning a little closer, more and more
(growing)
Intent, and intense upon my desperation's hope,

& I forgot the others. they were wrong and false

And right, holding to al, that was unreal

Forgetting how many lies each moment tells,

If first they laughed at me, nevertheless

Soon after, laughter, they would pity me

Both right and wrong and wronged--self-wronged

Wrongly assured in natural certitude -

To think I looked and looked

In love upon my face. I looked for love,

I looked in love, but never looked

With love: With love's delighted stupefaction

But with dismay which grew to disappointment &
gr ing and ever growing in the river's flowing
Became intense disgust!

9 10 57 / (Return last night to civilian life // this morning
straggling to get going after a tormented --belly and back tormented
night / Come again under the star

AS A PAINTING IS, SO A POEM IS

Cezanne's Portrait of Himself AS
An Ageing Dedicated Man, Almostsatisfied by
the way he had painted the shirt front --(use
Meyer, letters , &)

O HEART, O Humiliated Heart,

Why is love the cause      until      disfigures
for                        of the ashes of scom, the bitter mouth      disfigures
                       and the lip, bitten, /
Narcissus,
Psyche
Orpheus                 Denied the reality of nobility glibly, with
                       a mechanic glibn ss.      al// unthinkable
                       --This is the exhibitionism of the blue apes,
(A History
of Love )               This is the infant and his show of the
                       self-made sculptues of excrement
                       soft and brown//      Blooming Purity

Alcestis:

The hatred of love is a form of love,

Eurydice/
Psyche
Echo

The form most intense, if ice and distance are
Measles of the rigor and the distanc

"herein all hatred, shabbies itself and shines,
Teeth of the cold gleaming, as molars' emptiness

... So the fey girl ran again and for the third
Time she ran away, because she could not find
The strength to love herself, loving another one

--He was for her as the terror and warmth of the sun,
Her blinded her, ami and the sunlight's swords:

She would not look at him, she would not believe

hi s love
wpoured and
poured,
With the
over-abundance
of waterfalls,
the passionate
brilliance of furnaces

in him, his love
in sunlight
sunlight's fire
Most often, but often to enough to her
In the
thunderlightning I roaring rain or the soft
Rain of self-pity which helps me strength no one
can escape
Then

cruis eliner/
the sleek cabin

## Studies of Narcissus

the shore,
It is eternal roar of eternity, the lightning and the thunder
--Each moment's subjection and rejection--the eternal
roar of judgement and resurrection--

...After utter forgiveness, what knowledge
Can be possessed by consciousness?

ecstasy,
that
They are not ashamed they touch other, nor afraid,
They are beautiful enough to touch and love,
Other,
They wish to touch each other, touching and touched,
Before the cause becomes the truth, before the root
becomes the fruit, because

O CHILD, DO NOT FEAR THE DARK AND SLEEP'S SECESSION
A DARK POSSESSION

O child, when you go down to sleep and sleep's secession,
You become more and other than you are, you become the
procession

Of bird and beast and tree: you are a chorus,
A pony among horses, a sapling in a dark forest,
Lifting your limbs and boughs to the sky, leafing.
And then you are one with the beaver, one
With the little animals warm in the sun,
Resting and hidden when it is white winter:

And in sleep's river you sleep
Like the river's self and the marine
Beings who mouth as they glide, nosing
And sliding lithely and smoothly,
Gleaming serenely and sleekly.

PASSAGE FROM
Studies of Narcissus

The sunlight is the world itself:

The river rose from sovereign sources, secret steeps,
Until, under the sun, it was a dream of diamonds
Or in the winter, frozen within

The snow's hushed infinite,
It was a kind of moonlight

How blond the light of summer is, how round
And how profound the blue contained and loved

Within the river's flowing glass, glinting and glittering--
Brightening and darkening, freshening, shadowing
In its irresistible going and going, holding,
Glowing and glowing being's immense plurality!

Hid what was already hidden, or not yet known.

This is one of the principle principles of ontolog y
-- every being however small is nothing less than an anthology'.

A selection/ a prehension of rior elements//
(and now does Whitehead suffer from the fallacy
ofsi mple location

Every image is conceived and rooted in the being of a
being//

evry being requeires its opponent, its antithesis, its pole//
--no sea without land, no island wi thout mainland // no man without wman
-- that which eneters must enter a passage that which accepts must oen
to afnkt.// canal// and boat// ship and (wharf// pier and water //
ferry and slip..//

( what isthe difference tween a cocktail bar and a crowbar?
(stone d to the yes? bashed and crashed?
a scare ctow , a scare

sibills--sibyls// all the sibyls//
w(armstrong

Thou are fair my love thou art fair
and the meaning of tim is enclosed in thee
as
What is the chief activity of being? cre ativity, procreativity
awake and asleep//

No state may pe is ist indefinitely w ith impa unity//
no sensation can became a nation--unless bedlam is a sovereggn
state//

Passage From The Studies of Narcissus

The river has an eminence beyond the mountains.
The river rises and rides out of the eminence of mountains.
The river is as candid as the falling rain.
The river sometimes glistens like the growing grain.
The river's rhetoric blossoms as the sun arises.
The river's statues are deer and fugitive.
The river's shells areas a window darkened.
The river's surfaces, under midsummer's glare
Are as palace of spontaneous dances.
Under the river's ripples and the river's spine
I saw the river's horses and the river's swine......
spray?

Passage from The Studies of Narcissus

THE MIND IS AS GOOD AS A PLACE
WHERE THOUGHTS GO
MIND TO MIND
AND SO DO THE MINDS
OF EVERY HAUNTED HUNTED GENERATION.

