A CHILD'S UNIVERSAL HISTORY

Bertholde Cannon, teacher and author, became passionately devoted to children, or the idea of children, after he had been married for four years.

This devotion seemed to his wife Edith mere egotism as did his desire to be himself a father. The marriage was not what it might have been and this was one form in which Edith expressed her dissatisfaction.

"You merely want an expansion of your ego," she said to her husband.

"Every desire, the saint's and the criminal's," he replied, "can be looked at in that light, if that's the kind of light you like."

This kind of discussion often occurred at breakfast as Bertholde looked from the morning paper at the two children of their neighbors as they stamped about in the backyard. Eva Cornelius, the little girl, blond, and fey, possessed by astonishing and astonished eyes, sought each morning to evoke a variety of emotions (the chief of which was rage) in her brother, John Cornelius, aged three. John, however, was sturdy and detached. He tried to keep away from his sister and to disregard her. To her he preferred whatever mud or stick he managed to secure, and he did not care for her attentions.

Bertholde soon admired John's indifference and detachment very much.

"Some morning soon he will start to hit her back," he said to Edith, enjoying the idea and the prospect very much,

He learned from Susan Cornelius, the mother of the children, that John was descended from Cotton Mather and his maternal grandfather had been a United States Senator from New York State. Bertholde had no great interest in national politics, although he enjoyed the excitement of national campaigns. But as his admiration for John

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Cornelius grew, he decided that it might well be expressed in the
prophecy that some day at the proper time, John would become President.

His parents were delighted by this idea. Edith snickered.
"I suppose," she said, "that if your brother's next child is a boy
(the first had been a girl and his brother's wife was pregnant again),
there will be no holding you."

The brother lived in Florida, far-off. Edith suggested
that he would certainly go to see the new boy by the fastest plane.

As for John Cornelius, he regarded his sponsor and admirer
with an absent-minded disdain, accepting gifts of chewing gum and
candy from him as if they were his natural due. Eva Cornelius, on the
other hand, became flirtatious with Bertholde, desiring the limelight
herself. Eva went one week-end with her mother, Susanna Cornelius,
to be present at the wedding of a cousin in a distant city and during
this week-end, when John, deprived of his mother and his sister and
left with the servant girl, sought out Bertholde, shyly smiling.

"You are only interested in friendship with me," said
Bertholde, "when your mother and sister are absent."

The child made nothing of this remark, but asked his adult
admirer to tell him a story. Bertholde told him the story of Noah
which was much enjoyed by John because he liked boats very much and
also animals. He wanted a detailed description of Noah's ark and
when the story was finished, he wanted to hear it again.

"What a President he will make," said Bertholde to Edith,
"he stands repetition. He will enjoy shaking hands with thousands
on Easter Sunday."

"Don't be foolish," said Edith, making use of a phrase
to which she was devoted, "all children like to hear the same story
again and again. They will not let you alter any of the details,
they like it just the same each time."

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"O, I am glad to hear that," said Bertholde, "it is
a love of exactitude. He will be precise, he will be nice. Yet
he will be full of charity, too."

"This child," said Edith, "has become a figment of your
imagination."

# # #

Bertholde's devotion to the sturdy little boy continued,
but at a distance. It was not truly a personal relationship.
Consequently, it was not unnatural that he should shift to a
second boy, although he was not fickle. This change occurred
at Christmas when Bertholde and his wife went to visit their
friends, the Roses, who also had two children, a girl and a boy
who were the same age as John and Eva Cornelius. They were met
at nightfall at the suburban railroad station, near where they
lived, and little Helen Rose, a beautiful blue-eyed blond girl,
ran forward to greet Bertholde and fell flat on her face sur-
prised by the platform, an icy and slippery surface. This sub-
sequently seemed to Bertholde a sensational beginning to a friend-
ship as he helped the little girl to her feet and saw how she hid
the tears which rose to her face. He remarked upon her fortitude
to Philip Rose as they drove to the house in the country. No
sooner had they arrived than Jeremiah Wallace Rose ran forward
blindly and embraced Bertholde about the knees.

"I see you," he cried loudly and joyously.

"Me, me," said Bertholde to himself, "long branded
with identity."

He was thrilled by this spontaneous welcome.

"If he sees me," he said to himself, "he sees a great
deal more than I do, for no one can maintain that I am able to
see myself."

4.

Bertholde was soon so charmed by Jeremiah that he wished that Jeremiah too might in the future rule the ageing republic. But his commitment to John Cornelius made him pause. He decided that Jeremiah ought to be Vice-President and that the two gifted boys ought soon to meet.

"You," said Edith, "must be under the impression that you not only control history, but also dominate the major political parties."

"O no," said Bertholde, long used to such disgruntled remarks, "I am merely exercising the rights of a citizen in a democracy."

"Too much exercise is not good for you," said Edith.

# # #

Not long after this discussion, the Rosed moved to the city and to the neighborhood where Bertholde and Edith lived. As Bertholde saw Jeremiah more often, the strain of his first commitment proved too much for him. And when he learned that Jeremiah had been born on Election Night, 1940, that, as his mother was driven to the hospital by his father, his mother, seized by her labor pains, had said:

"Philip, I think you can disregard the traffic lights."

Bertholde was overcome. For this remark seemed to him to be the obvious beginning of a great fate. He observed that it might not be an accident that the blue-eyed boy had been born on the day once in four years of great democratic choice. And he announced to Edith and to Susanna that Jeremiah and not John must be the President.

Susanna, annoyed and disappointed, stuch out her tongue at him.

"You are faithless, fickle, and disloyal," she said.

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"John can be the Prime Minister of the British Empire,"
said Bertholde.

Susanna was enraged.

"Either he will be President or he will be nothing,"
she said.

"In questions of world import," said Bertholde, "we
must submit and surrender our personal desires to the interests
of our great nation."

Undeterred by the resentment he had caused, Bertholde
went to confer with Philip, who, like Bertholde, had long been a
student of Freud.

"Jeremiah can be the first psychoanalyst in the White
House," said Bertholde.

"He can come out against inhibition of every kind,"
said Philip.

"Yes, yes," said Bertholde, mounting in excitement, "as
soon as he takes office, he will abolish Mothers' Day, the national
celebration of the Oedipus complex."

Philip, assented and suggested that Bertholde become
Jeremiah's tutor and Bertholde accepted the proposal immediately
without hesitation.

"Jeremiah will be our first socialist King," cried the
intoxicated author and teacher. "Perhaps we ought to make him
king, instead of president? Four years or eight are not enough.
Perhaps we ought to start a dynasty?"

"Yes," said Philip, "but let's keep it a top drawer
secret."

# # #

It was not long before Jeremiah Wallace Rose was very
much aware of the unusual interest and devotion if which

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the object. He took it for granted. He accepted Bertholde's
arrival with gifts, especially candy, as the most natural thing
in the world, no more remarkable than breathing. And he adopted
Bertholde's name which astonished some and gave Bertholde the
finest pleasures of the ego.

"This is Bertholde," he asid when he answered the
telephone, "who is calling?"

This was the cause of perplexity, but Jeremiah was
obdurate, immovable. He insisted that his name was Bertholde,
and consequently the Rose number was often thought to be the
wrong number by friends of the family.

At last Bertholde decided that perhaps it would be
best for this phase to draw to a conclusion. He rang the Rose
number.

"I am Jeremiah," he said when Jeremiah answered.

"How are you?" said Jeremiah, "I am Bertholde."

"Now look here, Jeremiah," said Bertholde vainly,
"this must come to a halt. You are making a comedy of identity.
It is no use having a name if you are going to use someone else's
name. There is enough ignorance and confusion in the world as
it is without any effort on your part to increase it."

"How about some candy," Jeremiah, said Jeremiah.

To Philip Rose, Bertholde declared that this incident
showed philosophical insight on his son's part, for it was obvious
that he understood how complex the self identification was and
how ambiguous.

And in the same way Jeremiah delighted and astounded
his sponsor when he heard "Peter and the Wolf," the tone poem by
the musician Prokofieff, in which a little boy, Peter, is menaced
by a dangerous wolf, but in the end rescued from the wolf'

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clutches, while the wolf himself is assassinated. Jeremiah took the wolf's part, hoping that the wolf would succeed in his malevolent purpose and sorrowing when the wolf was thwarted and killed.

"What a prodigy Jeremiah is," said Bertholde, rejoicing in his youthful friend.

So it was when Bertholde and Edith visited the Roses one evening when Jeremiah and Helen had gone to bed, but were not asleep. Jeremiah who had heard his sponsor's voice on the stair hid under his covers, seeking to attract more attention. Bertholde recognized the strategem and decided to pay attention to Helen who had for some time shown no little resentment of her brother's success. After five minutes of conversation between Bertholde and Helen, during which Bertholde showed no interest in the boy beneath the covers and on the contrary a fascinated interest in what Helen had to say, Jeremiah, impatient at last, thrust out his head.

"Hello, Bertholde," he shouted, "did you bring us candy again?"

"No," was the reply, "you have come to expect candy, you take it for granted, this will end by spoiling candy for you."

"It will not," declared Jeremiah with conviction.

"It will not, it will not," his sister affirmed, dancing and chanting.

"What have you been thinking about, Jeremiah?" asked Bertholde.

"I have been thinking about everything," answered the blue-eyed boy.

"How can you think about everything?" asked Bertholde, a sometime student of metaphysics and theory of knowledge.

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"That's all there is to think about!" shouted Jeremiah at the top of his voice.

# # #

After this exchange, Bertholde rehearsed in mind his previous encounters with children memorable or remarkable.

There had been the little boy, Johnson his name was, who, when his family moved to a suberb, had been sent to the Catholic Hungarian school because there were no other Catholic schools in the neighborhood. It turned out that he was the only child in the school who was not of Hungarian descent and this made him unhappy. He returned from school unhappy and crying: "I want to be a Hungarian!" Soon other children pitied him and gave him candy because of his unhappiness and because of the deprivation of not being Hungarian.

There also had been a little boy who on a picnic with his father and mother did not want to eat the dish his mother pressed upon him. As the look upon his mother's face hardened in irritation in the struggle to control her emotion, the little boy broke the gathering storm with a remark like a lightning stroke.

"Be happy, Mother," he said, "be happy, be happy!"

"What insight," thought Bertholde, "how heartbreaking to hear such an outcry from the mouth of a little child. Jeremiah does not know as that child knew the distance of happiness, the suffering of human beings, the torments of consciousness."

And yet Bertholde was not sure that this was true when during his next visit to the Rose household, as he dined with the Roses, Jeremiah, wakened by a fearful dream, came to the head of the stair and called down to him.

"I am lonely, Bertholde," he said tearfully, "I am very lonely. It is dark at night."

9.

Bertholde was very much moved by this appeal from the
little boy. He too when little and even as late as his twenty-
fifth year had been afraid of the dark, and afraid of being alone,
and awakened at night by dreams, and excited by lights and visitors
at night. He pleaded with the Roses to permit him to go upstairs,
touch the button and make the light bloom, console the little
boy and tell him a story. This was a breach of the Rose's dis-
cipline, but they yeilded/Bertholde's desire.

He went upstairs, turned on the light, took the little
boy back to bed and told him that he would have to get used to
darkness and loneliness because they were everywhere when the sun
went down. But soon he recognized that this was not the time for
the youthful Jeremiah to hear about such matters, not, at least,
in the way that he, Bertholde, was capable of speaking of them.

"Tell me a story of when you were a little boy," said
Jeremiah, desiring above all to stay awake although he also loved
stories very much, and loved even more the repetition of stories,
a repetition in which he corrected all changes and omissions.

"When I was a little boy," said Bertholde pensively,
"I was supposed to go to the circus with my mother and father.
My mother and I met my father after his day's work was done and it
turned out that my mother had forgotten to bring the tickets.
Then my father bought new tickets, but he was angry at my mother
and my mother was afraid of my father's anger, and she was unhappy.
I was sick the day after and my mother said that I was sick because
of having too much peanuts at the circus, but I think I was sick
because my father was angry and my mother was unhappy. And I think
my father was angry at my mother not because of the tickets, but
because he did not like her very much."

The child had fallen asleep. The story had bored h

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Bertholde turned out the light and went downstairs.

"Be happy, Mother," he said to himself, "be happy, be happy!"

# # #

Interested (to say the least) as he was in children, Bertholde thought of his own childless marriage and of the fact that his wife did not want a child. She said at various times that she would be jealous of the child, that the world of our time was too evil a one for a poor child, and finally flatly she declared that she just did not want to have a child. There could be no doubt of the truth of her declaration nor of her ignorance of the true reasons in her for not wanting a child.

"Had I a child," he thought, seeking to console himself, "I would not be able to make as much of him as I do of Jeremiah, since that would be braggadocio, bravado, and bumptious parenthood."

He thought then and sadly of the marriages he knew of the boys and girls of his generation, many of whom now had children. Some had married because they were in the toils of a relationship that they had not understood they were slipping into, at least at the start; and some had married because they wished to get work done, supposing that the stability of the married state would give them more time and energy for what they really wanted to accomplish in this life; and some had married in flight from the tyranny of the family life which had given them being; some because they became more and more lonely when they ate dinner alone; and some because they were in love, but these were very few in number and often enough the love turned into hatred or boredom, teased by the possibility of promiscuity. Yet marriage was a need and parenthood was a need, for otherwise some part of one's being lay idle and decayed like unused muscle.

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Philip and Bertholde had agreed that the latter was
to become Jeremiah's tutor and that Bertholde was to visit
Jeremiah Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Bertholde decided that
the future politician should be well-informed immediately about
the history of America and of the world.

It turned out, however, that the clever child's
interests were at this time more limited than one would have
supposed. He was not at all interested, for example, in the
story of George Washington (father of his country and in more ways
than one) and the childhood episode concerning the chopping down
of the apple tree in which the famous exchange occurs in which
youthful George confesses his crime of chopping.

"Father, I cannot tell a lie," bravely and candidly,

"What a fool!" cried Jeremiah, "anyone who cannot tell a lie is just a dumb-bell who does not know nothing."

Bewildered Bertholde tried to explain that the story
probably was not true. It was an invention by an author who
wished to make children believe that if you want to become Pres-
ident you had better be a good boy and not tell lies.

"You mean the story-teller was a liar himself," asked
the quick-witted child, "and was just trying to get children not
to tell lies like him?"

"We will discuss this at a future date," said Bertholde,
stumped by his question, "He was not a liar, but I can't explain
what an author is right now, but to be an author is not to be a
liar. It is something else, it is the making up of stories."

"That's a liar," said Jeremiah.

Bertholde felt that he was making no progress whatever
as the tutorial hour waned.

Helen rushed in. She had decided that she would not

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come to these sessions since they were clearly intended for
Jeremiah, and Jeremiah was without question, beyond a doubt,
Bertholde's favorite, much as the latter sought to pretend that
he liked them equally. But her curiosity was too great.

Rushing in, she shouted, "Tell us about your adventures
when you were a little boy."

Bertholde did not need much encouragement, for he was
fond of speaking of being a little boy. He chose to tell them of
a story he had encountered in a poem book.

"Once upon a time," he said, "there was a little boy
named Hershey whose parents were unhappy and whose unhappiness
made him unhappy also. And one night he was dreaming that he
had to go to the bathroom, but he was unable to go because the
plumber was fixing the bathroom. He kept dreaming and thinking
in his dream that the plumber was just about to fix the bathroom
when his parents awakened him and stood by his crib and said to
him: 'Who do you want to live with, your father or your mother?'"

"Now Helen, what would you answer, if you were asked
such a question," he asked the girl who seemed to be very much
interested in this riddle.

"My mother," said Helen, who was not telling the truth,
"or my grandmother," thinking this a more tactful answer.

"The plumber," said Jeremiah, baffling Bertholde though
he knew that Jeremiah had a strong interest in plumbing and regarded
all plumbers as men of ingenuity and power.

"But this little boy," Bertholde continued, made a
better answer, though perhaps by accident. "All that he said
was that he wanted to go to the bathroom. In this way he refused
to take sides in a quarrel which he knew little or nothing about,
and that is the best way to be."

13.

The children were interested in the story, although perplexed by the ending and indifferent to moral Bertholde had drawn for them. They did not know that the true reason that Bertholde had told them not to take sides (in matters they did not understand) was that he found that he himself took sides too often (in matters which he did not fully understand) and the consequences ran from the disastrous to the catastrophic.

"Another adventure," shouted Jeremiah, "just one more adventure." He heard his mother coming up the stair and feared he would have to go to sleep.

"Yes," said Helen, "but this time put in a little girl."

