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Monday, November 6, 1961 University Daily Kansan Page 2
the took world
By Calder M. Pickett Professor of Journalism
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MARK TWAIN, edited, with introduction, notes and essay by Charles Neider. Washington Square Press, 90 cents.
In his introduction, Charles Neider suggests that Mark Twain's Autobiography should be ranked with the autobiographies of Benjamin Franklin and Henry Adams. I don't think so. I'm not sure it's really an autobiography, and it takes too much careless license with facts and history.
It is warm and winning, however, and pure Mark Twain. The penchant for exaggerated humor that distinguished Twain and others in the local color tradition is present here. Reminiscences and even diatribes are worth reading.
THE FORGETFULNESS OF MARK TWAIN is a puzzling thing. He has difficulty recalling whether he put certain episodes in "Tom Sawyer" or "Huckleberry Finn." He recalls with difficulty when certain things happened. He is especially derelict in respect to "Innocents Abroad." He tells that he used 10 or 12 of the Quaker City letters in assembling the final book. This is not so. Careful collation of the book and the letters reveals that Twain used almost all of the newspaper-slanted letters, and in their entirety at that.
He has a fixation on Bret Harte. Harte "hadn't a sincere fiber in him," Twain writes. "I think he was incapable of emotion, for I think he had nothing to feel with." He is harsh with Mrs. Thomas Bailey Aldrich, though kindly toward Aldrich himself.
IT IS THE EARLIER PART OF THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY that most enchants the reader. This is young Same Clemens growing up in Florida, Mo., and later in Hannibal, terrorizing his brother Henry, mystifying his mother, observing slavery and emigrants bound for California, being the hero of the town for allowing himself to be mesmerized (though he was faking everything throughout).
Then he becomes a printer and learns about life on the Mississippi, goes to Nevada with his brother Orion, mines silver, works on the Territorial Enterprise, goes to San Francisco and the Sandwich Islands and the Holy Land, writes "The Jumping Frog" and "Innocents Abroad" and "Roughing It," meets Oliva Langdon, marries and becomes a solid citizen of Hartford.
NEIDER'S EDITION OF THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY differs from that of Albert Bigelow Paine and from Bernard DeVoto's later "Mark Twain in Eruption." The edition, in fact, occasioned an international controversy that Neider includes as a kind of appendix—his dispute with the Moscow Literary Gazette, which had said that America has an "official line" on Mark Twain, "that the nation tries to suppress or forget him, that his editors have followed the line carefully and that I have been the worst offender in this respect."
He doesn't tell much about becoming a solid citizen. The latter part of the autobiography falls apart, with long chapters on his family and long moods of depression and bitterness.
The interchange of Neider and the Gazette are in this volume, and they are of interest. The Autobiography remains of value chiefly not as an autobiography but as one more book full of Twain ideas, language, comments and philosophy.
★ ★ ★
THE FLOWERING OF NEW ENGLAND, by Van Wyck Brooks. Dutton Everyman, $1.85.
Van Wyck Brooks gives us a panorama of American life in his "Makers and Finders" series. Some literary critics and some literature majors have intense contempt for Brooks. Too often their case is based on his early interpretations of Mark Twain, which Bernard DeVoto made an effort to refute several years later.
POSSIBLY BROOKS IS NOT A DEEP CRITIC of American literature. But he offers a picture of literary America that is difficult to argue with. This is the first-published of his monumental series, though it follows "The World of Washington Irving" chronologically. It won him the Pulitzer prize and helped to make his popular reputation.
BROOKS UNFOLDS HERE A PICTURE OF LITERARY New England from early in the 19th century to the era of the Civil War. This was the time of New England's greatness. Giants appeared elsewhere, but most of them came later, like Melville and Whitman and Henry James and Mark Twain.
NEW ENGLAND IN ITS DAY OF FLOWERING was a region where Harvard College dominated thought, where Boston was the intellectual center. Boston and Cambridge. Bancroft was writing his historical epic that glowed with praises for democracy. Long-fellow was translating Latin in Cambridge, Emerson was building his circle of Transcendentalists, Thoreau was seeking solitude in the woods. Hawthorne was brooding at the custom-house in Salem.
Transcendentalist dreamers who had been touched with Fourierism were at work at Brook Farm. Dana was writing about two years before the mast and Holmes was dominating his circle. Garrison was writing wild diatribes in the Liberator. Channing was stirring up Unitarian excitement, and Allston and Stuart were creating memorable paintings.
Liberal Victory In NSA Seen
Despite a well-financed assault from a highly vocal but surprisingly small group on the far Right, the United States National Student Association's Fourteenth Annual Congress, which recently ended ten days of deliberations at the University of Wisconsin, was clearly a victory for student liberalism.
LACKING the strength to launch a frontal attack on NSA, the conservatives struck at the flank of liberal positions and, in some instances, managed minor victories in weakening position statements. The Association's attitude on Cuba in recent years has mirrored, but to a lesser degree, the position of the adult community as Fidel Castro moved steadily leftward and adopted an increasingly belligerent anti-United States posture.
In making such an evaluation one should add that there are signs that the battle between the Right and Left in NSA may have only just begun. The liberal-oriented leadership of NFA faces a threat from both the College Young Republicans and the right-wing Young Americans for Freedom, the former controlled lock, stock and barrel by supporters of Senator Goldwater, Arizona Republican, and the latter heavily oriented toward the lunatic fringe that finds its home in the John Birch Society. Both groups, with interlocking leadership, have threatened to conduct a nationwide campaign, beginning this fall, against NSA.