THE MIND IS A CITY LIKE LONDON,

SMOKY AND POPULOUS: IT IS A CAPITAL
LIKE ROME RUINED AND ETERNAL,

MARKED BY THE MONUMENTS OF AGES WHICH NO ONE
NOW REMEMBER. FOR THE MIND, LIKE ROME, CONTAINS
CATACOMBS, AQUEDUCTS, AMPHITHEATRES, PALACES,
CHURCHES AND EQUE STRIAN STATUES, FALLEN, BROKEN OR SOILED;
THE MIND POSSESSES AND IS POSSESSED BY ALL THE RUINS
OF EVERY HAUNTED HUNTED GENERATION'S CELEBRATION.

"CALL US WHAT YOU WILL: WE ARE MADE SUCH BYNLOVE",
WE ARE SUCH STUDS AS DREAMS ARE MADE ON, AND
OUR LIVES ARE RULED BY GODS, BY PAN,
PIPING OF ALL, AND SEEKING TO GRASP OR GRASPING
ALL OF THE GRAPES; AND BY THE BOW--AND-AROW GOD,
CUPID, PIERCING THE HEART THROUGH, SUDDENLY AND FOREVER:

Dusk we are: to dusk returning, after the burning,
After the gold fall, and fallen ash, the bronze,
Scattered and rotten, after the white null statues which
Are winter, sleep, and nothingness: when
Will the houselights of the universe
Light up and blaze?

FOR IT IS NOT THE SEA
WHICH MURMURS IN A SHELL,
AND IT IS NOT ONLY THE HEART, AT HARP O'CLOCK,
IT IS THE DREAD TERROR OF THE HOOVES OF THE UNCONTROLLABLE
HORSES OF THE-apocalypse, running in wild dread
TOWARD ARCTURUS--AND RETURNING AS SUDDENLY...

FEBRUARY 2, 1959

of art as a superior reality was that it
offered an immediate basis for an im-
portant criticism of industrialism. The
negative consequence was that it tended
to isolate art, to specialize the imagina-
tive faculty to this one kind of acti-
vity...

Both of these consequences are traced
by Mr. Williams in thoughtful chapter
after chapter. Morris becomes an almost
ideal figure, not so much for his ideas as
for his example: the man of many
talents, interests, generosities. Toward
Arnold, Mr. Williams is both sympathe-
tic and severe, appreciating the classical
stature of his defense of culture but just-
ly noting his eviscerated high-minded-
ness as it took the form of "the attach-
ment to culture which disparages
science; the attachment which writes off
politics as a narrow and squalid mis-
direction of energy; the attachment
which appears to criticize manners by
the priggish intonation of a word..."

IT is "minority culture," as F. R. Leavis
calls it, or "high-brow culture,"
as American journalism sneers, which is
here at stake. And while committed to
its assumptions, Mr. Williams finds him-
self struck by the losses that have fol-
lowed from its increasing narrowness:

For Coleridge the minority was to be a
class, an endowed order of clerisy ...
whose allegiance was to the whole body
of sciences. For Arnold the minority
was a remnant, composed of individ-
uals to be found in all social classes,
whose principal distinction was that
they escaped the limitations of habitual
class feeling. For F. R. Leavis the min-
ority is essentially a literary minority,
which keeps alive the literary tradition
and the finest capacity of the language.
This development is instructive, for the
tensity of the claim to be a "center"
[of intellectual and cultural concerns]
is, unfortunately, increasingly obvious.

True enough; Mr. Williams has put
his finger on the weakness of "minority
culture." But what he does not face up

to, or face up to enough—and I find it a
failure characteristic of his decent and
generous form of British socialism—is
that the narrowing of defensive cultural
positions may have been a retreat neces-
sary to avoid annihilation. Faulty as it
may be, marred by snobbism and pro-
vinciality and arrogance, "minority cul-
ture" has still been the one force that
makes it possible for us even to dream
of something better.

THAT we do need something better is,
in any case, Williams' central con-
clusion. He ends his book with a plea
for a "common culture" resting upon a
democratic socialist community in which
the manipulativeness and vulgarity of
our present "mass culture" would be
eradicated and the excellence of tradi-
tional "minority culture" would become
a common property. I share with him the
feeling that, for the moment at least,
"minority culture" seems to have reached
a point of exhaustion and that the politi-
cal-cultural perspective he outlines is the
only humane solution to the problems of
the 20th Century. But I do not share his
optimism and his apparent readiness to
dismiss, in the name of what we desire
but do not yet have, that which we do
have and cling to. It seems to me that he
takes much too cavalier an attitude to-
ward "minority culture"—for remem-
ber, so far we have nothing else—and
that he fails to appreciate the exact na-
ture of the difficulties which must now
be faced by those who desire a demo-
cratic "common culture."

I leave aside what seems to be a sen-
timental exaggeration of the survival
value of the British working class style
of life. My guess is that the warm feel-
ing held for it by writers like Mr. Wil-
liams and other British intellectuals is
not merely an authentic appreciation but
also a token of desperation, a sign of
their uneasiness at entering mass society.
On this I may be wrong; perhaps an
American isn't in a position to speak of
it. But when we come to two central
problems of our time as these affect fu-
ture possibilities for culture—the prob-
lems of mass society and authoritarian-
ism—then we have reached matters that
far transcend peculiarities of national
life, and it doesn't crucially matter
whether one writes as an Englishman or
American.

Mr. Howe's discussion of Mr. Williams'
book will be concluded in the next issue.