"Not tonight," Bertholde replied, "I must speak with your mother before I tell a story in which there is a little girl because when there is a little girl as well as a little boy in the story, it is very strange and often sad."

"I like sad and strange stories," said Helen.

"I will ask your mother if it's possible to tell such stories," said Bertholde, as Elizabeth entered to persuade the children to turn out the light please and go to sleep.

"If you don't stop talking to each other," said the good mother, "I will have to put one of you in the other room."

Bertholde said goodnight, kissed his protegee and his protegee's sister, promising to come again in two days. And then he went downstairs with Elizabeth Rose. He spoke of the story he had told and asked her if it was all right to tell such stories.

"I don't know what are the right stories to tell children. I thought I did, but I changed my mind after hearing the effect of Little Red Riding Hood upon my sister's children. They were scared to death by the wolf, but perhaps it was the fault of the way in which the story was told by their father who without knowing that he wished to make them afraid with

14.

them afraid, because at the time he was disappointed in himself
and resented his children's existence as a burden which prevented
him from doing what he really wanted to do, although at more
rational moments he knew that they did not really create any
obstacle since he had been unable to do what he really wanted to
do for years before they were born." This was her reply.

"Nom de chien!" exclaimed Bertholde, "what an answer!
You must have given no little thought to the poor man."

"I think you can tell the children any stories that
occur to you since they like you and since you are unlikely to
make any story bear the burden of your emotions."

"I can bear them hardly myself," said Bertholde, "but I
will keep in mind your point about not letting my own emotions
distort the stories I tell."

He stood at the door and put on his coat as the two
Rose children came to the head of the stair. The perplexed
Bertholde looked up at them. Mother commanded them to return to
sleep. Bertholde said good night to all three and departed into
the darkness, wondering what unexpected incident would occur,
at midnight in the depths and blackness of sleep.

# # #

CUH

Invocation Of Noah

When Bertholde first began to think of the project
of being jeremiah's tutor, he fell prey to emotions which were
alternately lyrical and didactic.

Seated in his study, looking out at the brilliant river
at the end of an autumn day, he became lyrical and he said to
himself:

"Jeremiah, little boy! verve, vigor and vivacity
sparkling, superb and unsurpassed (élan enough to run a railroad
train!), is it not time for you to go to kindergarten? Is it not
time to go to Sunday school? Is it not time to go to that black
school where chalk upon the blackboard always screams? A name-
less fate awaits us, priceless boy, a fate growing as secretly
as teeth, growing with ice-hard pain, unmarked necessity, a hidden
fate, dear juvenile."

Bertholde knew well enough that he would not be able
to hold conversations such as this with the child. It was nec-
essary when he spoke to the child, and used the language and
knowledge common to them, there should be present in his con-
sciousness some sense of these fundamental matters, such as
fate and necessity.

"Look," Bertholde decided he would say to his protégé,
"do you see how my beard has grown, though I shaved this morning?
Each morning in the glass I see how my face has grown dark with
hair while I slept and did not know what was happening. So I
know enough to look at my body and think about it and see how
much and how little control I have over it. One's body is very
interesting. But most interesting of all is the dark mind
behind the face and the immortal past in every place."

CUH

**Invocation Of Noah/2**

Again Bertholde felt that he was becoming too much concerned explicitly with matters he discussed only with himself and which would merely perplex a little boy, however gifted. But he could not control himself, as the night descended from the sky and grew up from the ground on the lawn in front of his house. He began to discuss with himself general principles of his education of the child;

"How good, (I will bear in my mind as I give my lessons)," he said to himself, "how good it is to know the wicked worst, the untouchable and forbidden apple, guilt, the gulf of love. How good it is if at the same time one can bear in mind the growing early morning light at the same time as one makes studies of the night."

Again he hesitated, knowing very well how difficult it would be to explain this to a little boy.

CUH

Invocation Of Noah

Lyrical once more, the boy's teacher, speaking to
himself, invoked the Biblical character, Noah:

"Noah, captain of the blue and unforeseen (expected
unexpectedness of mariners) has it availed to say to Psyche
'Don't look love in the face!'? Has it done any good to tell
Narcissus not to look too long in the glass, warning him jud-
iciously that nausea and boredom are the true end of self-love?

"Does any knowledge truly help save for the knowledge
gained in the frying pan and in the fire by the burned and
pained hand?

"The sage said, 'Know yourself! But this knowledge is
often too painful to be borne and even when borne is often not
enough, for to know oneself, one must also know other human
beings, but they hide from one as they hide from their own self-
knowledge, and they are ashamed to let you know them.

"For even when you listen to a shell, all that you
hear is your own heart's roar, thunderous like coal going down
a chute (and yet it is a pleasant sound).

"One might as well speak maxims to the senseless sways
of the North Atlantic, for all the good it will do such a one
as you, Noah.

"A fat sad wise man said long ago: 'Were there no
future time, I'd ride all day in a closed and handsome cab, closed
with the blinds drawn and a pretty lady next to me.' But there is
a future time. There always is. One is afraid of disgracing oneself
at the moment of death or having a dirty tomb.

"Noah, amid the slushing of the wakeful sea, amid the
chortling of the beasts below, before the horizons' blue-grey
distances, these sentences, pretty as fireworks, might sparkle for

CUH

Invocation Of Noah/2

our budding prodigy: let his be Adam's look the day Creation
stopped and let him remember how Abel looked when his brother
struck him. And here and there and everywhere let him possess
the Magi's amaze when, as if ordinary as a loaf of bread, the
waiting women showed them the little child."

YOUTHFUL TEACHER AND YOUTHFUL POET

In the very first class which Bertholde Cannon taught,
there was a young man who like his teacher was a poet. The
first assignment had been established in time immemorial as the
writing of a self-description by the student. Thus it was ex-
pected that the teacher would come to know about his students
quickly.

After the first hour, during which time the assignment
had been explained with care, the young man who was a poet came
to the teacher and asked if he might write his description of
himself in metrical form. Cannon naively assented, thinking
that it was his duty to encourage the writing of poetry. He
did say, however, that he thought that it might be difficult to
get all the relevent facts versified and he suggested that this
student, William Perry, write such facts as the poem did not
present on a separate sheet of paper.

Little did he know that his suggestion would be very
much resented by this student as implying some difficulty in the
writing of poetry.

William Perry handed in his poem at the next meeting of
class and looked very superior at the other young men who had
been restricted to prose. Mr. Cannon read his poem and saw that
it was about how his mother had died last summer and he had felt
like jumping into the coffin with her.

"The poor boy," said Cannon to himself and resolved to
be very sympathetic.

Foolishly, however, he did not tell the student Perry
that his poem was very talented because it was not. Perry sulked.
For the second theme he turned in a composition which was hardly
more than ninety words long, although it was rule strictly en-

2.

forced, that each student was supposed to write six hundred words at least.

The teacher summoned the student after class and tried to be patient in explaining that he had not written a sufficient number of words.

"This is just about ninety words," he said, "and you are supposed to write six hundred words every week."

"The Sermon on the Mount," said Perry, "is not much longer than what I wrote."

Cannon was dumbfounded.

"If you will come down to the river," he said, "and walk on it, I will accept this paper, but not until then."

"I will wait until it freezes over," said Perry.

"I am told that the river does not freeze over on some winters," said Cannon.

"I bet it will," said Perry, who was an optimist and liked to think well of the future.

"Never mind," said Cannon, "I referred to walking on water and not on ice, as you very well know." Do you know that Shakespeare was hindered by his lack of training in prose composition even though he eventually, after much arduous practice became the greatest prose writer in the history of the English theater. Did you know also that Molière's bourgeois gentleman was under the mistaken impression that he had been talking prose all his life. He had been talking poetry all his life, and if he had only known he would have been overjoyed."

"Who was Molière," asked Perry, "I better watch out. You can count on me, sir," said Perry, concluding the entire dispute, "You will have six thousand words from me by next Monday morning."

CUH

The Truth

"And next the truth," Bertholde said to himself,
"What is the truth? Surely a little boy should know the truth
if he knows anything.

"Suppose we were upon the deck of a moving ocean liner:
then you might look at the dark water where the foam falls, after
the wake, which was white. Such is the knowledge which sparkles
in the memory, dark days, dead years--

"But more than that, more and more, much more than that
can be seen in the evening's slow decay: Sahara stretches out,
vain as silence, empty as violence, an endless instance, an
unfinished sentence, all these are ways in which the truth appears.

"And truth is a sphinx, half-girl, half animal, and
preys on drunkards, heroes and small boys who think they are en
route to rich Cathay. They do not know for sure what answer is
the right one, and must conclude, at last, that the right answer
is to wander endlessly for human dignity touring infinity, the
while, on the trip de luxe on certain days, the truth will seem
to be the wind and the rain, the rising smoke or the falling snow.

"Although, on other days, truth seems to be the lie
beneath the face, the motive like a serpent coiled within the
heart which grabs at everything and squeezes it like oranges
for juice, for joy! even although it deals with rocks or sand.

"The truth is like Christ himself, and like Alsace
Lorraine often contested, and in long wars overrun like the
Low countries jammed against the sea.

"The names of truth are plentiful as the stars.

"A great while ago the world began: (this is where
we came in), and that is why the truth grows more and more
difficult.

CUH

The Truth/2

"Arithmetic, for example, is true of everything, and monotonous as boxcars on a track. Yet arithmetic is often in- correct. One and one are sometimes two and sometimes three and sometimes sixty-nine. One and one make a small child sometimes and this makes three and sometimes an error in arithmetic will lead to sixty-nine years in prison.

"To know the truth you must know of great Rome's decline and of the Caesars who suffered such passions that their foreheads burst. But sometimes to know this is to be foolish enough not to know many other important things.

"To know the truth one must know how dark the future is, darkened by hope more than by any other thing."

CUH

Beauty

Bertholde said to himself:

"Can I explain to but a little boy the mystery which
is the beautiful? For that matter, I doubt that I can explain
it to myself.

"But I must try, I must begin, or else I will forfeit
my tutorship of the child.

"The beautiful is each thing in itself. To understand
this takes a lifetime, alas!

"He sees the beautiful which is each thing who looks
at it only for looking's sake; who looks merely to see what that
thing has to show. He gazes with such concentration and intensity
that he would not turn away his eyes if a chorus or a crowd
cried from the street, _Ecce Homo! Jesus the Christ returns, the
second coming has begun._ Or Shakespeare reads his plays aloud
next door.

"Consequently to look at any thing like this is to
look with love and thus to be in love, to be devout, to forget
oneself because there is so much outside oneself, finding so
much and always finding more, more and more, and endlessly,
like a rainbow over the horizon of the ocean.

"The beautiful is found like love again because one
finds the whole world in the beloved's face as one who settles
on his great estates. But the beautiful is mostly beautiful
because then each thing itself is not in itself, each thing
itself is then itself no more--each thing is pure beauty, which
is not what it mainly is for most and for all most of the time.

"It is the look (it is the love) which brings the
beauty forth, the actual beauty which was in the dark (because
one's eyes were closed or open), it is the look and love in
which the mind has kneeled and the heart fallen infatuated and

CUH

Beauty/2

the flesh seated itself relaxed like a sated cow.

For otherwise and most of the time our glances fall
as if through windows or as if on stairs which mere take us
where we wish to go and we keep climbing on the stairs, never
arrived, although the mind leaps to the as yet unopened door
where party sounds arise from troops of friends and all hearts
play like ponies cantering.

"This is the beginning," said Bertholde to himself,
"of an explanation of the beautiful to myself. But it is far
from an explanation for the little boy."

CUH
Goodness

The teacher of the little boy said to himself (as
if he were speaking to the little boy):

"When you sleep, time is at work and the darkling powers arise. The earth turns, your waking life slips away from you.

"Goodness! what is goodness? How often I have asked myself this question! And found or thought I found that goodness is as strange as God and comes disguised like butterflies within the livid worm, and makes believe, at times, that it is a catastrophe, breaking the heart, as jilted girls suppose that the world has come to an end when their white knight marries the princess or the swan.

"Often I thought that goodness is good because when you do something good, you feel better. But I am not very sure most of the time. Too many good people look tormented and by their very goodness.

"Goodness thumbs its nose as if in mockery to say, 'I am an old disease, a hollow cough continuing into the dead of summer, lasting through the dead of slumber. I am as dull as pins, as repetitious as counting one's fingers, as plain as sand, or as boring as some event long ago joyously celebrated with party horns. It is an effort like climbing a peak.

"Some say that goodness is sensible, it is a good policy, it makes for good health. Do not be deceived, dear fellow, goodness has a wild excitement in it, and the wild excitement grows and at times it is ashysterical as tickled girls, although sometimes it is as serene, distant, and dignified as Northern snows.

"And do not be deceived by other lies about goodness

CUH
Goodness/2

that it is like candy, like ice cream, and like tulips. These
are but skins and quickly skimmed, poor creams sensational as
kisses they fall and fail and melt. 'Take me!' they cry and
'goodbye' they cry, 'bells, bells', they always say, 'I hope
to see you soon.' Like merry-go-rounds, they only take you
where you were before, around and around and around; what
good is that?

"All this is morning knowledge and thus fit for a
little boy. It bores and wanes like summer afternoons' slow
warmth and buzz, the peaches' softening cheek. Then comes the
morning after knowledge, the knowledge which is true enough,
and declares that there is no good, and no one may say that
this is good and that is not good, it is all a matter of
taste; one thing for Spaniards, one thing for Eskimos, diff-
erent in Timbuctoo. This is a pit or an abyss, and bottomless,
in which must fall and hardly climb again to where goodness is.

"Do not believe a word such cynics say. They do
not know."

CUH

The Navy Party/1

During the second year of Cannon's devotion to Jeremiah, the course of the second World War was such as to make it necessary that the university teach students who were in the Navy. Cannon was assigned to sailor boys who were enrolled in what was called the V-12 program, a program presumably intended to make enlisted or drafted young men into officers. Naturally the sailors wanted very much to become officers because officers they knew from experience were superior beings.

Some of the boys had been in action in the South Pacific, some of them had been in convoys which crossed the Atlantic, and some had just been in one or another camp.

Cannon felt ashamed somewhat that he had the role of teacher to these boys, for they had seen death at close quarters, they had seen their friends die right next to them, while he on the other hand had led a sheltered existence, so called, and he had been regarded as a privileged character.

He decided that he must discuss this gulf of experience with some of the boys as soon as they arrived.

Meanwhile there was a period of intermission between terms during which the hardworking Cannon tried very hard to write poems, stories, and plays.

He was as before in a pensive and theological mood and thinking of the sentence of Voltaire which went: "If there was no God, he would have to be invented," he decided to revise it to, "If there is no God, then we are demented."

He also wrote metaphors and comparisons in his notebook and this was for future use. He wrote: "Whereever she is, love is," so that he would be prepared in the event that he fell in love again. And he inscribed with care a piece of self-observation:

CUH

The Navy Party/2

"I am at times as tactful as an elephant attempting the minuet,"
And reflecting upon the nature of the institution which employed
him and upon the literary profession and upon the capitalist
society which gave all of these things their breath if not their
being; He wrote; "They are all as competitive as a track meet."
It then occurred to him that he might write a story in which
two visitors from somewhere in Europe arrived at a great stadium
and saw all the young men and young women engaged in endless
hundred yard dashes while the older folks sat in the grandstand
and cheered them or booed them.

This would be a very sad story, he said to himself.
And it would be a very old story.

But all stories were old, he said to himself.

When the first term of the V-12 program began, Cannon
was at first bewildered. Some of the navy boys dozed in class
because it was ten o'clock and they had been awake since five and
the first thing they had done in the morning was to trot a mile
along the river front. Cannon was distressed indeed that the
navy boys, or at least some of them, dozed in class because he
thought that he was boring them. But he knew that he was not,
in general, in a boring frame of mind because the girls in his
female classes did not seem to be bored.

At first Cannon tried to keep the boys from dozing by
calling on them, but they looked like children dazed when awakened
at two o'clock in the morning. Consequently he decided to pay
no attention to their dozing, especially since he had learned
that not he but their early hours were the true cause.

In this class there was a slim and blond student
named Schumacher. He had driven a truck in Washington and an
important official who liked him had told him that he mi

CUH

The Navy Party/3

if he liked choose between driving a truck in North Africa and becoming part of the V-12 program, since he was going to be drafted anyway.

Schumacher had not finished high school, and although he was quite intelligent, he was afflicted with a profound and at times poetic misunderstanding of the English language, the consequence probably of the fact that in his household, only German was spoken.

He was a likable chap in many ways and he had been intended for the priesthood and one of the first things he told Mr. Cannon was that he liked best of all to write sermons.

