Book Reviews
Monday, October 9, 1961 University Daily Kansan
Page 3
Art, College Humor and Science Fiction
By Marilyn Stokstad
GODS AND GODDESES IN ART AND LEGEND, by Herman J. Wechsler, Washington Square Press, New York, 1961. 60 cents.
I find it difficult to understand the excuse for publishing a book like "Gods and Goddesses in Art and Legend." On the cover we are told that it is "a spirited retelling of the best-known classic myths."
"Spirited retelling" indeed! How could anyone turn these really spirited stories into such tedious tales? May I remind all new SIC members of Edith Hamilton's "Mythology" (in its eleventh printing as a Mentor Book and only 50c)? Compare, for example, the two authors treatment of the tale of Atalanta, a story singularly appropriate for the University of Kansas.
IN DESCRIBING the conditions for this famous track event, Wechsler writes, "she (Atalanta) announced that only he who could outrun her in a footrace would.win her as a bride. The prize, therefore, was a beautiful virgin, but the penalty for being beaten in the contest was death!"
Such a situation has its interesting aspects, to be sure, and in her edition Edith Hamilton adds, "It seems odd that a number of men wanted to marry her."
TO MAKE MATTERS worse for any SIConian, Mr. Wechsler's book is "illustrated by the paintings of the world's great masters." I am afraid that the so-called color reproductions on the cover and the "sixty-four illustrations in gravure" in the text are enough to turn anyone against painting.
I thought that sepia prints were a passion of my great aunts and had passed away with these dear ladies; unfortunately, bleary sepia ghosts of paintings still haunt us in this little volume—a good reminder of what mythology, painting, and art history are not.
Worth Repeating
It is simply not possible for small oases of prosperity in the world to continue to exist amidst vast deserts of poverty without engendering storms that might engulf those oases.—B. K. Nehru
Drink is worse than war, for drink is continuous, war but periodic.-Graccio Houlder
COLLEGE PARODIES, edited by Will and Martin Lieberson, Ballantine Books. 75 cents.
Call this generation what you will—beat, hip or silent—its most obvious characteristic is the face it turns to the world it surveys, a bland, unsmiling, poker face. Apparently the collegiate have swallowed copious portions of the bologna being served by their elders—especially in the groves of academe—that the times are too serious for the good belly laugh and the risque joke.
Having been conned into taking themselves seriously, these post-pubescents are duly shuffling over the campus green instead of gamboling.
ONE MARK OF this new seriousness is the decline and fall of the college humor magazine. Gone from most campuses are the Squat, the Bladder, the Pipsqueak, the Fowl and the Squirt.
Worse, the collegiates are purling with pleasure because their academic elders have been patting them for showing maturity by dumping these magazines. Apparently, Falstaff and Juliet's lickernurse are as lifeless and sterile as a slide of strentococcus culture.
Well, those who can do, and those who can't read about those who do. This collection of parodies by such talented staffs as the Harvard Lampoon, the Columbia Jester, and the Stanford Chaparral includes takeoffs on Life, Holiday, Playboy, the Saturday Evening Post and others.
THE BEST, AND they are very good, go back to the late 40's and early 50's.
As Orpheum Annie says in the Yale Record's takeoff on the New York Daily News, "If the meatball who writes this script don't let me grow to puberty soon, I'm gonna take some fierce hormone injections." Testosterone anyone?—N.R.
Your sympathies with the foreigners who are the victims of discriminatory practices are perhaps well taken. There is a human side to the story which touches every person who sees in his fellow man an equal in the image of God.
But, there is also the person whose home is, in the tradition of a free peoples, her castle to dispose with at will. Already, the personal sanctity of her anonymity and a peaceful state of mind have been done violently. The moral arguments against compulsion, of constraints, are just as forceful as those advanced to straightjacket our freedom of choice. And, what is imminently hazardous is to state that KU must be motivated to a certain type of action in this instance. This is nothing more than a devious attempt, seen from many persons' vantage point, to circum-scribe the potential for independent action which the landlady now has. Liberties have a habit of eventually succumbing to erosion when a dictum is enforced, regardless of how benign its intent.
KU, and its administration, reflects the desires, aspirations and structures of the people of the State who engendered this institution. If these people are to be intimidated into thought paralysis by
Editor Criticized
a charlatan who in his emoting invokes the support of naive doogoders, as well as intelligent persons, then it seems like the people of Kansas and this basic sense of values are being done violence through a default of silence.