Notes on Contributors

DELMORE SCHWARTZ is completing a new
book of poems. FRANK R. PIERSON has
worked on TV and for a national maga-
zine. TOM F. DRIVER is a young critic
who lives in New York and has written
about the theatre for a number of period-
icals.

19

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DISSENT

* Our winter 1959 issue (104 pp.) features a brilliant "nuclear fable" by F. Aitkin which tells what happened after a U.S. SAC bomber went berserk; a sharp polemic against the Kissinger thesis on limited nuclear war by Wm. Newman; a lively exchange on current U.S. policies by Irving Howe, Norman Mailer, Lewis Coser and others; a sensitive appreciation of Dr. Zhivago by Nicola Chiaromonte; and;

* A bristling controversy: "Force, Justice and Integration." Hannah Arendt has written a piece on integration in the South that is likely to disturb liberals; it is sharply answered by David Spitz and Melvin Tumin.

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20

THE NEW REPUBLIC

THEATRE

Gielgud's Broadway Triumph

SIR JOHN GIELGUD's evening of readings from Shakespeare, which is now enjoying a short yet highly acclaimed engagement on Broadway, is miraculous: it succeeds in spite of itself.

I had seen Sir John previously in *The Winter's Tale and Much Ado About Nothing*, as well as in several films. He is by no means an ideal screen actor, but on the stage he had impressed me as

*Ages of Man, A Program of Readings from Shakespeare, by Sir John Gielgud (Forty-sixth Street Theatre).*

the best Shakespearean we have. So authoritative had he been that I had failed to notice that he has almost as many natural liabilities as assets. His voice is high, at times well-nigh rasping. It never achieves full-throated resonance. He is of light build, sufficiently tall, I suppose, but nothing of an imposing physical presence. He uses his body vigorously and carefully, but his gestures are not fluid. One is much aware of his hands, his stance, his feet, as if some residue of awkwardness had not entirely been expunged. In other words, when I saw him alone in evening dress upon the stage, I was surprised to learn that he is not, as I had imagined, all grace.

If Sir John overcomes personal liabilities, his "show" overcomes others. It is, as he calls it, a recital. All we have before our eyes is a reading stand, a large book, a rug, plain draperies, and the actor-reader. All we hear are excerpts from Shakespeare's plays and poems. If one sits very far away, there is little for the eye to rest upon except the light which is reflected from Sir John's nearly hairless head.

I resist the temptation to wax roman-

tic on the effects of the "pure" word. Sir John has carried out Robert Edmond Jones' dictum that we should learn, on the stage, to do "more and more with less and less." But the truth is I did not react to the evening as if mesmerized. I was aware at every moment of the limitations of the actor and of the form of presentation which he had chosen. Yet I applauded as long as the next man, and am willing to say that this reading is a theoretical event which no one who cares about theatre should miss.

It is an intellectual triumph. I had not supposed before, nor would I be willing to generalize now, that an actor could win an audience by sheer force of intellect. Whether that is the way he does it, I do not know. But that is the effect he conveys by this reading. It is as if his mind had met the mind of Shakespeare in such a moment as engendered no embarrassment. Although the actor has not forgotten his station as servant to the poet, when they speak the words belong as naturally to the one as to the other. The dramatic encounter of the evening is between Gielgud and Shakespeare. The startlingly fresh thing about the performance is that, in a day when we are exposed on every side to the ingenuities of directors, designers, and actors who wish us to heed their inventive talents, Sir John Gielgud has walked upon the stage and asked us to watch as he greets, in the realm of the imaginative mind, the poet to whom he has so obviously listened with scrupulous attention. The real purity of the evening is this: to the marriage of two minds there have been admitted no impediments.

The spectator is thus forced to sit in his seat and think. As in the presence of all good poetry, he is forced to think on two levels at once: the level of concrete picturization (with Romeo beneath the balcony, or Richard holding the mirror), and, beyond the imagery, the level of a world furnished for the habitation of the human spirit.

The selections Sir John reads, based on an anthology by George Rylands, bear the collective title, *Ages of Man*. Part One, called "Youth," includes passages on childhood, magic and faery, love, jealousy, and lust. Polonius gives

advice to Laertes, Oberon hears "a mermaid on a dolphin's back," Mercutio describes Queen Mab, Romeo falls in love with Juliet in the instant he sees her, Leontes is seized with a jealous fit, Angelo covets the body of chaste Isabella. Part Two, called "Manhood," gives us speeches on war, civil strife, kingship, the connection between passion and character. Othello, Bolingbroke, Hotspur, Richard II, Caesar, and Hamlet unfold themselves to us here. Hotspur's steaming description of his ire on the battlefield at being "pested with a popinjay," messenger from the King, brings forth from Sir John lively proof of virtuosity. The speech of Richard II at his deposition is the evening's longest and most moving piece. Part Three, "Old Age," includes speeches on sickness, death, and time. It ends, inevitably, with Prospero's epilogue to *The Tempest*.

THE arrangement of the program allows one to see a full portrait of Shakespearean man. It gives us a notion of the poetic anthropology which lies beneath the surface of all the plays and sonnets. One basis of Shakespeare's grandeur was that he was able to see man as a finite creature. It may be this, as much as anything else, which distinguishes his theatre from ours. The modern theatre seems often to be after infinity: an infinity of despair, or an infinity of progress, the latter based on some notion that the ills of the world are curable through social or psychological science. For the sake of an infinity of progress Shaw made war upon Shakespeare. The hankering after infinity is a legacy we receive from the Romantics.