But he amazed Cannon with his first composition in which when he wanted to say pumping well, he said, tomb. By careful analysis Cannon discovered that this was because on the campus there was a pumping well which, regarded from above, resembled a mound and thus a tomb.

The two immediately misunderstood each other. Cannon thought that Schumacher was not an intelligent fellow and Schumacher thought that Cannon would fail him because of a grudge against Germans. The fact that he was failing in all his other courses was something that he did not try to explain to himself. Upon receiving his first paper back, an E meaning failing upon it, he remarked half-aloud: "Fuck the Jews! Jews on the half-shell!"

Cannon, alarmed by this extreme pugnacity, which had never before occurred in a class he taught, urged Schumacher not to use four-letter words.

"It is not permitted to use four-letter or Anglo-Saxon expressions of contempt and aggression in this course in English."

This ended the first misunderstanding between th

CUH

The Navy Party/4

teacher and the student. But he was very much disturbed, for
he had not had to deal with any such situation before.

Other students were also somewhat disgruntled because
Cannon spoke in a low voice and because at times, when he felt
fine, his mind moved too fast.

Feeling the mood of resentment in the Navy class ( he
did not know that it was equal or greater in other classes, for
example, in the physics classes where the students were taught as
if they were slated to become Einsteins and Oppenheimers), Cannon
decided that something must be done and quickly.

Schumacher arrived in classes and immediately took his
shoes off. They hurt him, he said, they were too small, the Navy
did not have the proper size.

Cannon announced to the class that he was going to give
a party at his house when the term ended. And at his party there
would be his two classes of Radcliffe girls, handsome, rich,
beautiful and often of high social position.

He then added in an off-hand way that no one could come
to the party who did not keep his shoes on, since it was impolite
not to wear shoes in company, except in China.

Schumacher immediately put on his shoes and took a fresh
look at his teacher. The other boys were absolutely delighted by
the idea of the party.

Cannon was somewhat apprehensive, thinking of the party.
God only knew what the boys might or might not do with the
beautiful Radcliffe girls. He immediately appointed two of the
best students as shore police and promised himself that he would
soon consult with them as to whether the drinks at this party
might be limited to Pepsi-Cola and other soft beverages.

CUH

The Navy Party/5

Cannon for long had loved parties and he had long felt
that he was not invited to enough parties (although he was wrong,
the real truth was that people thought that _he_ did not want _them_ to
invite _him_), and thus it was that he had made a serious study of the
nature of parties, and had even thought of writing a book entitled,
"The Idea Of A Party."

He consulted with the shore police, Graham and Forbes,
two of his best students. They were the only boys who were likely
to become officers as a result of being included in the party.

By means of discreet questioning, he soon learned from
them that anything and everything could and did happen at a navy
party. They told him that at soon of the private parties of the
Navy boys, the girls from town had often begun to take all of their
clothes. This was partly because they recognized the inevitable,
partly because they enjoyed being in the nude, and partly because
their nakedness excited the boys so much.

It was true, thought Cannon, that the Radcliffe girls
were hardly likely to behave like that, at least not before a
considerable amount of indoctrination. But on the other hand
this was precisely what the Navy boys would probably expect of
any and all girls, unless they intended to marry them.

And this expectation, being denied or supposedly
denied, would lead them to a feeling of frustration and frust-
ration would lead to resentment and resentment might lead to
gross acts such as are committed by the American Legion whenever
it has a convention.

Cannon became more and more alarmed. He decided to
discuss the idea of the party with the Radcliffe girls.

The Radcliffe girls were overjoyed by the idea of the
party and some explained that they would bake pies. The:

CUH

The Navy Party/6

to have no idea of the dangers inherent in the nature of a Navy
party, or perhaps they did not care about these dangers, or per-
haps they liked the dangers very much, just as at the circus some
people enjoy the thrills and dangers of the trapeze artists and
would like to be such artists too, except that they don't want to
take the risk.

It developed (as Cannon later discovered) that the girls
wanted to see what kind of a house Cannon lived in, how strange
it was, whether any girl was ever present to help with the
domestic chores, or related duties.

Cannon was somewhat reassured by the attitude of the
Navy girls, although it seemed to him that their delight was
somewhat excessive, while the joy of the boys was perfectly normal,
even though ecstatic.

The relationship between the teacher and the Navy students
was now transformed. Schumacher looked down at his shoes to see for
sure that they were tied tight; and Schumacher became angry with
any other student who seemed to him not to be paying the proper
attention to Mr. Cannon. It was Schumacher's ambition and hope
to become one of the shore police, preferably by supplanting one
of them, but if, failing to secure this post, perhaps the teacher
might require three shore police instead of just two, and certainly
there might be an occasion when this would be necessary, although
on the other hand the students were all so well-behaved now that
it was quite possible that no police at all would be necessary.

Cannon then asked the head of the department, Arthur
Lord, if it was all right to have a party, and Professor Lord
liked the idea very much also and he said that it was a very
friendly idea. Other teachers, hearing of the party, also
decided to give parties for their students. In fact, the idea

CUH

The Navy Party/7

of the party seemed to be growing more and more popular, and
one of Cannon's fellow teachers, John Paul Gibson, stopped
Cannon in the street as he was returning from a difficult two
hours with his classes and told Cannon that he and his wife
had had their students to tea.

"The idea of the party is extremely civic-minded,"
said Gibson.

Cannon was delighted to hear this, but thought to
himself that after all it had been inspired really by the fact
that he had been terrified when one of his students had taken
off his shoes in class. Of course, it was perfectly true that
taking measures to keep shoes on the students might also be
regarded as civic-minded.

It was time, Cannon felt, to consult with Jeremiah
about the party and see whether he wanted to come too. But
first he would have to consult with Philip and Elizabeth Rose
to see if they thought it proper that Jeremiah and his sister
Helen should go to a party for boys of the Navy and their
opposite numbers.

Philip and Elizabeth were very pleased both with the
idea of the party and with the idea that Jeremiah and his sister
Helen should go to the party. Elizabeth felt that Cannon's
misgivings were baseless. She said that he always imagined and
forced into any situation certain of his feelings of hesitation
and doubt. The real reasons for these feelings was Cannon's
concern about what other people would think.

"Hell is the opinion of other people," she said to
him, and he listened, feeling that she was a wise woman and that
she had shown real insight, such as he was quite incapable of,

CUH

The Navy Party/8

perhaps because in thinking about himself his own ego was always
a formidable black barrier.

"Do you want to go to a party?" Cannon asked Jeremiah,
having gone out to visit with him in the yard where the pre-
cocious youngster was much involved in making matters as difficult
as possible for an old, decripit, and patient tom-cat (a storm
cat was what Jeremiah called him) who knew the boy very well and
knew that the only way to deal with Jeremiah was to accept his
behavior as if with indifference.

Jeremiah had not listened to his tutor.

"I say, Jeremiah, do you want to go to a party?"
asked Cannon again.

"What kind of a party?" asked the clever boy.

"A good party, full of boys and girls who are full of fun," said Cannon.

"Will there be plenty of candy and ice cream?"
asked Jeremiah.

"Candy, ice cream and Pepse-Cola, more than you could get down your stomach," said Cannon.

"All right, I'll come," said Jeremiah, as one who is bestowing a great favor. He was feeling high and mighty that day because he had punched a twelve year old boy in the nose. This twelve year old villain had tormented Jeremiah for months and escaped punishment only because he wore glasses and Jeremiah who believed in the Marquis of Queensberry rules believed also that one ought not to punch anyone while he was wearing glasses. In the end, however, Jeremiah had figured that if he punched him with sufficient accuracy, he would hit him in the nose and this would be fair enough, this would conform to the code duello.

CUH

The Navy Party/9

He did not know that the enraged and wicked twelve year old boy would hide, break his glasses and claim that Jeremiah had broken them.

Some are made aggressive by insecurity, become pugnacious from fear (such as being taunted by one who is older, like the twelve year old boy) and some by insecurity return to childish helplessness from fear (they retreat, they withdraw, they run away, they go back to previous states of being and of feeling).

Jeremiah was of the former type. He was the stuffing of which heroes are made (and also the stuff of which dreams are made).

He was also just, as just as a child can be, and when his father spanked him for breaking the glasses of the twelve year old boy, he accepted the punishment as just.

"This hurts you more than it hurts me," Jeremiah said to his father, and he was correct. He was feeling very cheerful because he was going to the party of the sailor boys and the blue stocking girls given by his friend, sponsor, and tutor.

Meanwhile Cannon had returned to his home to brood somemore about the event of the party, what might or might not occur when the party took place.

He was still troubled and uneasy, despite his friends reassurances. Some of his best ideas had from time to time proved catastrophic, and he always had a feeling and fear that this might occur, in fact he cultivated his sense of doubt precisely because of such catastrophes.

For example, just the year before he had in an idle moment offered to buy a ten year old boy an expensive camera

CUH

The Navy Party/10

(this camera had been the apple of the boy's eye for more than
nine months), if the youngster could find out by himself (without
anyone's help except for the borrowing of dictionaries) the
meaning of the motto on the United States penny: *E PLURIBUS UNUM*.
Cannon meant to be kind to the boy and to encourage scholarship.

In less than four hours, the ten year old boy named
Alexis had convulsed the entire rooming house in which he lived
with his parents and which was inhabited mostly by students of
law. Alexis had gone from one learned student to another, seeking
to get them to tell him what *E PLURIBUS UNUM* meant, but at the
same time explaining to them that the conditions of the contest
were such that no one was permitted to give him any help, for
the purpose of the contest was to further the interests of
scholarship. Being scholarly, they recognized the justice of
this condition and they would not help him except to tell him
to use the dictionary. Alexis used English and Latin diction-
aries, but to little avail. He found out that the second word
of the motto meant, many, and the third word, one. But he was
unable to find out from the dictionaries what the first word
meant because it was an obsolete form of the word, *ex*.

Alexis' father rang Cannon and asked him to tell the
boy that he was not going to get anything whatever since he had
violated the conditions of the contest.

Alexis rang Cannon and told him hopefully of the re-
sults he had obtained and argued that since he had found out
two of the three words, might he not receive two-thirds of the
prize, that is to say, a camera two-thirds as expensive as the
one for which he had asked, as a reward.

Cannon murmured something about Will Rogers and you

CUH

The Navy Party/10

(this camera had been the apple of the boy's eye for more than
nine months), if the youngster could find out by himself (without
anyone's help except for the borrowing of dictionaries) the
meaning of the motto on the United States penny: _E PLURIBUS UNUM_.
Cannon meant to be kind to the boy and to encourage scholarship.

In less than four hours, the ten year old boy named
Alexis had convulsed the entire rooming house in which he lived
with his parents and which was inhabited mostly by students of
law. Alexis had gone from one learned student to another, seeking
to get them to tell him what _E PLURIBUS UNUM_ meant, but at the
same time explaining to them that the conditions of the contest
were such that no one was permitted to give him any help, for
the purpose of the contest was to further the interests of
scholarship. Being scholarly, they recognized the justice of
this condition and they would not help him except to tell him
to use the dictionary. Alexis used English and Latin diction-
aries, but to little avail. He found out that the second word
of the motto meant, many, and the third word, one. But he was
unable to find out from the dictionaries what the first word
meant because it was an obsolete form of the word, _ex_.

CUH

The Navy Party/11

can fool all of the people some of the time. He did not really
like Alexis and he had started the contest because the ten year
old had been annoying a friend of his, Florence Saunders (also
a graduate student of English) by looking through the keyhole
when she took a shower. He thought that this contest might
serve to distract the boy's attention, but now that he thought
of it, he saw how wrong he was, for obviously the camera was in
a sense the same kind of thing as looking through a keyhole for
Alexis.

He called Alexis after some thought and told him that
he would get his camera and explained to him that _E PLURIBUS UNUM_
meant, Out Of Many, One, and by extension or implication, Out Of
Plurality Comes Unity. He then made Alexis promise that he
would stop looking through the keyhole when Florence took a
shower, but he had little hope that Alexis would keep this pro-
mise since Florence was very handsome and furthermore Alexis was
hard to swerve. He might even use his camera to take pictures
of Florence through the keyhole.

At any rate, this illustrates how some of Cannon's
best ideas had proved catastrophic in the past, and it explains
to some extent his emotions of doubt and hesitation with regard
to the party, what would come of it.

Whatever his doubts about the party itself, there
could be no question of the success of the idea of the party,
for all the students, male and female, now regarded Cannon as
a kind of Santa Claus, and behaved accordingly. And the longer
the party was delayed (it was scheduled to occur immediately
after the end of the term), the more fascinating it seemed.
There was much discussion of the character of the party among

CUH

The Navy Party/12

all the students and one of the Navy students wanted to come
and sit in on Cannon's female classes so that he might look
the girls over. Cannon denied this request, pointing out that
this would give the Navy boy an unfair advantage. The Navy boy
answered that he would gladly report the results of his find-
ings to his fellows and peers. But Cannon observed then that
this would not be enough, for no matter how hard he tried he
was certain to choose the best girl for himself and do all that
he could to win her favor.

This era of ever-increasing good feeling due to the
desire for the party and the enjoyment of the idea of the party
was rudely interrupted when the mid-term grades were posted.
It looked like most of the Navy students might fail by the end
of the term, for they were failing, most of them, in at least
two subjects, and almost all of them were failing in physics,
which as has been observed, was taught them as if they were
going to take the place of Einstein at some future date.

The crisis was not really a real one, for there was
little intention in Washington to make most of the boys officers,
but neither the boys nor their instructors knew this. Some of
the boys were irritable, some depressed, some panicky, and some
hopeless. Schumacher was hopeless and panicky. He had failed in
all his courses, including his English course (which was called
"Direct Communication").

Schumacher spoke to his teacher after class and his
hopelessness was clear in his words and the panic in his gestures.

"I guessed I just can't make the grade," he said, "I
guess I'm just no good. I might have known that I should not
have done that."

CUH

Goodness

"When sleep, time is at work and the darkling powers arise. The earth turns and your life slips away from you."

"Goodness! what is goodness? How many times have asked myself, And found or thought I found that goodness is as strange as God and comes disguised like butterflies within the livid worm, and makes believes, at times, that it is a catastrophe, breaking the heart, as jilted girls suppose that the world has come to an end when their white knight marries or the princess the swan."

"Often I thought that goodness is good because when you do something good, you feel better. But I am not so sure most of the time. Too many good people look tormented and by their very goodness."

"Goodness thumbs its nose as if in mockery to say, 'I am an old disease, a hollow cough continuing into the dead of summer. I am as dull as pins, as repetitious as counting one's fingers, as plain as sand, or as boring as something? some event long ago joyously celebrated with party horns, an effort like climbing a peak.'"

"Also some say that goodness is sensible, it is a good policy, it makes for good health. Do not be deceived, dear fellow, goodness has a wild excitement in it, and the wild excitement grows and at times it is as hysterical as tickled girls, although sometimes it is a serenity and distant and dignified as Northern snows."

"And do not be deceived by other lies about goodness, that it is like candy, like ice cream, and like tulips. These are but skins and quickly skimmed, poor creams sensational as kisses

CUH

GOODNESS/2/

which fall and fail and melt.' Take me!' they cry and 'goodbye' they cry, 'bells, bells', they always say, 'I hope to see you soon'. Like merry-go-rounds, they only take you where you were before, around and around and around: what good is that?

"All this is morning knowledge and thus fit for a little boy. It bores and wanes like summer afternoons' slow warmth and buzz, the peaches' softening cheek. Then comes the morning after knowledge, which is true enough, and declares that there is no good, and no one may say that this is good and that is not, for it is all a matter of taste: one thing for Spaniards, one thing for Eskimos, different in Timbuctoo. This is a pit or an abyss, and bottomless, in which most fall and hardly climb again to where goodness is.

CUH

The Wish To be A Grandfather/3/

a wife who wanted to have children, and she did not.

Fish, offended by his wife's remark (although he should have been used to it by this time), replied that the trouble with being a grandfather was that one had to have a wife.

Then he apologized for his reply and was told that he was wrong to think that Wilhelmina had been offended. In Fish, as in most of his kind, extreme sensitivity was combined with extreme insensitivity to the feelings of others.

CUH

Two More Parents

The morning after his entcounter with four more children,
Fish thought again of the book he had read about a boy named Hershey
Green, for Hershey's childhood had been indeed a significant one
so far as any question of the education of children was concerned.