In 1959, NSA denounced the Bastista regime and supported the revolt that was centered in the Sierra Maestra. In 1960, NSA adopted a resolution which said, in part, "NSA views the implementation of the concept of university reform in Cuba with interest and, in some respects, concern." This year NSA delegates denounced Castro's suppression of academic freedom and democratic student unions. At one point in their deliberations the delegates wired the heads of South and Central American governments to appeal to Castro to urge clemency for a group of Cuban student leaders who faced death as a result of anti-Castro activities. Significantly, the delegates denounced both Soviet shipment of arms to Havana and this country's role in the ill-fated April invasion.
Conservative forces, aided by Fulton Lewis III, a former HUAC aide and technical director of the controversial film, "Operation Abolition," sought to reverse a 1960 NSA stand calling for "reform or abolition" of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Instead, this year's delegates urged abolition straight out, apparently convinced reform of HUAC is no longer possible. The students also petitioned the House of Representatives to "disclaim the film 'Operation Abolition' as an official and accurate documentation of the San Francisco demonstrations against HUAC.
THE CONSERVATIVES, who had hoped to prove that a conservative tide is running on the campuses of American colleges and universities, were outmeuered and outvoted most of the way. The results of the ten-day gathering seemed to confirm the judgment on the political coloration of present day youth expressed by Governor Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin in his speech welcoming the NSA.
"I have heard it said on occasion," said Governor Nelson, "that your generation is turning conservative. I find this hard to believe, although conservative youth today may be better organized and financed by their elders.
"It is your generation that has given us the stirring sit-ins in the South and militant support for them in the North. Surely this is not conservative. It is your generation that has participated so much in the Freedom Rides dedicated to smashing interstate segregation. Surely this is not conservative. And it is your generation that has answered the call of the Peace Corps with such enthusiasm."
(From the October 1961 issue of The Progressive.)
Campus Traffic
It Looks This Way...
By Ervin H. Schmidt
Lawrence graduate student
The announcement that the campus would be open only to restricted traffic next year came with a sonic boom. One wonders why the announcement was so sudden, bold and irretrievable. The auto is now a green-eyed monster and the immediate forthwith cessation of tomorrow's traffic is today's fact.
NOT A SOUL WOULD TRADE PLACES with the traffic cop at the Sunflower Road and Jayhawk Boulevard intersection. An object subject to pity and scorn, he needs the arms of an octopus and the patience of a one-armed paperhanger. No one has anything against him, but everyone is in a hurry and the intersection serves entirely too many purposes. When the cop stops to bawl out a victim or give a ticket, frustration is supreme.
This one intersection is, of course, the main problem. The second problem is that Jayhawk Boulevard is used as a crosswalk almost anywhere and any time. Making this thoroughfare wider would help some in that there would be more dodging room.
Next year's solution calls for five turn-arounds and five manned stations—at five points that will shut off traffic at the Jayhawk-Sunflower intersection.
THE TURN-AROUNDS WILL HELP SOME. Many a car now must go through the intersection when the driver devoutly wishes he did not have to.
But the five manned stations is a rather peculiar solution. Iron curtain check points, gendarmes, inspections and questioning. My, isn't education getting more European all the time.
And what is so bad about owning and driving a car anyway? Virtually everyone drives a car, and for good purpose. How else can you be in more widely separated places in a given amount of time and actually accomplish more? The auto is here to stay. It is an American institution. Notice how the state equates highway maintenance costs with costs of education.
KANSAS HAS FANTASTIC BYPASSES, overpasses, underpasses and four leaf clovers almost everywhere and anywhere. What is to hinder traffic count data from establishing the need on the campus?
Look at the experience of the American city—look even at Lawrence. The simple problem of parking, fairly successfully solved with municipal parking lots, brings some customers to town. As many, however, prefer to shop elsewhere because highway access and parking are available.
Why restrict traffic as a matter of privilege to the white license plate holder and the faculty poll tax payer?
Another solution at KU (other than the one already announced) would be simply to employ or make use of one fairly good civil engineer to lay out more permanent solutions. For example, Sunflower Road could easily underpass Jayhawk. A short 50 to 75 yard underpass would leave Jayhawk and landscaping as it is now. The underpass would eliminate turns at the intersection, provide pedestrian crossings for Jayhawk and increase the value of X parking lot.
SURELY MANY OTHER GOOD STUDENT IDEAS are floating around the campus such as putting a Holland Tunnel through at Fourteenth with a way station at the Student Union. It would soon pay for itself.
There isn't a single street on the campus that could not be widened. Let's knock out some curbs—release old restraints and pentup frustrations—make room. Why pile all the buildings on top of an Arkansas Razorback and then declare it off limits except for the fleet of foot? Places will be made for traffic eventually anyway. Why try to hold the flood back with ten whistle tooters at five lonely checkpoints?
Worth Repeating
Some schools are friendly, others are cold. In some the intellectual life flourishes; in others the intellectual life has to fight for its existence. There are fraternity schools and Bohemian schools, rural and urban, religious and militantly secular. And there are those colleges—more interesting than most—in which many of these tendencies are complexly intertwined, and the student must define himself as he unravels the twisted strands.David Boroff
★ ★ ★
The trick is not simply to match the college and the student a dull, gray, compatible marriage. There is a lot to be said for conflict, polarity, opposition. Out of rugged encounter comes intellectual and moral muscle. A certain kind of rural boy or girl may well profit from a sophisticated urban college. And a New York City provincial can achieve undreamed of breakthroughs by living in a small town or rural school.-David Boroff
★★
One can nardy resist the fantasy of shuffling the elements of some of the schools. Birmingham-Southern could learn from some of Brooklyn College's intellectually bellicose kids, just as Brooklyn could profit from BSC's relaxed rhythms. Wisconsin's hurly-burly of farmer's sons and storekeeper's daughters might dilute Harvard's tendency toward preciousness. There should be an infusion of Claremont's rugged optimism about higher education in boards of trustees all around the country.-David Boroff
oR