Shakespeare, on the other hand, could contemplate the passage from birth to death and know that it was complete. He knew that man has the capacity to be both below and above himself. He knew that such self-transcendence is an intimation of a reality perhaps more real than "this insubstantial pageant," which, after all, "shall dissolve" and "leave not a rack behind." He did not suppose that the ability to transcend the finite meant the ability to escape it. His is a paradoxical art based on the acceptance of the limits and a dreaming beyond. Sir John Gielgud deserves highest praise for enabling the Shakespearean voice to declare again the despair and the hope of finitude.

TOM F. DRIVER

THE AMISH FOLK
by V. R. Tortora

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Photo Arts Press Box 1274N
Lancaster, Pennsylvania

FEBRUARY 2, 1959

21

MOVIES

Far East and Far Off

JAPAN is currently the world's leading producer of films numerically, yet only a handful of post-war Japanese pictures have had general release here. Prudence is one reason: many Japanese pictures probably could not succeed here either because they would have little meaning for Americans or they are shoddy or both. But it is hard to believe that there would not be appreciative and

The Mistress (Harrison); Miss Lonely-hearts (United Artists)

sufficiently large audiences for more Japanese films than are now shown.

Those that I have seen are, visually, almost unsurpassed and only rarely equalled. Even when they are boring as dramas, as was *Gate of Hell*, they are ravishing to the eye; that film contained as beautiful color pictures as I can remember on the screen. When the drama matches the visual quality, the result is a stunner like *Rashomon*.

The latest Japanese import, *The Mistress*, while not in the same class as *Rashomon*, is quite enjoyable. Its story, which is its weakness, takes place in 1900 and tells of a poor girl who becomes a rich merchant's mistress in order to provide for her ailing father whom she cannot otherwise adequately support. The merchant sets her up in her own house—and also gets a house for the father. She is ashamed of her position, more so when she discovers that her benefactor is married and that he is a moneylender, not a merchant. (Why these are added indignities one does not learn.) A handsome young medical student passes her door daily on the way to school. She falls in love with him and he is attracted to her, but he holds back because he has an appointment to leave Japan as apprentice to a German doctor. Still, the inspiration of her brief, unfulfilled love for him gives her the courage to break out of her gilded cage and be free. (Her father, for whom she first accepted concubinage, presumably is now free, too; to starve.)

This heart-throb drama would have been rejected indignantly thirty-five years ago by Norma Talmadge and Richard Barthelmess as old-hat. But it is

tolerable here because it is well acted by a cast including Hideko Takamine, a popular star, in the title-role—not only touchingly acted but acted in a style that has an exotic interest of its own. There is no Kabuki formalism about it or quaint, gift-shop Oriental flavor; it is a style rooted in the human springs of another culture and is affecting.

Then, too, as in many foreign pictures, there are fascinating glimpses of foreign mores. I had thought that, unlike some closer to home, the Japanese husband was an unquestioned king, but the moneylender's righteously harrying wife might just have loosened her corsets in Levittown. The position of the mistress in the community, the slavish devotion of her infatuated patron, the odd ways that people did or didn't make a living, the way children played and students celebrated—all these and more are incidental and valuable bonuses.

But the chief richness of the film is in its filming. Shiro Toyoda, the director, and Mitsuo Miura, the photographer, make us feel again that there is a special magic built into Japanese movie cameras. This black-and-white film is photographed in a succession of subtle lights and exquisite compositions that achieve a double effect: they tinge the players and the backgrounds with poetry and at the same time make them more immediate and real. That statement is tautological, of course, but let us remember that many Occidental movie-makers tirelessly equate immediacy with bleak naturalism.

DORE SCHARY, one of Hollywood's masters of the pulled punch, has now turned his attention to *Miss Lonely-hearts*. If asked how Nathanael West's novel could possibly be filmed, this picture will not answer the question. After another writer's Broadway dramatization had failed, Schary proceeded undaunted to write and produce a film version. The play had at least tried to capture some of the book's agony, but in the film everything is munched down into pulp. Books like this are viewed by Hollywood as problems to be "licked." Schary, who has for years been striking boldly up to large issues and then turn-

ing sideways, is an expert in this sort of "licking."

Montgomery Clift plays the leading role (here named Adam White), and, although slightly better than in his other post-accident films, is still an uncomfortable reminder of what he used to be as person and actor. Robert Ryan, a player of resonances, does his best with Shrike as written and directed. Myrna Loy lets herself be photographed revealingly and appealingly as the middle-aged Mrs. Shrike. Maureen Stapleton gives all the earthiness she can to Fay Doyle.

The script gives Adam a father imprisoned for life for killing his wife; Shrike is embittered by his wife's brief, long-past infidelity; Adam's girl has a cozy family with likeable kid brothers and understanding pop who made her What She Is. Everything has blatant, easily digested TV motivation and is directed by Vincent J. Donehue with a heaviness matching that he displayed in Schary's current Broadway high-school pageant about Roosevelt.

Various elements of West's book are present in carefully spayed form; but of the encompassing phantasmagoria of a young man ripped asunder by compassion for the horrors of the world, of the crucifixion of a youth who feels unworthy to be a Christ yet believes that life can be endured only by those who accept the Christian meaning of suffering—of all this there is no trace. It is hoped that this notice will save the time of those who care for the book.

STANLEY KAUFFMANN

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22

THE NEW REPUBLIC

TELEVISION

The Dying TV Drama

"OMNIBUS," its producer, Robert Saudek announced last month, holds the promise of a "golden age of television. We are bidding competitively for . . . Peter Ustinov—perhaps the greatest figure in Western dramatic literature and performance of our time. . . . We are bidding for Helen Hayes, for verse plays by Christopher Fry and for adaptations of the classics. Television drama is on its way to being the Elizabethan theatre of our century." His words must have fallen oddly on the ears of the generation of bright young men contemplating from their refuge in movies or Broadway the wreckage of their television careers.