Hershey Green's parents had taken him and his brother Ronald for a ride one Sunday when Hershey was in his seventh year. They were driving toward a suburb by the sea on this balmy Sunday, fresh and new, in the wondershining sunlight of the month of May. As a special privilege granted him because he was two years older than his brother, Hershey sat next to his father in the front seat, and dispensation a privilege/his good-natured brother Ronald accepted as being as natural as the sky and the earth. All was well, for the moment. All were in good spirits because they were taking an automobile ride. Then as they were driving through a fashionable and expensive suburb on the parkway which went to the suburb by the sea, Hershey, an avid reader of all printed matter, saw a great billboard advertisement of a Broadway play entitled "The Bad Man".

He read the name of the play aloud and it turned out that
and father
that his mother/had seen it. His mother speaking from the backseat
where Ronald was seated pleasantly beside her, began to tell
the enthralled Hershey the story of the play. It was about a
beautiful girl who is going to marry a rich and unpleasant business
man because her father is an invalid who has to use a wheel-chair
for the rest of his life. The play occurs in New Mexico. The
beautiful girl is really in love with a handsome ne'erdowell who
is penninless and who is looking for gold mines in New Mexico. He
is also behaving unpleasantly because the beautiful girl is going
to marry someone else for the sake of her poor father. Then a
Mexican bandit, who had known the handsome ne'erdowell as a chum
during the 1st World War, arrivesat the ranch where all the other

CUH/2/

Two More Parents

characters are staying, and kidnaps all the characters with the
aid of the other bandits under his leadership.

Hershey was very much moved and excited by the story.
His father next to him sat in silence and drove the automobile.
of the play
His mother told the story/passionately.

The bad man kidnaps all the characters for the sake of
the ransom he can get from the rich business man. He then forces
the rich business man to show his true colors and behave like
a coward. And then he persuades the handsome ne'rdowell and
the beautiful girl to get married. No sooner are they married than
the handsome ne'rdowell hears that he has just discovered an
enormous gold mine. This is the happy ending.

Hershey Green's mother concluded by explaining the true
meaning of the play, which was that some, who seem to be good,
like the rich business man, are really handsome who seem to
be bad, like the bad man bandit, are really good. She spoke with
a passion which her older son Hershey heard, but did not under-
stand. She was very much concerned with good and evil because
her husband was a rich business man who seemed to be both bad
and good.

Hershey Green's father seemed to be disturbed by the
story.
"You ought not to tell children such stories", he said
to his wife.

Hershey wondered why, although the story had perplexed
him.
"What difference does it make what stories the
child hears", said Hershey Green's mother, "when he sees
the kind of thing that he does see in his own family?"

Hershey Green's father said nothing, for he knew
that he would merely provoked his wife further. He had been

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Two More Parents/3

away from his family for four days and he knew that this was the reason for his wife's anger.

"The bad man is really the good man and the good man is really the bad man", said Hershey Green to himself, perplexed. He was continually being surprised by what he found out about existence from his mother and his father.

"But if the good man looks like the bad man", he said to himself, "and the bad man looks like a good man, then how can we tell the difference between what is good and what is bad?"

Hershey tried to answer this question by supposing that one recognized good ness by the appearance of badness. But he was too sensible to be convinced by this simple inversion.

It was not unlike the occasion when Hershey had gone with his parents one winter evening to the motion pictures, a place where Hershey was often perplexed as well as delighted. The trio father, mother, and child, passed an institution for the deaf and to his son dumb. Hershey's father explained/that the buildings and the great courtyard were the deaf and dumb academy where lived those poor people who could neither hear nor speak.

Hershey, impressed, cried out to the silence of the winter night and the institutional courtyard and buildings (just like a chirico, since the moon was weakly shining): "Deaf and dumb! deaf and dumb; deaf and dumb;"

Hershey's father told him sternly to stop. Hershey stopped but he wanted to know why.

"You said that they were deaf and dumb. They can't hear me".

"He has a very logical mind", said Hershey's father to his mother, "Some of the people who live there," he explained

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Two More Parents/4

to his son, "are not deaf and dumb. They may be offended. They live
there to help take care of the unfortunate deaf mutes and they
are likely to be sensitive people".

"But they are not deaf and dumb", said Hershey, "they
ought not to have their feelings hurt".

"Logic will be the undoing of this boy", said Hershey
Green's father to his mother, thus offending her by implying that
she was somehow at fault, since her child was too logical, and
since he always made her feel at fault for everything.
"They may be fast asleep", said Hershey's father to his
difficult son.

"I thought grown-ups don't go to sleep at eight o'clock",
said Hershey stubborn as ever. / Hoyle's son - olden story, not
socialized medicine yet, I think, for it

"Or they may be reading, or they may not like shouting",
said Hershey's father patiently, "they may like it quiet. Perhaps that's
why they accepted such jobs". He had come to the point where he
was losing his own sense of conviction about the matter.

"Anyway", he said to his son, "shouting is not polite. And
it is not polite to do whatever you want to do, even if no one hears
you or sees you." (R-1935)

Either the moral note just struck or the fact that they
had arrived at the interesting moving pictures sufficed to silence
Hershey, as Hershey's father resolved to tell him the story of Gyge's
ring. (Lapland & co. relevant.)

Poor Hershey Green, said Fish to himself, poor Hershey,
sick with sick pity then as in later years.

Fish had reviewed the story he had read four years before
and he had mused again on how, when children heard of the
epidemics in the life of Hershey Green, they were much taken, they
might even be said to be fascinated, although this seemed strange

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Two More Parents/5/

to Fish because the book about Hershey Green had been written for
adults, and certainly not for children. Yet, thought Fish in his
blue study, perhaps the children were touched in a way that most
children's stories did not touch them. For example, perhaps they
were touched by the name Hershey without knowing why, without that
Hershey was a pleasant name because it made them unknowingly
think of the Hershey chocolate bars all of them loved?

I must reread that book, said Fish to himself, perhaps I
will find in it more stories for my nephew Jeremiah Wallace Rose?

CUH

Four More Children /2

to open their pants's buttons and urinate in front of her. This
possibility of having to regard the private parts of the three
boys visibly in operation had always been sufficient to drive
the poor little girl from the window.

"May be she just likes you very much", said Fish to
the three boys.

"She can't like all of us, can she?", the three boys
cried back, *manom*.

"Yes, she can", said Fish, "and even if she likes
one of you best of all, she may be hiding this fact from the
lucky one of you because she is afraid you do not like her best
of all".

The boys were unconvinced, but both Fish and Nicholas
felt very sentimental at the moment.

The boys were bored by the sententiousness which
they sensed in Fish' point of view and suggestion or suggestiveness.

Nicholas, however, was interested. He had always felt
that there was something strange and unresolved in his friend's
interest in children.

The sudden drop into silence perplexed Fish and he
decided to tell the boys a story he had read some time ago. He
told the story as if it had happened to him and not as if it had
been narrated by an author for whom Fish did not care very much
(or toward whom Fish felt a mixture of detestation and admiration).

"When I was a boy like you", said Fish, "a thousand years
ago--"

"You're not so old", said Dwight, "you don't look so

old".

"I am five thousand years of age", said Fish, "but
never mind that. When I was a boy, I was always falling in love
with little girls like Nancy and when I was not in love with a

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Four More Children/3/

little girl, I was very sorry because I felt something was
missing, and something was missing because when I went to bed
at night, I did not have any beautiful little girl to think about
and to think about kissing me goodnight".

"Ugh", groaned the three boys in chorus, "ugh!" For
the idea of being kissed by a girl was supposed to be unmanly,
ridiculous, and sissy-like" to them during this period
of their lives,"

"When I was your age", said Fish, to the ten year olds,
"I fell in love at the drop of a hat and I liked to fall in
love except that I was afraid that girls did not like me very
much, and even when they did like me very much, I did not believe
in the signs."

"One Sunday a girl came with her father to visit me,
my mother, aunt, and grandmother. I was soon very good friends
with this girl and we played for a while and then I thought that
it would be a good idea to give a play for the adults. The play
I had read was based on a joke/in the newspaper. A fellow is driving in
the country with a beautiful girl and they pass a handsome es-
tate. "That's my uncle's estate. I am his only heir", says the
fellow to the girl, because he is trying to impress her because
she is very pretty. Then, a moment after, they pass the gate-
way to the estate where a sign announces that this estate is the
state insane asylum. And that is the end of the play."

"What's the joke?" said Dwight.

"It's very sad", said Mack and Jack, "it's a very
sad story".

"I have not finished the story", said Fish, "it is
really a different story. The little girl acted out this story
with me and the grown-ups looked, listened and laughed because

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Four More Children/6

because he had eaten too many peanuts just as his father had
thought that his anger had been caused by his wife's failure
to bring the tickets with her.

The truth was that Hershey had been sick because of his
father's anger and because he loved his parents too much. And
his father's a ger anger had been cused by the fact that he did
not love his wife enough, if in fact he may be said to have loved
the mother, his wife, at all. And the wife's sorrow had been
because she did not love her husband as she should have loved him,
for she could not, since she was not loved by him.

All stories are stories of love, said Fish to himself, prone
as he was to quick generalizations. And all actions are dictated
by love in some one of an infinite number of ways. Thus the three
boys, Mack, Jack and Dwight had behaved toward the little girl
Nancy as they did because they did not understand the nature of
love, their misunderstanding having no slight resemblance to the
way in which Hershey Green's father did not understand the nature
of love. And the little girl had acted toward the three boys as
she had acted because she was in love with love, which was very nice and warm and true.

Fish, arriving at the street on which his old house stood,
kicked a tobacco-like mess of brown leaves on the brickwalk and
recited to himself a famous Song of Experience:

"Love seeketh not Itsself to please
Nor for itself hath any care,
But for another gives its ease
And builds a Heaven in Hell's despair."

So sung a little Clod of Clay,
Trodden with the cattle's feet,
But a Peble of the brook
Warbled out these metres meet:

"Love seeketh only Self to please,
To bind another to Its delight,
Joys in another's loss of ease,
And builds a Hell in Heaven despite".

It is too true, too blue and it is not new, Said Fish to

2.

mourned by Milton, because he had been drowned on the high seas.

On Saturday sailed from Bremen,
American-outward-bound

Take settler and seamen, tell men with women,

Two hundred souls in the round--

O Father, not under their feathers nor ever as guessing

The goal was a shoal, of a fourth the doom to be drawn

Yet did the dark side of the bay of thy blessing

Not vault them, the millions of rounds of thy mercy not

reeve even them in?

part to
The teacher jumped from one part of this poem because it was very long
and it was difficult to read aloud. He stated that it was not as good
a poem as "Lycidas".

"I like it better", Sir", said Charles Paris, "I
don't want to seem contrary, but the second poem has more punch
to it".

"Alas! what boots it with incessant care", said
the teacher, "To tend the homely, slighted critic's trade? Were
it not better / And strictly meditate these thankless views? Were
it not better done, as others use / To sport with brokers on a
gay parade / Or with the tressess of a chorine's hair".

The students were perplexed but used to this sort

of thing.

"Let us try a third poem", said Mr. Ellery Brown
and read his students "Beauty For Ashes" a poem about the death
in Italy of a very gifted young man. This poem had been written
by R.P. Blackmur whom the students immediately recognized as the
author of "Lorna Boone".

"So you see", said Mr. Brown, "how the death
of the in ocent and the good makes the poet search the depths of

9.

but they were also dissatisfied. They did not think that life/could
be or would be so difficult, so disappointing, so unsatisfactory and
so sentimental, at best.

and love

Mr. Brown
Some of the students suspected or entertained the view that /
was talking through his hat, as often before, even though he had
cited the famous play about "Romeo and Juliet".

And yet, after a time, after the class hour had ended, they
all felt much better.

CUH
The Navy Party/2

"I am at times as tactful as an elephant attempting the minuet", And reflecting upon the nature of the institution which employed him and upon the literary profession and upon the capitalist society which gave all of them things their breath if not their being; He wrote: "They are all as competitive as a track meet". It then occurred to him that he might write a story in which two visitors from somewhere in Europe arrived at a great stadium and saw all the young men and young women engaged in endless hundred yard dashes while the older folks sat in the grandstand and cheered them or booed them.

But all stories are old, he said to himself.

When the first term of the V-12 program began, Harris was at first bewildered. Some of the navy boys dozed in class because it was ten o'clock and they had been awake since five and the first thing they had done in the morning was to trot a mile along the river front. Harris was distressed indeed that the navy boys, or at least some of them, dozed in class because he thought that he was boring them. But he knew that he was not, in general, in a boring period because the girls in his female classes did not seem to be bored.

At first Harris tried to keep the boys from dozing by calling on them, but they looked like pathetic children awakened at two o'clock in the morning. Consequently he decided to pay no attention to their dozing, especially since he had learned that not he but their early hours were the true cause.

In this class there was a slim and blond student named Schumacher. He had driven a truck in Washington and a powerful official who liked him had told him that he might

CUH
The Navy Party/3/

the teacher and the student. But he was very much disturbed, for he had not had to deal with any such situation before.

Other students were also somewhat disgruntled because Harris spoke in a low voice and at times, when he felt fine, his mind moved too fast.

Feeling the mood of resentment in the Navy class (he did equal or not know that it was greater in other classes, for example, in the physics class where the students were taught as if they were slated to become Einsteins and Oppenheimers), Harris decided that something must be done and quickly.

Harris announced to the class that he was going to give a party at his house when the term ended. And at his party there would be his two classes of Radcliffe girls, handsome, rich, beautiful and often of high social position.

He then added in an off-hand way that no one could come to the party unless they could keep their shoes on, he declared, cannot come to the party. Clearly they do not know how to be allowed to be badly dressed in the secondary schools. polite not to wear shoes in company, except in China.

Harris was somewhat apprehensive, thinking of the party. God only knew what the boys might or might not do with the beautiful Radcliffe girls. He immediately appointed two of the best students as shore police and promised himself that he would soon consult with them as to whether the drinks at this party might be limited to Pepsi-Cola and other soft beverages.

CUH
The Idea Of A Party/4

Harris for long had loved parties and he had long felt
that he was not invited to enough parties (although he was wrong,
the
real truth was that people thought that _he_ did not want _them_ to
invite _him_), and thus it was that he had made a serious study
of the nature of parties, and had even thought of writing a
book entitled, "The Idea Of A Party".

By means of discreet questioning, he soon learned from
them that anything and everything could happen at the party.
They told him that at soon of the private parties of the Navy
boys, the girls from town had often begun to take all of their
clothes. This was partly because they recognized the inevitable,
partly because they enjoyed being in the nude, and partly because
their nakedness excited the boys so much.

It was true, thought Harris, that the Radcliffe girls
were hardly likely to behave like that, at least not before
a considerable amount of indoctrination. But on the other hand
this was precisely what the Navy boys would probably expect of
any and all girls, unless they intended to marry them.

And this expectation, being denied or supposedly
denied, would lead them to a feeling of frustration and
frustration would lead to resentment and resentment might lead
to gross acts such as are committed by the American Legion
whenever it has a convention.

Harris became more and more alarmed. He decided to
discuss the idea of the party with the Radcliffe girls.

The Radcliffe girls were delighted with the idea of

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The Idea Of A Party/5

They appeared to have no idea of the dangers inherent in the
nature of a Navy party, or perhaps they did not care about
these dangers, or perhaps they liked the dangers very much,
just as at the circus some people enjoy the thrills and dangers
of the trapeze artists and would like to be such artists too,
except that they don't want to take the risk.

It developed (as Harris later discovered) that the girls
wanted to see what kind of a house Harris lived in, how strange
it was, whether any girl was ever present to help with the
domestic chores, or related duties.

Harris was somewhat reassured by the attitude of the Navy
girls, although it seemed to him that their delight was somewhat
excessive, while the joy of the boys was perfectly normal, even
though ecstatic.

The relationship between the teacher and the Navy students
was now transformed. Schumacher greeted him as boss when he
arrived in class; Schumacher looked down at his shoes to see
for sure that they were tied tight; and Schumacher became angry
with any other student who seemed to him not to be paying the
proper attention to Mr. Harris. It was Schumacher's ambition and
hope to become one of the shore police, preferably by supplanting
one of them, but if that did not work, perhaps there could be
three shore police instead of just two, and certainly there
might be an occasion when this would be necessary, although
on the other hand the students were all so well-behaved that
it was quite possible that no police at all would be necessary.

Harris then asked the head of the department, Arthur
Lord, if it was all right to have a party, and Professor Lord
liked the idea very much also and he said that it was a very
friendly idea. Other teachers, hearing of the party, also

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The Idea Of A Party

In fact, the idea of the party seemed to be growing more and more popular, and one of Harris' fellow teachers, John Paul Gibson, stopped Harris in the street as he was returning from a difficult two hours with his classes and told Harris that he and his wife had had their students to tea.

"The idea of the party is extremely civic-minded", said Gibson.

Harris was delighted to hear this, but thought to himself that after all it had been inspired really by the fact that he had been terrified when one of his students had taken off his shoes in class. Of course, it was perfectly true that taking measures to keep shoes on the students might also be regarded as civic-minded.

It was time, Harris felt, to consult with Jeremiah about the party and see whether he wanted to come too. But first he would have to consult with Richard and Helen Rose to see if they thought it proper that Jeremiah and his sister Tessa should go to a party for boys of the Navy and their opposite numbers.

Richard and Helen were very pleased both with the idea of the party and with the idea that Jeremiah and his sister Tessa should go to the party. Helen felt that Harris' misgivings were baseless. She said that he always projected into any situation certain of his feelings of hesitation and doubt, and the real basis for these feelings was Harris' concern about what other people would think.

"Hell is the opinion of other people", she said to him, and he listened, feeling that she was a wise woman and that she shown real insight, such as he was quite incapable of, perhaps because in thinking about himself his own ego was always a formidable black barrier.

CUH

The Idea Of A Party

"Do you want to go to a party"? Harris asked
Jeremiah, having gone out to visit with him in the yard
where the precocious youngster was much involved in making
matters as difficult as possible for an old, decripit,
and patient tom-cat (known as a storm cat to Jeremiah) who
knew the boy very well and knew that the only way to deal with
Jeremiah was to accept his behavior as if with indifference.

"I say, Jeremiah, do you want to go to a party?"
asked Harris again.

"A good party, full of boys and girls who are
full of fun", said Harris.

"Will there be plenty of candy and icecream?"
asked Jeremiah.

"Candy, ice-cream and Pepsi-Cola, more than you
get down your stomach", said Harris.

"All right, I'll come", said Jeremiah, as one who
is bestowing a great favor. He was feeling high and mighty that
day because he had punched a twelve year old boy in the nose.
This twelve year old vilain had tormented Jeremiah for months
and escaped punishment only because he wore glasses and Jeremiah
who believed in the Marquis of Queensberry rules, believed also
that one ought not to punch anyone while he was wearing glasses.
In the end, however, Jeremiah had figured that if he punched him with
sufficient accuracy, he would hit him in the nose and this would
be fair enough, this would conform to the code duello. He did not
know that the enraged and wicked twelve year old boy would hide,
break his glasses and claim that Jeremiah had broken them.

CUH

The Idea Of A Party /10

He called Alexis after some thought and told him that he
would get his *a*amera and explained to him that *E Pluribus*
*Unum* meant, Out Of Many, One, and by extension or implication,
Out Of Plurality Comes Unity. He then made Alexis promise that
he would stop looking through the keyhole when Florence tooka
shower, but he had little hope that Alexis would keep this
promise since Florence was very handsome and furthermore Alexis
was hard to swerve. He might even use his camera to take pictures
of Florence through the keyhole.

At any rate, this illustrates how some of Harris' best ideas
had proved catastrophic in the past, and it explains to some
extent his emotions of doubt and hesitation with regard to the
party, what would come of it.

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The Idea Of A Party/11/

Whatever his doubts about the party itself, there could be no question of the success of the idea of the party, for all the students, male and female, now regarded Harris as a kind of Santa Claus, and the longer the party was delayed (it was scheduled to occur immediately after the end of the term), the more fascinating it seemed. There was much discussion of the character of the party among all the students and one of the Navy boys wanted to come and sit in on Harris' female classes so that he might look the girls over. Harris denied this request, pointing out that this would give the Navy boy an unfair advantage.

The Navy boy answered that he would gladly report the results of his findings to his fellows and peers. But Harris observed then that this would not be enough, for no matter how hard he tried he was certain to choose the best girl for himself and do all that he could to win her favor.

This era of ever-increasing good feeling due to the desire for the party and the enjoyment of the idea of the party was rudely interrupted when the mid-term grades were posted. It looked like most of the Navy boys might fail by the end of the term, for they were failing, most of them, in at least two subjects, and almost all of them were failing in physics, which as has been observed, was taught them as if they were going to emulate Einstein at some future date.

The crisis was not really a real one, for there was little intention in Washington to make most of the boys officers, but neither the boys nor their instructors knew this. Some of the boys were irritable, some depressed, some panicky, and some hopeless. Schumacher was hopeless and panicky. He had failed in all his courses, including his English course (which was called "Direct Communication".

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The Idea Of A Party/12/

Schumacher spoke to his teacher after class and his
hopelessness was clear in his words and his panic in his gestures

"I guessed I just can't make the grade", he said, "I guess I'm just no good. I might have known that I should not have done that."

"Done what?" asked the teacher, who felt sympathy and
for the boy since he had himself often felt just like that.

"Do you promise to God, boss, that you won't tell anyone?" he asked in a whisper.

"It depends on what it is", said the teacher, "there are some things which can't be kept secret". He was wondering at the time what ~~they~~ were so that he could figure out if he was right.

"I guess I can trust you", said Schumacher, "the fact is, Boss, that I'm married".

"What's wrong with being married," asked the curious teacher, "lots of people are married."

"If the big shots knew that I was married", said Schumacher, "I would get thrown out on my ear. If you're in the V-12 program, you're not supposed to get married. My wife lives in Worcester and I tried to get to see her twice a week and that's why I don't study my lessons enough, I'm busy with her. And anyway, I had a feeling that if I broke the rule about not getting married, everything would go wrong once I was in the V-12 program."

Harris tried to reassure the boy, but he spoke without much conviction because he knew how poor Schumacher was in English, or Direct Communication. He told the boy that he would carry his secret marriage a secret to the grave, and he also remarked that most of the other boys were not doing very well in most of their subjects.

In the very first class which Shenandoah Fish ever taught, there was a young man who was like his teacher a poet. The first assignment had been established in time immemorial as the writing of a self-description by the student. Thus it was expected that the teacher would come to know his students quickly.

After the first hour, after this assignment had been explained with care, the young man who was a poet came to the teacher and asked if he might write his description of himself in metrical form. Fish naively assented, thinking that it was his duty to encourage the writing of poetry. He did say, however, that he thought that it might be difficult to get all the relevant facts verified and he suggested that this student, William Perry, write such facts as the poem did not present on a separate sheet of paper.

Little did he know that his suggestion would be very resented by this student as implying some difficulty in the writing of poetry.

William Perry handed in his poem at the next meeting of class and looked very superior at the other young men who had been restricted to prose. Mr. Fish read his poem and saw that it was about how his mother had died last summer and he had felt like jumping into the coffin with her.

"The poor boy", said Fish to himself and resolved to be very sympathetic.

Foolishly, however, he did not tell the student Perry that his poem was very talented because it was not. Perry sulked. For the second theme he turned in a composition which was hardly more than ninety words long, although it was rule strictly enforced, that each student was supposed to write six hundred words at least.

A CHILD'S UNIVERSAL HISTORY

Shenandoah Fish, teacher and author, became passionately devoted to children, or the idea of children, after he had been married for four years.

### Wilhelmina

This devotion seemed to his wife/mere egotism as did his desire to be a father himself. The marriage was not what it might have been, and this was one form in which Wilhelmina expressed her dissatisfaction.

"You merely want an ex tension of your ego", she said to her husband.

"Every desire, the saint's and the criminal's," he replied, "can be looked at in that light, if that's the kind of light you like".

This kind of discussion often occurred at breakfast as Shenandoah looked from the/paper at the two children of their neighbors who stamped about in the backyard. Eva Cornelius, the little girl, blond, and fey, possessed by astonishing and astonished eyes, sought each morning to evoke a variety of emotions, the chief of which was rage, from her brother, John Cornelius, aged three. John, however, was sturdy and detached. He tried to keep away from his sister and to disregard her. He preferred whatever mud or stick he managed to secure, and he did/care for her attentions.

Shenandoah soon admired John's disinterest and detachment very much.

"One day he will start to hit her back", he said to Wilhelmina, enjoying the idea and the prospect very much.

2.

Shenanandoah had no great interest in national politics, although he enjoyed the excitement of national campaigns. But as his admiration for John Cornelius grew, he decided that it might well be expressed in the prophecy that some day at the proper time, John would become President.

His parents were delighted by this idea. Wilhemina snickered, "I suppose", she said, "that if your brother's next child is a boy (the first had been a girl and his brother's wife was pregnant again), there will be no holding you".

The brother lived in Florida, far-off. Wilhelmina suggested that he goad certainly go to see the new boy by the fastest plane.

As for John Cornelius, he regarded his sponsor and admirer with an absent-minded disdain, accepting gifts of chewing gum and candy from him as if they were his natural due. Eva Cornelius, on the other hand, became flirtatious with Shenandoah, desiring the limelight herself. Eva went one week-end with her mother, Susanna Cornelius, to be present at the wedding of a cousin in a distant city and during this week-end, when John, deprived of his mother and his sister and left with the servant girl, sought out Shenandoah, shyly smiling.

"You are only interested in friendship with me", said Shenandoah, "when your mother and sister are absent".

The child made nothing of this remark, but asked his adult admirer to tell him a story. Shenandoah told him the story of Noah which was much enjoyed by John because he liked boats very much and also animals. He wanted a detailed description of Noah's ark and when the story was finished, he wanted to hear it again

"What a President he will make", said Shenandoah to Wilhelmina, "he can stand repetition!"

Edmund Kish went to visit Cambridge for six weeks, to use the library at Harvard. Here he met two of the most interesting children of the age. One was named Wallace Rose and he was perhaps the most interesting and gifted boy in America, the only possible exception being John Cornelia. The two prodigies knew each other.

One evening at the Rose household Edmund, who was fonder of children than he knew, went to the child's bedroom where Wallace and his sister Helen were preparing to go to sleep by means of exhausting all the devices for staving awake, picture books, glasses of water, and operas about the twenty-fifth century on the radio.

Seeing Edmund, Wallace, a blue-eyed and very handsome child, hid under the blankets in order to attract more attention.

Edmund saw through this manoeuvre and conversed with Helen, a beautiful child too, who suffered from the fact that her brother was a charmer to the point of genius.

At last, convinced that Edmund was seriously interested in conversing with Helen, Wallace emerged from the blankets and shouted:

"Hello, Edmund dead-pan!"

"What are you thinking about?" Edmund inquired.

"I am thinking about everything" said the blue-eyed boy emphasizing everything with a kind of natural imperialism.

"How can you think about everything?" asked Edmund, who had studied Kant and other positivists. ) Footnote )

"That's all there is to think about", Wallace shouted back in glee and triumph.

Meanwhile Helen had paid no attention to this exchange, but had sat upright in her bed and stared at her beautiful face in the dresser looking-glass. She was thinking of a boy in her class named Richard who was in love with her best friend Tessa.

5.

choice. And he announced to Wilhelmina and to Susanna Rose that
Jeremiah and not John must be the President.

Susanna, annoyed and disappointed, stuck out her
her tongue at him.

"You are faithless, fickle, and disloyal", she said
to him.

"John can be the Prime Minister of the British
Empire", said Shenandoah.

Susanna was enraged.

"Either he is President or he is nothing", she
said.

"In these matters", said Shenandoah, "we must
submit and surrender our personal desires to the interests
of our great nation".

Undeterred by the resentment he had caused,
Shenandoah went to confer with Philip, who, like Shenandoah,
had long been a student of Freud.

"Jeremiah can be the first psychoanalyst in the
White House", said Shenandoah.

"He can come out against inhibition of every kind",
said Philip.

"Yes, yes", said Shenandoah, enthused, "as soon
as he takes office, he will abolish Mother's Day, because it
is the national celebration of the Oedipus complex".

Philip, delighted, suggested that Shenandoah become
Jeremiah's tutor and Shenandoah accepted the proposal immediately
without hesitation.

"Jeremiah will be our first socialist King", cried
the intoxicated author and teacher, "Perhaps we ought to
make him king, instead of president? Four years or eight are not
enough. Perhaps we ought to start a dynasty?"

"Perhaps", said Philip,

6.

###

It was not long before Jeremiah Wallace Rose was very much aware of the unusual interest and devotion of which he was the object. He took it for granted. He accepted Shenandoah's arrival with gifts, especially candy, as the most natural thing in the world, no more remarkable than breathing. And he adopted Shenandoah's name which astonished some and of the ego. gave Shenandoah the finest of pleasures.

"I am Shenandoah", he said when he answered the telephone, "who are you?"

This was the cause of perplexity, but Jeremiah was obdurate. He insisted that his name was Shenandoah, and consequently the Rose number was often thought to be the wrong number by friends of the family.

At last Shenandoah decided that perhaps it would be best for this phase to draw to a conclusion. He rang the Rose number.

"I am Jeremiah", he said when Jeremiah answered.

"How are you?" said Jeremiah, "I am Shenandoah".

"Now look here, Jeremiah", said Shenandoah vainly, "this must come to halt. You are making a comedy of identity. It is no use having a name if you are going to use someone else's name. There is enough ignorance and confusion in the world as it is without any effort on your part to increase it".

"That's right, Jeremiah", said Jeremiah.

To Philip Rose Shenandoah declared that this incident showed metaphysical insight on his son's part, for it was obvious that he understood how complex the self was and how ambiguous.

And in the same way Jeremiah delighted and astounded his sponsor when he heard "Peter and the Wolf", the tone poem by Prokofiev in which a little boy, Peter, is menaced by a dan ger-

7.

ous wolf, but in the end rescued from the wolf's clutches while
the wolf himself is assassinated. Jeremiah took the wolf's part,
hoping that the wolf would succeed in his malevolent purpose and
soprowing when the wolf was thwarted and killed.

"What a prodigy is Jeremiah", said Shenandoah, rejoicing
in his youthful friend.

So it was when Shenandoah and Wilhelmina visited the
Roses on evening when Jeremiah and Helen had gone to bed, but
were not asleep. Jeremiah who had heard his sponsor's voice
on the stair hid under his covers, thus to attract more attention.
Shenandoah recognized the strategem and decided to pay attention
to Helen who had for some time shown no little resentment of
her brother's success. After five minutes of conversation
between Shenandoah and Helen, during which Shenandoah showed
no interest in the boy beneath the covers and on the contrary
a fascinated interest in what Helen had to say, Jeremiah, im-
patient at last, thrust out his head.

"Hello, Shenandoah", he shouted, "did you bring us
candy again".

"No", was the reply, "you have come to expect, you
take it for granted this will end by spoiling candy for you".

"It will not", declared Jeremiah with conviction.

"It will not, it will not", his sister affirmed.

"What have you been thinking about, Jeremiah?" asked Shenandoah.

"I have been thinking about everything", answered
the blue-eyed boy.

"How can you think about everything?" asked Shenandoah, a student of Kant and other skeptics.

9.

Shenandoah was very much moved by this appeal from the little boy. He too when little and even as late as his twenty-fifth year had been afraid of the dark, afraid of being alone, awakened at night by dreams, excited by lights and visitors at night. He pleaded with the Roses to permit him to go upstairs, touch the button and make the light bloom, console the little boy and tell him a story. This was a breach of the Rose's discipline, but they yielded to Shenandoah's desire.

He went upstairs, turned on the light, took the little boy back to bed and told him that he would have to get used to darkness and loneliness because they were everywhere when the sun went down. But soon he recognized that this was not the time for the yout ful Jeremiah to recognize such matters, not, at least, in the way that Shenandoah was capable of speaking of them.

"Tell me a story of when you were a little boy", said Jeremiah, desiring above all to stay awake although he also loved stories very much, and loved even more the repetition of stories, a repetition in which he corrected all changes and omissions.

"When I was a little boy", said Shenandoah pensively, "I was supposed to go to the circus with my mother and father. My mother and I met my father after his day's work was done and it turned out that my mother had forgotten to bring the tickets. Then my father bought new tickets, but he was angry at my mother and my mother was afraid of my father's anger, and she was unhappy. I was sick the day after and my mother said that I was sick because of having too much peanuts at the circus, but I think I was sick because my father was angry and my mother was unhappy. And I think my father was angry at my mother not because of the tickets, but because he did not like her enough".

## Jeremiah

Childless at the age of 30 and married to a wife who did not want to have a child, it was natural that Bertram Harris should become intetested in the children of his friends.

His wife Susan had long declared that she did not wish to bring a child into a world so evil. But her true reasons were other, an
She was/only child and she was childlike herself and as she had told her to whom
husband, she would be jealous of any child/she gave being. And yet
a deeper reason perhaps was the fact that she did not love her husband.
It seemed then that she was really in love with herself. But this was
not in fact true.

Next door to Bertram and Susan Barnes lived Isabel Howells and her two children Phoebe and Cotton, aged five and three. The father Woodrow Howells had been sent to England by Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the two young matrons were soon close friends, although not Susan but Isabel had made the friendship intimate.