Five years ago there was live television theatre; a theatre in the French sense, of a community of players, writers and audiences sharing a common theatrical tradition. It was full of mad excitement, burning talent at a riotous rate, and like the Elizabethans paying very little. As many as ten original hour plays were produced every week. The most prolific hacks were exhausted, and young men were rushed in to fill the empty hours with fresh, sweet ideas, like Marty. There was a sense of destiny about this scramble of idiocy and brilliance side by side. Paddy Chayefsky felt they had found new ways of looking at life beneath the surface of their entertainments.

"This is an age of savage introspection," he wrote, "and television is the dramatic medium through which to expose our insights . . . as a kind of dramatic writing it is unique. An excellent story (for example) could be written about homosexuality in the 'normal' American male, and television would be the only medium I know of that could present the problem as it really exists."

The young men were still groping and

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experimenting when the fundamental reality of their approach, and television's exotic economics, abruptly intervened. Savage introspection quickly revealed danger in the safest subjects; the blue pencils scratched; the stories were compromised, though the realistic staging remained. There is nothing so boring as surface realism empty of meaning; it is the curse of modern detective fiction, relentlessly coating in layers of existential detail a sugar pill of sentimentality. The live drama turned to an endless parade of glum kitchen comedies and misunderstood cops. The sponsors went West. All that is left of the old excitement, besides a couple of lusterless weekday hours, are "Playhouse 90" and "Omnibus."

IF these are the beginning of an Elizabethan age we might draw some instructive parallels: the Globe Theatre, for example, as the Playhouse 90 of its time. The Globe was not bidding for classics but for police court horror written by Shakespeare, perhaps the Peter Ustinov of his times. Mr. Saudek's prim and antiquarian policy suggests the Countess of Pembroke presenting tragedies in the style of Seneca for what T. S. Eliot referred to as an audience of "shy recluses."

Omnibus has sometimes been interesting, let me hasten to say, and sometimes sensational. I wish I had room to express in detail my gratitude to Saudek, Christopher Plummer, Irene Worth and whoever else was responsible for *Prince Orestes*, an abridgement of *The Oresteia*, of a few weeks back. But then there was Peter Ustinov's *The Empty Chair*. It is the story of Danton, the French revolutionary hero, and a neat showpiece it is for a small theatre, but so ineptly arranged for television (Mr. Ustinov co-directed) that one lost track of who was who, and the camera kept getting stuck at the wrong end of the room. It was staged with Mr. Ustinov's unerring theatrical instinct for the stage, where the camera's work is done by moving the actors. What we saw was a distant stage set strained through the camera, as though we peeked in at it through the mail slot. The stagy punge

language (Mr. Ustinov wrote it) might have soared over footlights; on television, as it is apt to do, it was merely grandiloquent, giving me the uneasy feeling I get watching operatic love duets, wondering if passion can triumph over earache.

There has been nothing this year on Omnibus as original and effective as J. P. Miller's *The Days of Wine and Roses*, nor to compare with the audacity of *The Plot to Kill Stalin*, both on Playhouse 90. This show when it tries an adaptation has the courage to die in public, which it did nobly and horribly with *Heart of Darkness*. There has never been an Omnibus to compare with William Gibson's play about Helen Keller, *The Miracle Worker*, and nothing as gentle and sweet without cloying as Elick Moll's *Gentleman from Seventh Avenue*, and no direction as imaginative as Arthur Penn's *Portrait of a Murderer*. All of this on Thursday night for a vulgar, heedless audience, thirsting for the blood of Westerns. Playhouse 90 is good commercial theatre, with its own style and its own people. Its cousin is the Western, as violent and cliché as pre-Elizabethan Italian melodrama, and as stylized and peopled with labelled stereotypes as Moralities.

OMNIBUS, though it has more freedom than most network shows, turns its back on what could be living theatre to make of itself a school or museum. There is no reason why Mr. Saudek should not go on dishing up classics, except that just now there is a crisis. Playhouse 90 exists without a base; alone it cannot support the body of writers and directors it must draw on. It has trouble finding good original scripts. The writers are writing for movies and the stage (and if they are successful enough there, perhaps will be hired back by Omnibus?). Playhouse 90 is only two-thirds sponsored, and in the halls at CBS there is quiet talk about what to do Thursday nights next year. It is a queer time to talk about budding golden ages. I wish instead Omnibus were leaving Christopher Fry and Peter Ustinov on stage, where they glory, and extending its freedom to Paddy Chayefsky, Arthur Penn, Delbert Mann, William Gibson, Tad Mosel, George Roy Hill and the rest. They were television's own.

FRANK R. PIERSON

FEBRUARY 2, 1959

23

Correspondence

(Continued from page 3)

United States will ultimately have co-
herent political parties like other na-
tions, instead of foggy coalitions" (NR,
Dec. 15).

To maintain their coherency, the poli-
tical parties of Great Britain and West
Germany generally require strong lead-
ership and effective party discipline. Un-
der the British or West German party
system, the voter has in effect only an
indirect vote, a vote for the party rather
than the individual candidate, who, once
elected, as a rule has precious little to
say. . . . The decisions are made in the
party caucus. The American system
shares some of these features, but I find
it nonetheless heartening to read of the
Congressional leadership of a party with
an overwhelming majority having to
bicker and bargain even with the fresh-
men, and I cannot help feeling that un-
der these circumstances the American
legislator is better able actively to repre-
sent the people who vote for him
(whether he or they are enlightened or
not is another question) than his British
or West German colleague and that in
any case this system might be preferable
to one where the party leadership would
be able to ram an ever so progressive or
liberal program through Congress with-
out having to face prolonged debate or
loakroom concessions.