Bertram first became interested in his neighbor's two children as he sat in the dining room at breakfast and strove to discover in *The New York Times* how obsequious would enter the war in Europe. It was April in New England and there was a spell of May weather. Consequently, the two children were let out to play in the backyard where their yelping and stamping soon irritated the student of The New York Times as he intoxicated himself with coffee before going to the job by which he earned his living and the wherewithal to pay for the coffee he loved so much.

CUH

Perseus

Perseus was a young man who was brought up to be a hero. In the best possible way it was made clear to him that the only life worth following was one which would lead to great fame and make everyone admire him. But he was also given to understand that he had to acquire this glory and fame by doing the true, the beautiful and the good thing. Otherwise fame was worthless and would not last, but you can't really be a hero when you do what was is wrong, anyone can see that. No matter how powerful you are, if you are unjust, your power is worthless.

this

Armed with knowledge from early childhood, Perseus, the hero, eras / enemy, enema, pat, pattern/ did in fact grow up to be a noble and heroic wrong man, and when he the right time came, he went forth into the wide and dangerous world to find heroic things to do. You might think that there was something comic about setting out to be a hero, for it might be and more heroic maintained that it is harder/to be a hero than anything else.

But after all he was just a young man and in any case heroes are like that, they have to go and look for trouble, there is very little incentive in sitting at home and waiting for trouble to come to you.

By asking other people, Perseus found out that in a distant country lived a wicked woman (wicked is hardly the word when they looked at her). She was wicked just as Perseus was heroic, that is to say, for its own sake, that is to say, just as one goes swimming, as an end in itself, for the pure joy of it. Now Perseus had received a birthday present of a shining brazen shield (it shone as bright as looking-glass) and he took it along with him to other useful birthday presents.

He found Medusa fast asleep, which was a piece of luck, and he knew enough from having listened to other people not to look at her face, for if he did he would turn to stone. Now one might

Perseus /2/

well inquire why a woman's face can turn a man to stone, but the
fact is that women's faces have done far worse things. They have
also done some very fine things to men's faces, but that's another
story and has been told before, (behind every man's success is a
woman, etc.), but to get back to Perseus, one interesting question
is how he figured out that the best way to kill the Medusa was to
use a shield as a mirror. Most men would have been frightened and
they would have been right to be frightened because what is the
use of a king unnecessary chances. Perseus, however, wanted to
be a hero and he would have taken an even graver chance, if necessary.

Not only that, he was extremely intelligent and he had once been
to a play in which the most horrifying events occur. He had noticed
that the representation of these events on the stage did horrify
him, but certainly not as much as if they had actually occurred.
And after the play was over, he had felt rather good, as if he had
succeeded in accomplishing some dangerous mission. Putting two and
four hundred and ninety seven together, Perseus decided that a
direct look at this dreadful woman might turn a man to stone, but
if he just looked at her reflection, he would be able to decapitate
her.

It was a calculated risk, no doubt.

And he had a certain amount of good fortune, for he did
happen to find the Medusa fast asleep. What a look he saw on her
(describe) (she is beautiful) face reflected in the brazen shield! How he paused, hesitated, almost changed his mind because he thought he might wake her up and converse with her and even make love to her. But he decided that he what he really wanted was to be a hero, he struck her neck with his sword, he conquered his own natural interest in a fascinating woman, and he decapitated her. He then put her head in a bag, supposing that it might be valuable as proof of his

2.

and Mata-Hari? To mention only a few examples. Women's faces have also done some very fine things to men's faces, behind every man's success is a woman, but that's another story.

To return to Perseus, the interesting question is how he figured out that the best way to kill the Medusa was to use a shield as a mirror. Most men would have been frightened stiff and they would have been right to be frightened because what is the use of taking unnecessary chances? But Percy wanted to be a hero and he would have taken even more dangerous chances, if necessary. Not only that, but he was extremely intelligent. He had once seen a tragic play in which the most horrifying events occur, a man kills his father, marries his mother, discovers what he has done and blinds himself. Now Percy had noticed that instead of having a depressing effect upon him, the experience of regarding these awful things was rather exhilarating. He was sensing some of the time, of course, but by the time the play was over, he was quite good, partly because these dreadful things had not happened to him. He felt like someone who has just escaped taking the plane which crashed and he also felt like someone who looks back at the ocean in which a tracherous undertow had made him think for a time that he was going to drown. Percy stood up and left the theatre, exhausted but relieved and pleased. That visit to the theatre was what suggested to Percy that if he just looked at the Medusa's face as reflected in the shield, he would not turn to stone and he would be able to decapitate her.

It was a calculated risk.

And he was lucky, finding the Medusa/sleep. What a look he saw upon her face in the glittering shield! The Medusa, contrary to the false account given elsewhere, was a very beautiful woman, as beautiful as Marlene Dietrich, Maud Gonne, and all

SIGISMUNDO

It came to pass by one of those accidents (which seem
in the end to be no accident at all) that a granddaughter of the
great savant was one of Bertram Harris' students. Her name was
Agatha Freud and she was very pleased to satisfy her teacher's
curiosity about her illustrious grandfather. She had been the last
of his grandchildren and she had been the only human being
permitted to break the ironclad routine of the studious day,
for she was allowed to come to his study whenever she wanted,
and he wrote her little notes on interesting occasions. He had
been very fond of little children as one would expect of the
mind and heart of the human being who had the courage and candor
to declare that inclined to many kinds of perversity.
Since as before, days and holidays

He had written her the kind of notes which a little
child delights to receive and read, although his labors like his
fame on earth international.

Not long before his deatha Princess of the House
of Bonaparte and the President of the United States had intervened
to secure his safety and departure from Vienna after the Nazis
took possession of this great capital and placed him under house
arrest. It was of this last period that Agatha Freud had the most
stories to tell her teacher, of her grandfather's unwillingness
to depart from the city in which he had learned and taught so much.

Harris decided that it might be a good idea for
Agatha Freud to make the acquaintance of his youthful protégé
Jeremiah. Since she was a baby-sitter and the Roses employed baby-
sitter, this project seemed practicable enough, and Harris felt
that she might exercise a good influence upon his young friend.
But first it was necessary to consult Jeremiah himself.

Sigismundo, 2

When Harris arrived at the Rose household, he found the little boy alone, reading the latest issue of *Life*, or more precisely looking at it. Jeremiah's mother was at a conference of parents whose children go to school, and his father was hard at work trying to take care that the Governor of Massachusetts did not make too big a fool of himself, a very delicate and important task. And Jeremiah's sister Helen was gazing enraptured at the cinema, with friends.

The little boy had become interested of late in the little discussed question of the existence of God. This was a consequence of his beginning to go to Sunday school, an action which his father deplored.

"Bertram", said the boy to his sponsor, brushing aside the conventional formalities of greeting, "why did God make the world?"

"Jeremiah had heard the Sunday School teacher's explanation, but desired Harris' view, feeling quite rightly that from his friend he would obtain an *avant-garde* view, a view different, at any rate, from that of his Sunday School teacher, whom he did not like because he looked anemic. He did like Harris, although in a patronizing way.

Harris was struck by the sudden-ness of the child's question. He was left bemused. He look ahead absentmindedly into empty glassy-eyed and with a dropped jaw.

"Why did God decide to make the world?" Jeremiah said again, striving to awaken his devoted friend and prepared to kick him in the shins if necessary.

"Because he was bored", said Harris, because he had nothing else to do with himself."

"Why didn't God get bored?" Jeremiah inquired with that tenacity of children which would become a great scientist.

SIGISMUNDO, 3

Jeremiah remembered his tutor's previous explication of boredom, that it was like being rainbound all day long until one gets distempered like cats, petulant, cranky, and over-sensitive.

Receiving no answer, Jeremiah kicked his friends lightly in the shins, and said: "Tell me why does God get bored?"

"Anyone who is always alone is bound to get bored", answered Harris, returning to the world of light, "That's how God knew that Adam had to have a wife. Adam was too lonely with just the animals and plants to keep him company, so God took a good look at him and said: 'It is not good for man to be alone.'"

He knew from his own feelings that being alone all the time was boring and painful. Not only that, but it is thought by some people that he had created other worlds before he made this world which we live in and wiped them out because he was not satisfied with them."

"Is he satisfied with this world?" asked the inspired child, delighting Harris.

"No one knows", Harris replied, because no one knows what God really thinks and feels. But some people believe that God can't possibly be satisfied with this world as it is and must probably be somewhat irritated, if not furious. Le Dieu est irrite," say the French, and it is supposed by some that he does not destroy the world because he has taken up forgiveness and needs the world to have enough things to forgive, especially the human beings in it.--You know what forgiveness is, it is when your mother smiles at you and tells you not to do it again, after you have taken all the fruit in the icebox and eaten and gotten an upset stomach. Yet on the other hand, Jeremiah, last summer when the atom bomb was announced, some people thought that God had changed his mind in disgust and decided to destroy the world after

SIGISMUNDO, 4

all, and make a fresh start on some other star unridden by radiation.

Radiation is like lotching, but itching until you die."

"What do you think?" asked Jeremiah, "Is it true?" pensively.

"I just don't know", said Harris pensively.

There was a pause. The two gazd at each other. This

confession of ignorance by Harris was not to Jeremiah's liking.

"Tell me some more about what God does", said Jeremiah, He
was bored by the silence. He was interested in God.

"It is believed by some", said Harris, "that God spends
much of his time as a kind of marriage broker, that is to say, he
uses the time on his hands by arranging marriages between unmarried
men and women, or those who are not married at the time. Others
doubt this very much because so many marriages do not turn out well--"

"What does that mean, _do not turn out well_?" Jeremiah
requested.

Harrish hesitated. He had been told by the child's parents
that he must be careful not to mention divorce to Jeremiah because
it was the kind of thing a child ought no to know about, he would
not understand it, he would merely be disturbed, unhappy, and
perplexed.

"Let's talk some more about God", said Harris, "all right?"

"Why does God not have a wife?" Jeremiah demanded, "did
his marriage not turn out well?"

"Too late, too late!" said Harris to himself, "the quick-
witted child has already guessed what divorce is. It must be more
careful."

"God is married to the world," he told the brilliant boy,
"the world is his wife. He loves the world dearly, he admires
the stars, the round blue sky, the thick green jungle, the bouncing
strong animals and the different trees, full of leaves. He also loves
human beings, though sometimes I wonder why. God's wife name is Nature

SIGISMUNDO, 5

and she is very beautiful, fruitful, and lovable, but also very
fickle and hard to control, and she becomes violent sometimes, and
makes earthquakes and hurricanes, and God must rush in and rescue
the innocent victims of these passions."

He stopped. There was a silence again.

"I am talking too much again," He said to himself. He
felt that he had reached beyond questions interesting to the child,
and must cease to avoid perplexing or boring the boy, for his own
personal feelings had intervened more and more in what he said.

He said goodbye to the child who was struck by the sudden-ness of his departure and thought that he might have somehow said or done something wrong.

"Stay to say hello to mother and Helen", the tactful boy
suggested.

"You did not do anything wrong", said Harris, "I just
have to go home. We will talk some more soon about God and also
about a man named Joy, a famous doctor who knew very many things".

"Joy is a strange name", said Jeremiah.

"He was a strange man", said Harris, "I will tell you all
about him, all that I know. Sometimes he makes me think of what my
grandmother once said to me, that to be entirely smart is to be
a fool".

"Come soon", said Jeremiah, "and don't go away all of a
sudden".

"Righto", said Harris, hurrying through the door awkwardly,
self-conscious about the abruptness of his departure, "See you soon".

As he left the house and looked at the glittering night
sky above him, it was a glittering black autumn night, fallen
leaves scratched the brickwalk of the academic city, and the stars
made Harris think of the moral law within (which tortured human

Sigismundo, 6

beings so much and yet gave them the pleasure of being good also)
and the dim tale of the Milky Way made him think again of the
existence of God, strange father of heaven and earth. His be-
lieved that God existed, but sometimes he was none too sure. The
boat of his belief was often close to the rocks, most often perhaps
when he sat on the beach of the Maine coast and gazed at the ocean.
sterile
seaside
 sterile
seaside

As he continued to review his thoughts, he spoke to himself
as if he were still speaking to the child. His tentative and some-
what didactic style kept going in him, as one who after he has read
Shakespeare all day, thinks in the rhythms of iambic pentameter.

If God existed, why did he let the wicked prosper? Because
it was necessary for man to be free to do good, or he would not
truly be free to do good. But why did God not intervene more often,
or at least once in a while, when an innocent child is punished for
the social diseases or sins of his parents and grandparents?

Perhaps it was He, not the British, American, and Russian
soldiers who brought about the downfall of Hitler, but no commander
seemed to be defending on Him very much. And if it was He, why did
He wait so long, until so many innocent and helpless children had
been tortured and killed?

been tortured and killed?

Here, in this life, our hearts are tried as gold in the
fire is tried, more cruel than jealousy: so a wise saint had answer-
ed these recurrent questions.

ed these recurrent questions.

The fire was certainly hot, it was furnace hot, hotter
than August, and after the heat, came the cold. Had the saint in-
tended to say that here in this life all hearts are tried to deter-
mine if they were worthy of heaven, hell or purgatory? This life
was a trial, it was a splendid opportunity, it was like Ellis Island,
in a way, it was a gauntlet, an ordeal, a race, or a schoolboy init-
itiation, full of slapstick, vicious jokes, and deliberate accidents.

Sigismundo, 7

It was a cruel trial, often unbearable to some, and death was it was more cruel than jealousy, and it more painful than going to the dentist every day for a year, as one might explain to Jeremiah. Death was more cruel and more powerful than jealousy and sunlight, it overshadowed everything, it was like a truly great man, like Goethe, Napoleon, and Freud.

"Who is Freud?" Jeremiah would certainly ask him, curious about all references.

"He is the one who invented radar", Harris decided that he would reply unless this answer made him ask a question about radar, about which Harris knew less than nothing, although more than most, less than he.

Harris had arrived at the porch of the house in which he lived. He looked again at the sparkling and cold sky, before going up to his door.

A great author had said: "I can forgive man his sins. What I can't forgive are the sins of God." His name was Ivan, and he read books all the time. So too on the Day of Atone-ment an ironic (needless to say!) Jew had cried out: "I am sick of atoning for my sins. Let God atone for his sins for a change!" And then it had been decided to put God on trial for his sins and he had been found guilty and then he had been forgiven.

If there is no God, said Harris to himself, then this life is absurd, it is a senseless farce, a jigsaw puzzle the parts of which do not compose a picture.

But perhaps and probably there is a God, for it is true enough that nothing succeeds like cynicism, except for love, except for love, which is very successful when it succeeds at all. But if love is even more successful than cynicism, then God must exist.

Sigismundo, 8

"That's my secret", said Harris as he mounted the dark stairs, "it is an open secret, just like my face. I wish that I were worthy of my open secret, capable of living by it to the bitter end."

"Here hearts are tried, here hearts are in search of bridegroom or bride," he concluded without conclusion, "I wonder how I will make out."

He pressed the button and the electric light blazed on in his study, and he asked himself: "What has been concluded that I am to deceive myself with the idea of conclusion, however pleasant?"

He turned on the radio to the middle of the second movement of a symphony, he sat down, and he recited the following poem:

Ein Gott vermag. Wie aber, sag mir, soll
ein Mann ihm folgen durch die schmale Leir?
Sein sinn ist Zweispalt. An der Kreuzung zweir
Herzwege steht kein Tempel für Apoll.
Gesang, wie du ihn lehrst, ist nicht Begehr,
Micht Werbung um ein endlich noch Erreichtes;
Gesang ist Dasein. Für den Gott ein Leichtes.
Wann aber sind wir? Und wann wendet er
an unser Seing die Erde und die Sterne?
Dies ist nicht, Jungling, dass du liebst, wenn auch
die Stimme dann den Munde dir audstosst,--lerne
Vergessen dass du aufsangst. Dass verrint.
Im Wahrheit singen, ist ein andrer Hauch.
Ein Hauch um nichts. Ein Wind am Gott. Ein Wind.

EVERYONE FELT MUCH BETTER

It was inevitable that Mr. Ellery Brown should come to the same subject, however he tried to run from it and no matter what his misgivings.

But most of all it was when he had to deal with the reading of poetry that the trying subject began to be as irritating as an itch. The students did not care very much for the reading of poems unless it was made a puzzle and a mystery to be answered. Even then they were annoyed and sometimes bored. And polite they did not seek to be more/than to their teacher whom they looked at as an amiable and well-meaning fantast.

The teacher chose poems which were interesting in their subject-matter. He tried to win their admiration by using everything from melodrama to catastrophe. Thus when he read them "Lycidas" by John Milton, they did not like this poem and were pleased to hear that Johnson, whoever he was, or was he the guy that was almost impressed after the Civil War, also did not like this poem.

"I am sorry", said Mr. Brown, "You are wrong and Johnson was also wrong. This is a very beautiful poem."

"If it is beautiful", asked Charles Paris, a rich boy from Brooklyn, "why don't I like it? I am very sensitive to beauty".

"Let us keep sex out of the discussion", said Mr. Brown, "If you were really interested in the matter, you would discover that this is a very beautiful poem. But since you are not interested and since I don't want you to take my word for anything, let me cite a poem in a different style."

He read his students "The Wreck of The Deutschland", by Gerard Manly Hopkins, for it was about five Franciscan nuns who had been drowned just like the young man, Edward King, who had been

2.

O Father, not under their feathers nor ever as guessing
The goal was a shoal, of a fourth the doom to be browned,

Yet did the dark side of the bay of thy blessing
Not vault them, the millions of rounds of thy mercy not
reeve even then in?

part to

The teacher jumped from one part of this poem because it was very long
and it was difficult to read aloud. He stated that it was not as good
a poem as "Lyridas".

"Alas! what boots it with incessant care", said
the teacher, "To tell the homely, slighted critic's trade? Were
it not better / And strictly meditate these thankless views? "ere
it not better done, as others use /To sport with brokers on a
gay parade/ Or with the treasuries of a chorine's hair".

"Let us try a third poem", said Mr. Tilly Brown
and read his students "Beauty For Ashes" a poem about the death
in Italy of a very gifted young man. This poem had been written
by R.P. Blackmur whom the students immediately recognized as the
author of "Lorne Boone".

3.

his mind."

"Lorna Boone is better", said Anthony Dickson, "much more interesting".

Mr. Brown was becoming desperate. He decided to try one more poem, "The Convergence Of the Twain", by Thomas Hardy:

Dim moon-eyed fishes near
And gane at the gilded gear

And query: "What does this vai gloriousness here?"

He pointed out how this poem was inferior to the other three and he observed again that death by accident makes the mind fall back on what to it is most dear or most significant.

But now the students had become interested in the sinking of the "Titanic" and before he knew it, forced by his failures in persuasion, he was telling them the story of this great disaster at sea.

It was the great ship's maiden voyage. Predictions of disaster had been made at Liverpool, and the ocean liner was said to be like the Tower of Babel, a defiance of God's will, an arrogance upon the part of heart of man, trying to improve on nature so much.

Mr. Brown had put aside his misgivings, being pleased to hold the students' attention with ease at last.

"The captain was making his last voyage as a captain and he had been chosen because he was an excellent commander. On board the ship was the general manager of the Cunard Line, and he wanted the Titanic to win the Blue Riband, the prize awarded for the ship that made the fastest crossing of the Atlantic.

On the ship was what was then called the millionaires' deck, because so many of the rich had booked passage in these sumptuous and expensive cabins. And there were others aboard who

4.

represented all the stations in society, a French novelist, an English journalist, a painter, an aide and close friend of a former President of the United States, the vice-president of a railroad, the president of a railroad, a Broadway producer, and in the steerage seven hundred and six immigrants.

No sooner had they gone to the west for two hours than a wireless message from an eastbound steamer warned the captain that there were icebergs. The captain, —his name was Smith—showed the message to the general manager, who said Ismay. More messages came and they all pointed to the dangers of the ordinary route of a steamer westbound on the Atlantic. Captain Smith wanted to alter the course a bit take no chances, but Ismay insisted that he keep to the quickest and shortest course so that the *Titanic* would win the Blue Riband. Captain Smith argued with Ismay but Ismay became impatient, and told him that he would demote him and make the first mate the captain, if he tried to take a slower and longer route. Had the captain been a man of more courage, he might have instigated on his own authority, and had Mr. Ismay been less dictatorial and eager to win prizes, all might have been well. Certainly other officers on other ships were well aware of the dangers the ship was running.

As you all know, the *Titanic* struck an iceberg and began to sink.

Everyone showed his true character then, the catastrophe was like an X-ray and displayed the bare black bones and the swollen black shadow of the pumping heart of each and all. The great liner sank slowly as each one consulted himself and conferred with others and acted out the truth in which they believed. Some tried to purchase or bribe their way to seats in lifeboats of which there were two few available. Some, dandies of dignity, put on their dress-suits to

5.

encounter the darkness like a bride. An old and rich man tells his young and beautiful as she enters a life-boat that she will be expecting her after a time. The immigrants are panicky and helpless. Two gamblers try to sneak onto a life-boat and are shot for their pains. Mrs. Iemon "traus refuses her place in a life-boat because she will be separated from her husband: "We have been with each other for many years", she says, "where you go I will go". One might well wonder if this reply was purely spontaneous or if she had thought before of such a crisis and such a choice. One man succeeds in getting his baggage in a ship, though there is not enough room, and one man disguised himself as a woman to get a seat and is ashamed forever after. Mr. Iemay did not take a seat until the last lifeboat was lowered and the captain without hesitation went down with his ship. Little effort was made to help those who struggled in the water, frozen and dazed and scared as never before. Those in the boats were afraid that to help the others might endanger themselves, and one woman punched a terrified man in the face as he tried to climb into the lifeboat she occupied, while in some boats exes were broken down on the frozen hands of those who clung to the side, and no one who saw this chopping was ever the same again.

"Never mind the Titanic anymore", said Mr. Brown to his listening students, "the story is sensational, but it is very true. The problem faced by those poor people is eternal and faces everyone at every turn. What would you do? Suppose you had a life-belt and you knew very well that it would only hold one person. And suppose another human being paddles near you and says he would like to hold it, or she would. What would you do? Would you save yourself or save the other human being? Remember, it is taken for granted that the life-belt will only hold one person."

6.

Some students invariably said that they would act on instinct a & keep the life-belts. They might even go so far as *keep* the other person, if he tried to get the life-belt. These students thought they were honest realists.

"The teacher protested that it was not wholly a question of instinct, it was certainly true that some human beings did not obey instinct only, as was illustrated by the old lady who decided to div with her husband."

And furthermore, since this was a classroom, no matter what one might do in an actual crisis, here in the schoolroom one might enjoy the freedom and luxury of speculating about moral choice and seek to make a genuine commitment of one's mind and one's heart.

One of the civic-minded students declared that he would give his life-belt to a great scientist who was of more use to society than he was.

"But what about the principle, 'Women and children first'?" asked the teacher. "Is it not one of the rules of Western society to save the weak, the children, and those who bear children. But this principle is abridged if we decide to save the great men, scientist and the like. In addition, it would be quite difficult to ascertain and judge the comparative merits of other human beings in the midst of the shipwreck."

"I would say that I had the life-belt first," said Charles Paris.

"Your friend might reply that you have had it long enough," said Mr. Brown. "But that is just a joke and a poor joke, and I must apologize for shielding to repartee, which I like very much. There is more than a little truth in your reply, though you state it in a way which would not persuade or convince anyone who is drowning" or trying to keep afloat on desperate seas."

W

7.

"What is the answer", cried the impatient and interest-
ed class, after the teacher had dismissed several other suggestions
which were worthless.

"In one sense, there is no answer", declared the teacher,
"it is something everyone has to decide for himself, and what he
decided will be what he is, he will be expressing his whole being by
his choice, and so important a choice cannot be made for you by
anyone else, nor by any student of choice and disasters at sea.
The most that can be done is to observe that every human relationship
involves some sacrifice of the interests of the self".

The class was getting bored again, and some were im-
patient to hear the conclusion, and some were pleased that they
were on dry land.

The teacher announced that some observations might be
helpful, even though no final answer was possible outside of
the water. One kind of observation might be call a natural and
one kind might be called divine, although these names were in-
adequate because the natural was often divine, and the divine
often very natural,

The natural observations, which might be called divine,
consisted, in short, of declaring to the other human being that
one had the life-belt as a matter of chance, good luck, or the
grace of God, just as one might have beautiful blond hair,
a beautiful face, or a marvellous tenor voice. The cause of this
gift was natural or divine. To ask you to give it to another
human being was like asking you to stop being beautiful or gifted
because others were not beautiful or gifted, or because they became
jealous, or because they had stringy and kinky hair and suffered
the consequences. This answer was as natural as the Grand Canyon

as just and democratic as man

history. It was divine because it was hard to see how this inequalit
of good fortune, talent, and difference might be avoided without
annihilating all that was valuable in them. But it was doubtless a
hard answer to make.

"The other answer was not only natural as well as divine, it was also slightly sentimental, if one was sensitive to such standards and distressed by sentimentality." This answer assumed the existence of a situation which was unique and yet desirable and not too infrequent, perhaps, namely, the situation in which you are in love with the other human being.

"Let us say that Romeo has the life-belt", said Mr. Brown, and Juliet comes swimming toward him and asks him to let her hold it".

"What does Romeo do?" asked the hushed class, moved by the mention of love, although none of them we re beyond the period of puppy infatuation, schoolboy crushes, and adolescent lust.

"What does he do?" said Mr. Brown pensively, "what does he do? and what does she do?" Since he is in love with her and she is in love with him, they spontaneously decide that they will both try to hold the life-belt, since they love each other and love life but love each other better than life itself apart from the other."

"But the life-belt can't hold two", cried Anthony Dickson, "that's what you said, it can't hold two, or there is no problem".

"Exactly", said Mr. Brown, "but they know, since they are in
love, that they will feel much better if they drown together than if
one survived and the other drowned. And in the brief moments before
they sink, they embrace each other and know an ecstatic happiness,
perhaps. They feel much better than they would if they did anything else"

The class moaned and groaned, disappointed. They were moved

9.

and love
but they were also dissatisfied. They did not think that life/could
be or would be so difficult, so disappointing, so unsatisfactory and
so sentimental, at best.

Mr. Brow
Some of the students suspected or entertained the view that /
was talking through his hat, as often before, even though he had
cited the famous play about "Romeo and Juliet".

5/

then a "How fołlish you are", said Ruth pointlessly, after
hearing the story of the strange discovery. You think very
well of yourself, and yet you don't appreciate yourself".

"That's a contradiction", said her husaband in
excitement, "and anyway it shows that I don't know myself
very well, for if I don't appreciate myself, how can I
be said to know myself".

Ruth maintained that he had an exaggerated view of
himself precisely because he did not appreciate himself. If
he recognized his own worth, he would not find it necessary
to ower-estimate himself.

Martin Ellery did not know whether to be fattered
or insulted. After reflection he decided to be illuminated,
for this too had turned out to be one more strange discovery,
almost as strange as the first one.

Since he was an optimist and thought well of the
future, he felt that it was now possible for him to
appreciate himself (to feel a certain self-esteem) without
exaggerating his own worth (and indulging in conceit,
braggadocio, self-consciousness, and apology which did no
good).

But he was wrong.

MASTER OF JOY, DOCTOR OF LIGHT

As Bertram Harris, a part-time teacher and full-time author and uneasy critic, departed from the concert hall where he had just heard Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, sometimes entitled "The Chorale" Symphony, he paused.

"What this country needs as a good five-cent psychiatrist" marked to himself.

It was early spring, an early spring evening in New England, when the mouse-grey evening had entered imperceptibly above the street-lights going on and the sizzle of taxis upon the wetness of the avenue. Harris did not want to go home by subway, and since he disliked the subway very much, it had occurred to him to think of the analysis of the mind and the heart, dark labryinth of heroes and knaves.

This thought had occurred to him often before in other forms, particularly when he perceived how intelligent human beings were about everything except themselves. He included himself in this criticism, it goes without saying.

The thought recurred because at that moment in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony when the chorus shouted so eloquently the words of Schiller: *Freude! Freude!* it seemed possible to Harris that were not only crying aloud the German word for joy, were also summoning from the dark earth, fertile with the great savant, master of joy and doctor of light, "Twice-Told Tales From The Viennese Woods", "The True Dreams Unknown To Joseph", "The Royal Highway To The Land Of The Unconscious Mind", "The Family Romance And The Primal Scene And The First Bean", "The Question

2.

All The Children Ask", "God Is An Anti-Semite", "Moses Was Not A Jew, But An Egyptian Bastard", "Wit As A Broadway Hit", "The Credo Of The Libido", "Hitler Has Nine Or Nintey-Nine Lives", "Love Makes The World Unsound" The Tyranny And Irony Of The Conscience Of The Sermon On Mount Venus", a "Doestoevsky's Father Was The Czar", The Incest And Breast Of Leonardo's Mama, Mona", ~~A History Of The Mystery Of Light At Night", "My Father Made Me Stubborn "~. "Reclaim-ation Of The Zuyder Zee, Or Consciousness Is Preferable".

Harris had begun to walk back to his home in the drizzling rain as he recited these titles to himself.

"Did he also write "A Street-Car Named Messiah?", he asked himself, "or was that great vehicle made by God or Jehovah?"

"What this country needs is love", he declared dogmatically to himself as he walked upon a bridge and looked at the mist-ridden river beneath where he had seen some rescued from suicide and some sailing a boat.

"More and more love", he continued, "there cannot be too much love: how can there ever be love enough?. There is not enough love in America, Love, health, and a clear conscience, a conscience cleared, a conscience accused, tried, and exonerated at last, the health of those who have been sick and have become well and have gained through the experience of sickness and suffering".

3.

"This is not a sentimental idea, nor an erotic" he remarked, defended himself against criticisms which had not been made.

By the time he had arrived at his house, Harris was wet and convinced of the truth of his speculations. He was under the impression that Freud would help many human beings to understand to know how to be in love. It was true enough, it seemed to him, that there not enough psychiatrists and some psychiatrists were not good enough for the human beings who suffered from the sickness of being unable to be in love, and some psychiatrists also had been good enough, but/no more because they had suffered from natural human weakness, exhaustion or derangement of the ego, the passing of time, worst of all exhaustions and derangements. Also, many/were sick and did not know that they were sick, and some were afraid because of great pride, which is a very great weakness, to recognize that they were sick or admit to themselves or to confess to others that they did not know how truly to be in love.

Before he retired for the day, he played a recording upon his phonography, winking courteously at the dog inscribed upon the Victor Album, His Master's Voice. He had made the recording himself, astonished profoundly by the sound of his own voice and astonished also by his choice of poems to record.

He began one poem in the second stanza:

> Banked be fortune it hath been otherwise
> Twenty times better; but once, in special,
> In thin array, after a pleasant guise,
> When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall,
> And she me caught in her arms long and small,
> Therewith all sweetly did me kiss
> And softly said, 'Dear heart, how like you this?'

> "It was no dream; I lay broad waking:
> But all is turned, through my gentleness,

4.

Into a strange fashion of forsaking;

And I have left the go of her goodness,
And she also to use newfangleness.

But since that I so kindly am served,
I would fain know what she hath deserved.

Sir
This poem by Thomas Wyatt, one of the few poets csekold by a
king and Henry VIII at that, made him very sad. He decided to
play the recording of one more poem, different in conclusion, before
seeking sleep, for the sadness of Wyatt's poem disturbed him very
much. He smiled at the dog this time, placing a sonnet by Sir Phil-
ip Sidney upon the turn-table:

Let dainty wits cry on the Sisters nine,
That, bravely masked, their fancies may be told;
Or Pindar's apes flaunt they in phrases fine,
Fnamelling with pied flowers their thoughts of gold;
Or else let them in statelier glory shine,
Ennobling new-found tropes with problems old;
Or with strange similes enrich each line,
Of herbs or beasts which Ind or Afric hold.
For me, in sooth, no Muse but one I know,
Phrases and problems from my reach do grow,
And strange things cost too dear for my poor sprites.
How then? even thus--in Stella's face I read
What love and beauty be; then all my deed
But copying is, what in her Nature writes.

The turn-table revolved idly upon the inner circle of the
phonograph and seemed to be a vain anticipation of the quartet
Beethoven might have written after Opus 135, The Grand Fugue.

Harris shop the revolution and went to the bedroom, hoping
to stop the partying festival of visiting tourists of thoughts,
mixing like a crowd on Election Night on Times Square.

"This is like a party visited by eager interlopers and gate
crashers whom the host thinks he might have met somewhat, or
strangers whose faces are familiar, or human beings whose names
doe s not remember, although he should."

He stretched out on his studio couch. "In going to my bed,
he said to himself, "as one that one would have slept".

5.

paused, amazed at the obvious date and period which had occurred to him. "These poems were written in the time of Elizabeth", he said as if he celebrated the defeat of the fops, the triumph of Drake, the humiliation of Philip of Spain, the second marriage of Edmund Spenser, the first marriage of John Donne, and the betrayal of William Shakespeare by the Dark Lady.