DONALD S. DETWILER
Goettingen, West Germany

► Segregation & the Textile Workers

SIRS:

YOUR excellent article "Southerners and Schools" (NR, Jan. 12) merits warmest praise, especially from those of us who live in Northern Virginia. However, I believe some clarification of the stand of the Textile Workers Union of America's local in Warren County is in order. I refer to the story that a check-off of a dollar a month per member and the use of the union hall for a private segregated school had been instituted by the union after the closing of the white high school by Governor Almond.

As a former labor reporter and a
member of a labor family, I was con-
siderably disturbed by the story and
could not understand how a union like
the Textile Workers could participate in

such an action, and I made a point of
checking it with the union.

It was not easy to find anyone who
would talk about it. Those to whom I
did talk seemed suspicious, and distrust-
ful of the press. However, I finally did
reach one of the International Vice
Presidents of the TWUA and he assured
me . . . that the International first be-
came aware of the situation through the
daily newspapers; that the International
officers took immediate and vigorous ac-
tion to stop it and that it was stopped,
prior to November 25.

Falls Church, Va.

► Books for Eight-Year-Olds

SIRS:

REFERRING to a parenthetical comment on the writing of books for eight-year-olds in my "Leaders that Follow" (NR, Dec. 1), your correspondent Toni Packer (NR, Jan. 12), in delicate and courteous terms, raises the question what a writer on international affairs can be expected to know about educating elementary-school children. I am glad she did not raise the question of what a father of five children can be expected to know about international affairs, because I would have found that harder to answer.

LOUIS J. HALLE

Geneva, Switzerland

► Art and Art News

SIRS:

IAM DELIGHTED that you have taken a
stand against the asininities perpetu-
ated in the name of art. . . . The antics of
the reviewers in *Art News* who praise
this trash have given me some wonderful
belly laughs. I think that the drivel they
write about the abstract expressionists
should be in a department of the maga-
zine labeled Humor.

FRED MITTEN

Phoenix, Arizona

"... cabalistic reverence"

ONE READS *The New Republic* not for the sake of its "advanced political ideas" or its "modern taste," but for the features that have distinguished its point of view for years: consistent clear thinking and hard-boiled common sense. These qualities are as incompatible with what is "reactionary" as they are with what is just plain wrong, stupid or bad.

It is only proper therefore that Jackson
Pollock and Art News should be ex-
amined in columns not usually given
over to what are unfortunately called
"the arts."

It is refreshing and encouraging to
read such sharp inquiry into an area
usually guarded by an unpregnable
cabalistic reverence. It seems to me that
the canons of "modern painting," espe-
cially as fixed by the Art News, could
do with plenty of the frank attention.

Fort Smith, Arkansas

DONALD S. BAIRD

The New Republic welcomes communications from its readers in regard to subjects of current interest. Those of 300 words or less lend themselves to publication more readily than longer letters.

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7

THE PROGRESSIVE'S
GOLDEN ANNIVERSARY IS
YOUR GOLDEN OPPORTUNITY

You have a rare opportunity to share
in celebrating the Fiftieth Anniversary
of the founding of The Progressive mag-
azine by Robert M. LaFollette, Sr.

The editors invite you to enjoy the Golden Anniversary issues they have planned to commemorate this historic occasion, and to receive FREE the giant 50th Anniversary number, just off the press—the largest and finest issue The Progressive has ever published.

Your free copy of this book-length
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by authors who represent the forward-
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hallmark of The Progressive:

Stuart Chase poses the provocative
proposition of a world with "No
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Richard L. Neuberger traces the upward course of conservation since 1909—and warns of the ground lost in this decade.

Walter Reuther looks at the abun-
dance that surrounds us and sees
"The Unfinished Task."

Estes Kefauver hammers at the
march of monopoly in America and
calls for a Secretary of Consumers
in the Presidential Cabinet.

Sidney Lens takes a penetrating look
into the self-regimented American
"Mass Man."

John Swomley exposes "The Growing
Power of the Military."

Norman Thomas analyzes "The Fail-
ure of Organized Socialism" in
America.

Richard Rovere discusses the extent
to which the search for more and
better technology may result in the
loss of our true values.

Morton Grodzins turns the spotlight
on an explosive "Segregation in the
North" that may make the South's
problem pale by comparison.

Milton Mayer probes deeply into "The

American Spirit" and finds it want-
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Washington Wire

Pablum and Mush

"TODAY, however, we realize that the American party—Democrat or Republican—is an agent of national unity, mainly because it lacks ideology," writes Peter F. Drucker in *Harper's*. "We are beginning to realize that the really unprincipled anachronism is the ideological party."

Which reminds us of a little legend.

Once upon a time there was a Political Caterer who yearned for Reform. The Village had a couple of sturdy old Inns—one The Elephant, the other The Donkey. Every traveler had a Choice of Meals that were Tasty and Ideological.

"What an Anachronism!" cried the Caterer. "Let us Modernize things."

So the Caterer put in a tiled, hygienic Frozen Custard Stand. More than this—he hit on a Novel Idea. He took all the viands from a typical breakfast, lunch and dinner, and he minced them and shredded them—oatmeal, fried fish, ice cream and soup—into one stew. The stuff was Glutinous and Gluey and Smelled Bad. But it was wonderfully Non-Ideological. Besides that you could eat it Standing up Without Chewing.

The Caterer served the stuff out of two Hygienic Non-Doctrinaire Chrome Nozzles, and while you ate a flag waved and a juke box played "Mother Machree." One faucet fed out gruel called "Pablum-GOP"; the other dispensed "Mush-Dem."

Foreigners found the scheme rather disgusting. They called the two products Flat and Monotonous and said you could not Tell Them Apart. People at the Frozen Custard Stand, they charged, lost their Taste for Politics. The Caterer retorted that People Liked to be Spoon Fed., As for Taste, he said, Pablum-GOP was "Smokier."

There was one Curious Fact. All the Famous Political Scientists hailed the System. "It exists," they said, "therefore it is Good." In a Country As Big As America, they explained, you must serve

the Voters Mush. Anything else would be Divisive. The PhD Political Mush School chanted, "Mush is Safe, Mush is Non-Ideological, Mush is All-American!"

That is the end of the Legend. Except for One Thing. People who ate their meals at the Political Frozen Custard Stand after a while got listless. They lacked Vitamins. Their Teeth Fell Out.

Who Am I?

WE keep thinking of this legend in various connections. Out in Des Moines last week GOP Chairman Meade Alcorn proposed a committee to sit down and figure out what his party stands for. In other words the Republican Party does not know what it is.

I think there is a sad loss of national morale in a land where political parties do not stand for anything. This thought occurred in reading the frightening story of why GI's folded in Korean prison camps, in Eugene Kinkead's *In Every War But One* (Norton: $3.75). Almost 30 percent of sample US prisoners "technically" collaborated with the enemy. It was the only war where this happened. The captured GI's did not seem to grasp the American heritage or American history. The Army wants to know why. Perhaps one answer is that their loyalties had never been touched by the parties which are at the very base of the political system—parties commonly accepted as being frauds and façades, and where learned PhD's justify the system by saying it is safe. Too often the children have been fed on mush.

One way to get political parties that mean more would be to have biennial or annual party congresses as they do in other democracies. Chairman Alcorn might also consider setting up a GOP National Advisory Council like the Democrats'. Such an agency gives continuity to the party and creates a national voice as opposed to the more conservative and parochial Congressional voice.

The deadly Gallup Polls are starting on poor Nixon—the same "he-can't-win" polls that eventually beat Bob Taft. In trial heat matches with various hypothetical opponents Gallup shows that Nixon customarily runs behind respective Democrats while Rockefeller, by contrast, does better. This is the hardest hurdle Nixon has to get over.

Will Lyndon Johnson be the Democratic candidate? We don't imagine so, and the reason won't be civil rights or integration. It is that Johnson is, and has been, a major prop of the fabulous oil and gas interests. It is hard to believe that a man can be nominated for President who has the 27½ percent depletion allowance for oil and gas corporations hung around his neck. This is the biggest single tax loophole and largely accounts for the recent crop of Texas millionaires.

Business Ethics

DURING the Sherman Adams-Goldfine gift-giving episode many students looked into the question of Washington ethics. They re-discovered the old fact, that it is terribly difficult to keep low-paid government employees honest who have to deal with businessmen having a radically different approach. The government employees have federal concessions to give away; businessmen take for granted the use of gifts, pressure and cash to obtain these concessions. Often the amiable Goldfines see nothing wrong with their methods: they are starry-eyed opportunists.

Now the Columbia Broadcasting Company in a 55-minute "for-adults-only" presentation on "The Business of Sex" offers another insight into the business ethos. It concerns the matter of "entertainment" by customers men, primarily in New York. This allegedly includes call girls and the full-time employment of prostitutes. The gaudy story may be over-stressed and it does not link directly with anything in Washington. But it illuminates again the problem of keeping government clean. Washington is about as honest as the rest of the country. This reporter thinks it is probably more honest. If a federal employee yields to a bribe, it is from some free enterprise businessman. Washington is the place where the business ethos and the government ethos meet, and their difference breeds conflict.

T.R.B.

The New Republic
A JOURNAL OF OPINION

VOL. 140, No. 5, ISSUE 2307

FEBRUARY 2, 1959

THE WEEK

3

Eisenhower Economics; Defense in 1960—The Citizen's Dilemma; Labor Morality; Lyndon Steps Forward; "Isn't It Clear We Have Justice?"; Mikoyan—Plus and Minus

ARTICLES

8

Atlanta Is Different

by Helen Fuller

The News magazines

by Ben H. Bagdikian

BOOKS 17

THEATRE 20

MOVIES 21

TELEVISION 22

GILBERT A. HARRISON, Editor & Publisher

HELEN FULLER, Managing Editor

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F. R. RUSKIN, Asst. to the Publisher

Contributing Editors: Alexander M. Bickel, B. H. Haggin, Irving Howe, Gerald W. Johnson, Stanley Kauffmann, James E. King, Jr., Donald Malcolm, Helen Hill Miller, Michael Straight

Published weekly (except for omissions of four summer issues) and distributed by The New Republic, 1244-19th St., N.W., Washington 6, D. C. Phone: Republic 7-8656. Entered as second-class matter September 26, 1950, at the post office at Washington, D. C., under the Act of March 3, 1879, Single copy, 25¢. Yearly subscription, $8.00; Foreign, $9.00. Armed Forces personnel or students, $5.00. Subscribers desiring change of address should notify us at least three weeks in advance. Please include both old and new addresses. Copyright, 1958, by Harrison-Blaine, Inc.