His mind did not stop in the dark, although he pressed his face in the soft pillow, causing sparks and flashes of color.

"Come sleep, O sleep, the certain knot of peace", he murmured in quotation again, "Greensleeves was all my joy, Alas, my love you do me wrong to cast me off disc urteously, using newfangledness, a strange fashion of forsaking. How shall I my true love know? Good night, sweet princess, and brights of angels ring and wing you to your breathe. There's an infinity to choose our ends, boohooing all the way. Here is someone coming that wa ts a little place. Y see a sea ten miles wide, ships sailing in the sea, & discharging their Canon. Y see a great Sky with moon & stars. I'm a fool, She is pretty quiet now, but has a diabolical temper. We happned to talk of Brutud and I said something in his praise, it struck me immediately that I had made a Blunder doing so, and therefore I recollected myself and said, Mr. Cesar, I be9 yr Pardon. The Cherry Orchard by te River side my Heart is sett upon. So we all laughed. I have read all the trash, and I am weary. I dined at the city tonight with Dr. Freind and he said that he wished he might be wrong and not wronged. You took my flowers, she said to me when we sat down in class to draw pictures in our Botany notebooks, and I said there are plenty more where they were, but she looked very unhappy, and disatisfied, but it is only six weeks before the Christmas holidays and no more teaching for ten full days."

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Two More Parents

He read the name of the play aloud and it turned out that and father that his mother/had seen it. His mother speaking from the backseat where Ronald was seated pleasantly beside her, began to tell the enthralled Hershey the story of the play. It was about a beautiful girl who is going to marry a rich and unpleasant business man because her father is an invalid who has to use a wheel-chair for the rest of his life. The play occurs in New Mexico. The beautiful girl is really in love with a handsome ne'erdowell who is penniless and who is looking for gold mines in New Mexico. He is also behaving unpleasantly because the beautiful girl is going to marry someone else for the sake of her poor father. Then a Mexican bandit, who had known the handsome ne'erdowell as a chum during the 1st World War, arrivesat the ranch where all the other

CUH/2/

Two More Parents

Hershey was very much moved and excited by the story.
His father next to him sat in silence and drove the automobile,
of the play
His mother told the story/passionately.

Hershey Green's mother concluded by explaining the true
meaning of the play, which was that some who seem to be good,
like the rich business man, are really, handsome who seem to
be bad, like the bad man bandit, are really good. She spoke with
a passion which her older son Hershey heard, but did not under-
stand. She was very much concerned with good and evil because
her husband was a rich business man who seemed to be both bad
and good.

Hershey wondered why, although the story had perplexed
him.
"What difference does it make what stories the
child hears", said Hershey Green's mother, "when he sees
the kind of thing that he does in his own family?"

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Two More Parents/3

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Two More Parents/4

"Logic will be the undoing of this boy", said Hershey
Green's father to his mother, thus offending her by implying that
she was somehow at fault, since her child was too logical; and
since he always made her feel at fault for everything,
they may be fast asleep, said Hershey's father to his
difficult son.

"I thought grown-ups don't go to sleep at eight o'clock",
said Hershey sturbborn as ever.

Fish had reviewed the story he had read four years before
and he had mused again on how, when children heard of the
episodes in the life of Hershey Green, they were much taken, they
might even be said to be fascinated, although this seemed strange

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Two More Parents/5/

to fish because the book about Hershey Green had been written for
adults, and certainly not for children. Yet, thought Fish in his
blue study, perhaps the children were touched in a way that most
children's stories did not touch them. For example, perhaps they
were touched by the name Hershey without knowing why, without that
Hershey was a pleasant name because it made them unknowingly
think of the Hershey chocolate bars all of them loved?

CUH/4

a case of Coca-Cola during the summer. His playful nature was extremely imitative and here in this story he had the authority of the great work entitled "The Imitation of Christ".

Harris thought that perhaps after telling this story he ought to recite to Jeremiah a poem which explained how complicated and difficult was the story of Christ and what effect he had upon some who knew him and who lived after him.

The poem was called:

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The Christ Child/2/

unfortunate wretch who did not in the depths of his heart believe
in God merely because his life was not what he wanted it to be
and in the dark mind beneath the conscious mind he thought this
lack of good fortune to be God's fault, but since he knew that it
was really his own fault, he did not believe in God.

Jeremiah had heard an exposition of the psalm in which
it is said that God made the heavens, the earth, and the waters
thereof.

"God makes water", Jeremiah remarked to his tutor as
his tutor held him and his sister by the hand, taking him two
children home for Sunday dinner. Then he broke into an uncontrollable
giggle, as did his sister.

"This will never do", Harris said to himself, and determined to bone up on theology as soon as possible so that his chosen nephew might not be lacking in respect for divinity.

He rehearsed to himself two famous stories which, so it seemed to him, might make Jeremiah adopt a more serious attitude toward the Father of heaven and earth. There was the French story which was recounted in "Ulysses", by James Joyce. Jeremiah knew a little French (he was bound to pick some up in the university city) and he had once tickled a party of adults pink by describing snails as _les escargots_, speaking with the purity of accent one might find in L'apadie Francaise. But Harris felt that this matter of theology was so important that he had better tell the story in English.

"Qui vous a mis dans cette fichue position?"

"Who has put you in that embarrassing fix?", asks Joseph
of his young wife Mary, who is pregnant although she has never
permitted him to make love to her.

"C'est le pigeon," Joseph" sweetly answers, and
with such charm that her wary husband, ever perplexed, thinks that

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The Christ Child/3

she is joking.

The second story was somewhat more complicated and it
might be difficult to tell to Jeremiah because he did not know
much about pregnancy, although he did know about pregnant cats,
having seen them give birth.

In this story, Joseph and his pregnant wife Mary are
going to Egypt to escape the slaughter of the innocents. It is
August, it is hot, they are on a dusty road, and Joseph is irrit-
ated as well as perplexed, perhaps because of the heat, or perhaps
because of the dust, or perhaps because his wife is pregnant and not
by him. Mary is hot and tired too, but she is also thirsty. She suffers
from a powerful thirst such as one might have after playing five
sets of tennis in July. The waddled pair pass a pear tree, and Mary
asks Joseph to get her a pear from the pear tree which is on
rise
an a slight hill next to the road.

get
" Let him who gave you that child give you the pear",
he answers her, in his irritation and feeling of perplexity.

Then the little child in Mary's womb speaks from the
womb to the pear tree.

"Pear-tree, bend that Mary may have the pear of her
infant
desire", says the foetus Jesus, "let my will be thy will for in my
will is your peace".

and quenches Ear pain; transbends low and Mary takes a pear from it
Joseph, gazing upon the miraculous event,
is moved to depthless awe and fear and yet also joy.

Harris wondered as to how Jeremiah would receive
this story. Perhaps, such was the assurance he felt, he might go
about Cambridge, and in an imperative voice command various trees
to bend down. He might ring up and command some store to deliver

After the first hour, after this assignment had been explained with care, the young man who was a poet came to the teacher and asked if he might write his description of himself in metrical form. Fish naively assented, thinking that it was his duty to encourage the writing of poetry. He did say, however, that he thought that it might be difficult to get all the relevant facts versified and he suggested that this student, William Perry, write such facts as the poem did not present on a separate sheet of paper.

2.

"This is just about ninety words," he said, "and you are supposed to write six hundred words every week".

"The Sermon On The Mount", said Perry, "is not much longer than what I wrote".

Fish was dumbfounded.

"If you will come down to the river", he said, "and walk on it, I will accept this paper, but not until then".

"I will wait until it freezes over", said Perry.

"I am told that it does not freeze over on some winters", said Fish.

"I bet it will", said Perry, "who seem to think well of the future.."

"Never mind", said Fish, "I referred to walking on water and not on ice, as you very well know."

CUH

The Navy Party

During the second year of Harris's devotion to Jeremiah, the course of the second World War was such as to make it necessary that the university teach students who were in the Navy. Harris was assigned to sailor boys who were enrolled in what was called the V-12 program, a program presumably intended to make enlisted or drafted young men into officers. Naturally the sailors wanted very much to become officers because officers they knew from experience were superior beings.

Harris felt ashamed somewhat that he had the role of teacher to these boys, for they had seen death at close quarters, they had seen their friends die right next to them, while he on the other hand had led a sheltered existence, so called, and he had been regarded as a privileged character.

Meanwhile there was a period of intermission between terms during which the hardworking Harris tried very hard to write poems, stories, and plays.

He was as before in a pensive and theological mood and thinking of the sentence of Voltaire which went: "If there was no God, he would have to be invented", he decided to revise it to "If there is no God, then we are demented".

He also wrote metaphors and comparisons in his notebook and this was for future use. He wrote: "Wherever she is, love is", so that he would be prepared in the event that he fell in love again. And he inscribed with care a piece of self-observation,

CUM
The Navy Party/2

"I am at times as tactful as an elephant attempting the minuet", And reflecting upon the nature of the institution which employed him and upon the literary profession and upon the capitalist society which gave all of these things their breath if not their being; he wrote: "They are all as competitive as a track meet". It then occurred to him that he might write a story in which two visitors from somewhere in Europe arrived at a great stadium and saw all the young men and young women engaged in endless hundred yard dashes while the older folks sat in the grandstand and cheered them or booed them.

But all stories are old.

CUM/3/

He was a likable chap in many ways and he had been intended for the priesthood and one of the first things he told Mr. Harris was that he liked best of all to write sermons.

But he mazed Harris with his first composition in which when he wanted to say pumping well, he said, tomb. By careful analysis Harris discovered that this was because on the campus there was a pumping well which, looked at from above, resembled a mound and thus a tomb.

The two immediately misunderstood each other. Harris thought that Schumacher was not an intelligent fellow and him Schumacher thought that Harris would fail/because of a grudge against Germans. The fact that he was failing in all his other courses was something that he did not try to explain to himself. Upon receiving his first paper back, an E meaning failing upon it, he remarked half-aloud: "Fuck the Jews! Jews on the half-shell!"

Harris, alarmed by this extreme pugnacity, which had never before occurred in a class he taught, urged Schumacher not to use four-letter words.

"It is not permitted to use four-letter or Anglo-Saxon expressions of contempt and aggression in this course in English".

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The Navy Party/3/

Feeling the mood of resentment in the Navy class (he did not know that it was/greater in other classes, for example, in the physics class where the students were taught as if they were slated to become Einsteins and Oppenheimers), Harris decided that something must be done and quickly.

CUH
The Idea Of A Party/4

Harris for long had loved parties and he had long felt
that he was not invited to enough parties (although he was wrong,
the
real truth was that people thought that he did not want them to
 invite him), and thus it was that he had made a serious study
of the nature of parties, and had even thought of writing a
book entitled, "The Idea Of A Party".

It was true, thought Harris, that the Radcliffe girls
were hardly likely to behave like that, at least not before
a considerable amount of indoctrination. But on the other hand
this was precisely what the Navy boys would probably expect of
any and all girls, unless they intended to marry then.

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The Idea Of A Party/5

The relationship between the teacher and the Navy students
was now transformed. Schumacher greeted him as boss when he
arrived in class; Schumacher looked down at his shoes to see
for sure that they were tied tight; and Schumacher became angry
with any other student who seemed to him not to be paying the
proper attention to Mr. Harris. It was Schumacher ambition and
hope to become one of the shore police, preferably by supplanting
one of them, but if that did not work, perhaps there could be
three shore police instead of just two, and certainly there
might be an occasion when this would be necessary, although
on the other hand they were all so well-behaved that
it was quite possible that no police at all would be necessary.

CUH

The Idea Of A Party

CUH
The Idea Of A party

"Do you want to go to a party"? Harris asked
Jeremiah, having gone out to visit with him in the yard
where the precocious youngster was much involved in making
matters as difficult as possible for an old, decrepit,
and patient tom-cat (known as a storm cat to Jeremiah) who
knew the boy very well and knew that the only way to deal with
Jeremiah was to accept his behavior as if with indifference.

"Will there be plenty of candy and ice-cream?"
asked Jeremiah.

"All right, I'll come", said Jeremiah, as one who
is bestowing a great favor. He was feeling high and mighty that
day because he had punched a twelve year old boy in the nose.
This twelve year old vilain had tormented Jeremiah for months
and escaped punishment only because he wore glasses and Jeremiah
who believed in the Marquis of Queensberry rules, believed also
that one ought not to punch anyone while he was wearing glasses.
At last, however, Jeremiah had figured that if he punched him with
sufficient accuracy, he would hit him in the nose and this would
be fair enough, this would conform to the code duello. He did not
know that the enraged and wicked twelve year old boy would hide,
break his glasses and claim that Jeremiah had broken them.

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The Idea Of A Party/8

Some are made aggressive by insecurity (such as being taunted by one who is older, like the 12 year old boy) and some are made regressive by insecurity (that is, they retreat, they withdraw, they run away, they go back to previous states of being and of feeling).

Jeremiah was of the former type. He was the stuff of which heroes are made and also the stuff of which dreams are made.

He was also just and when his father spanked him for breaking the glasses of the twelve year old boy, he accepted the punishment as right on his part.

"This hurts you more than it hurts me", he said to his father, and he was correct. He was feeling very cheerful because he was going to the party of the sailor boys and the blue stocking girls given by his friend, sponsor, and tutor.

Meanwhile Harris had returned to his home to brood some more about the event of the party, what might or might not occur when the party took place.

He was still full of hesitation and doubt, despite all the reassurances he had received. Some of his best ideas had come from time to time proved catastrophic, and he always had a sense that this might occur, in fact he cultivate his sense of doubt precisely because of such catastrophes.

For example, just the year before he had in an idle moment offered to buy a ten year old boy an expensive camera (this camera had been the apple of the boy's eye for more than nine months), if you gster could find out by himself (without anyone's help except for the borrowing of dictionaries) the meaning of the motto on the United States

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The Idea Of A Party/9

In less than four hours, the ten year old boy named Alexis
had convulsed the entire rooming house in which he lived with his
parents and which was inhabited mostly by learned graduate students,

Alexis had gone from one learned student to another, seeking to
get them to tell him what _E Bluribus Unum_ meant, but at the same
same time explaining to them that the conditions of the contest
were such that no one was permitted to give him any help, for the
purpose of the contest was to further the interests of scholarship,

Being scholars, they recognized the justice of this condition
and they would not help him except to tell him to use the dictionary.
Alexis used English and Latin dictionaries, but to little avail. He
found out that the second word of the motto meant, many, and the
the third word, one. But he was unable to find out from the dictionary
what the first word meant because it was an obsolete form of
the word, ex.

Alexis' father called Harris and asked him to tell the boy
that he was not going to get anything whatever since he had violated the conditions of the contest.

Alexis called Harris and told him of the results he had obtained and said that since he had found out two of the three words, might he not receive two-thirds of the prize, that is to say, a camera two-thirds as expensive as the one for which he had asked, as a reward.

Harris murmured something about Abe Lincoln and you can fool
all of the people some of the time. He did not really like Alexis
and he had started the contest because the ten year old had
been annoying a friend of his, Florence Saunders (also a graduate student of English) by looking through the keyhole when she
took a shower. He thought that this contest might serve to distract
the boy's attention, but now that he thought of it, he saw how

CUH

The Idea Of A Party /10

He called Alexis after some thought and told him that he
would get his camera and explained to him that _E Pluribus_
Unum meant, Out Of Many, One, and by extension or implication,
Out Of Plurality Comes Unity. He then made Alexis promise that
he would stop looking through the keyhole when Florence took a
shower, but he had little hope that Alexis would keep this
promise since Florence was very handsome and furthermore Alexis
was hard to swerve. He might even use his camera to take pictures
of Florence through the keyhole.

CUH

The Idea Of A Party/11/

CUH
The Idea Of A Party/12/

"It depends on what it is", said the teacher, "there are some things which can't be kept secret". He was wondering at the time what they were so that he could figure out if he was right.

"I guess I can trust you", said Schumacher, "the fact is, boss, that I'm married".

"What's wrong with being married said the curious teacher, "lots of people are married."

"If the big shots knew that I was married", said Schumacher, "I would get thrown right out on my ear. If you're in the V-12 program, you're not supposed to get married. My wife lives in Worcester and I tried to get to see her twice a week and that's why I don't study my lessons enough, I'm busy with her. And anyway, I had a feeling that if I broke the rule about not getting married, everything would go wrong once I was in the V-12 program."

Harris tried to reassure the boy, but he spoke with much conviction because he knew how poor Schumacher was in English, or Direct Communication. He told the boy that he would carry his secret marriage a secret to the grave, and he also remarked that most of the other boys were not doing very well in most of his subjects.