Correspondence

► The Coalition Parties

SIRS:

ALTHOUGH I understand TRB's frustration about the unwillingness of the Democratic Congressional leadership to cooperate with the Democratic National Advisory Council, I cannot join him in "... hoping ... that the

(Continued on page 23)

Eisenhower Economics

TWO GENERAL PROPOSITIONS in the President's Economic Report warrant comment. Mr. Eisenhower sees our present partial recovery from the recession as underlining the importance of "avoiding hasty and disproportionate actions, such as tax reductions that needlessly endanger the prospects of future fiscal balance and prejudice the orderly revision of the tax structure." A more objective account of the Administration's response to the recession would have mentioned its reluctance to admit the recession's existence, the sluggishness of the Federal Reserve System in shifting from a tactic of monetary contraction to one of monetary expansion, its opposition to minimum federal standards for unemployment compensation benefits, and its insensitivity to the social and economic costs of unemployment and underemployment of national resources. Indeed, it can reasonably be argued that the tax cut which the President scorned, if large enough and early enough applied, would have shortened the recession and made it less deep. Paradoxically, too, it might well have resulted in a deficit considerably smaller than the $12 billion deficit we are going to have, since taxable incomes and taxable profits would have shrunk less.

Implicit also in the President's Report is, if not a theory of inflation, at least an attempt to isolate inflation's prime villains. As Mr. Eisenhower puts it: "Increases in money wages, and other compensation not justified by the productivity performance of the economy are inevitably inflationary. ... Self-discipline and restraint are essential."

In other words, labor unions are strong enough to push wages up so high that the only recourse businessmen see is to raise prices. The price increases then serve as new occasions for wage adjustment, and so on.

This is seriously misleading doctrine. In the first place, the kinds of activities which employ most Americans—service industries, for example— do not show substantial increases in productivity. In the second place, even if productivity were accepted as the only basis of wage increase (a sizable assumption), it is not clear whether unions should be guided by productivity changes in their own industry or in industry in general. The statistical problems are both too large and too controversial to give unions a clear lead.

But these points aside, the President's generalizations are at wide variance with the way our economic life is organized. Before unions can act as an inflationary force, managements must agree to pay them "excessive" wages, the same managements must raise their prices, and the monetary authorities must increase the supply of money in order to allow commodities to be bought at their new prices. What frequently happens, of course, is that major industries, organized in semi-monopolistic ways, cover wage increases with huge mark-ups. If unions ask too much, it is because they recognize how this process works. The President's opinions on how this process can be made accountable to the public interest would be interesting to hear.

4

THE NEW REPUBLIC

# Defense in 1960—
The Citizen's Dilemma

THERE WAS NOTHING unexpected in the President's defense budget for the fiscal year 1960, which begins on July 1, 1959. The $40.85 billion in new appropriations will maintain expenditures at approximately the present levels, with a slight increase, probably inadequate, to compensate for the steadily rising costs of military hardware. The ground forces reductions scheduled earlier to occur by June 3, 1959 (approximately 25,000 for the Army and 15,000 for the Marines), together with a reduction of 5,000 for the Air Force slated during the new fiscal year, will bring the totals, by June 30, 1960, down to 2.5 million. These personnel reductions will result in no dollar savings, owing to higher costs per man that are traceable, in good part, to the reforms in proficiency pay introduced as a result of the recommendations of the Cordiner Committee.

On the threshold of the long-range missile age, the budget provides less money for the production of such missiles in 1960 than in 1959. The explanation seems to be that the small increase in research and development funds is offset by the cancellation of certain production items (notably the Regulus II, the Navy airbreathing cruise missile that was to fill the gap until the Polaris solid-fuel ballistic missile is ready); also that the modest missile production schedules already underway (Jupiter and Thor IRBM's to be stationed abroad, and Atlas ICBM's to be stationed in this country) will be largely completed with funds already appropriated, while the later generation missiles (Titan, Polaris, and Minuteman) will not go into production in 1960.

Congressional watchdogs of the national security are, of course, unconvinced that Mr. Eisenhower's defense requests are adequate. They are impressed, as the President and the Secretary of Defense appear not to be, with the reality of the prospective "missile-gap." Moreover, they are beginning to be impressed by the need for more adequate means to meet "less than total" threats, to use the President's own phrase. They do not agree with the Administration that the means we have now were proved adequate by last summer's crisis in Lebanon and last fall's crisis over Quemoy. For in both these cases there was ample time for our moves to be made; in neither were our forces required to fight.

The plight of the ordinary citizen who desires an objective, non-partisan, evaluation of the adequacy of the provisions for national defense is frustrating in the extreme. How can he pit his judgment against the President's military background, shored up by the vast resources of the Defense establishment? On the other hand,

"Our aim is a sensible posture of defense . . ."

—EISENHOWER, Jan. 9, 1959

how can he ignore the widely advertised adverse judgments of the services themselves on the adequacy of the budget, and the disturbing opinions of scientists who have gained their technical and intelligence know-how in government service? He must be doubly disconcerted to hear Senators accusing the intelligence agencies of altering their estimates of Russian capability to fit the Administration's budget. He can derive no comfort from the thought that the Senators, even those who are members of the Armed Services Committee, aren't much better off than he is, since they too have to take what information the Administration is willing for them to have, and lack the means to evaluate it independently. The bystander is also aware that Congressional "revolts" are rather pointless when the sums appropriated in excess of budget requests in one fiscal year are merely reserved until the next and are then used to justify diminished appropriations recommendations in the new budget.

Citizen or Senator can adopt one of two attitudes. He can take the President's judgments on faith—this is what the Republican Senators do. Or he can challenge those judgments.

If he chooses to challenge the Administration, as we do, he bases his challenge on such considerations as the