Let us review the inception of the incident. Two persons, both originating in countries whose social structures violate the basic traditions of a democracy, are now clamoring for a status that they would not demand under similar conditions in their own countries. Parenthetically, the look of astonishment on the Greek colony in the Delta would be amusing to contemplate if, under similar circumstances, they were chastised for refusing to rent to individuals amongst their national hosts!
The leader of one of their nations, in particular, has vowed to do away with another neighboring nation which is regarded in our circles as a flourishing democratic state encircled by a chaotic miasma. How much more one could reform the judicial, social and charitable attitudes in that part of the world?
A certain editor affiliated with your columns reminds one of the coeds who greeted the President in Vienna with an "Ooh, la, la, Jacquelyn!" Their obsession with the foreign—one might speculate a consequence of a revolt against provincialism or an ignorance of domestic worth — lead them to emote over what they considered "chic," even though the object of their attentions was not present on the occasion, which parallels your espousals of vaccous causes.
What then might constitute a constructive and sane attitude? First, let us not resort to the constant trauma of event-responding, but rather let's take the initiative and become purveyors of event-creating leadership. Yes, I mean right here—of the people-to-people variety! Secondly, in finishing the unfinished business of democracy, let's remember that we are a "nation-of-nations," to quote Walt Whitman. This means that our actions should reflect a blueprint for world-living based on a carefully thought out formula; motivated by the Golden Rule and its concomitant ingredients, virtue and talent. Permissiveness on a date is no more respected than kindred laxity amongst varying cultures,
Editor:
One of the most significant changes in American Culture has been the shift from participation by the individual in face-to-face, primary groups to participation in great mass secondary organizations, largely on an anonymous basis. The Roman Catholic Bishops decried this trend in a momentous document reminiscent to the Protestant tenet of the priesthood of believers. In effect, last year they illustrated how this transfer of responsibility and allegiance was detrimental to the cause of personal moral excellence. This, in the final analysis, degrades corporate excellence. In the same vein, if we as individuals restrict from participation in the economic and intellectual development of our nation other individuals due to the by-product of the social evil of discrimination, we might be sealing our doom. There are no talents to be wasted, nor any contributions to be rejected, in this an intellectual struggle to win others to our system.
By James E. Gunn
and steadfast moral conduct may always serve to enhance the vanquished or victor.
Yours truly,
H. Schick
Baldwin graduate student
Finally, I would like to add a little footnote, for those whose prime motivation is a paranoic fear of the domestic communist bogey — a la John Birch Society. It is this.
NEW MAPS OF HELL, by Kingsley Amis. LEFT TURN AT THURSDAY, by Frederick Pohl. STRANGERS FROM EARTH, by Poul Anderson. A CUPFUL OF SPACE, by Mildred Clingerman. All Ballantine Books, All 35 cents.
Short Ones
I should fancy that the real tragedy of the poor is that they can afford nothing but self-denial. —Oscar Wilde.
In 1958 Princeton's Seminar Committee invited Britain's Kingsley Amis to give a series of lectures in the Christian Gauss Seminars in Criticism. Amis shocked them by choosing science fiction as his topic.
Self-denial is practical, and is not only polite to all but is pleasant to those who practice it.— Mary Baker Eddy.
Two Amis judgments are worth repeating: "... what attracts people to science fiction is not in the first place literary quality in the accustomed sense of that term. But ... they may well come to find such quality there, perhaps in an unaccustomed form, if they ever take the trouble to look for it."
None, also, have revealed such personal judgments, and with these the "angry young" author of "Lucky Jim," "That Uncertain Feeling," and other works of current British social criticism succeeded for awhile in making angry young men out of some of this country's science-fiction authors.
NOW THESE LECTURES ARE AVAILABLE in paperback form, and it is clear that the blind trust of the Seminar Committee was well-founded. There have been other critiques of science fiction, but none have been so literate, so revealing, nor written out of so long and enduring a love.
"SCIENCE FICTION IS NOT TOMFOOL SENSATIONALISM, but neither is it a massive body of serious art destined any moment to engulf the whole of Anglo-American writing."
Addicts of science fiction will find new insights in "New Maps of Hell." Non-readers may be persuaded by Amis to try. In fact, the author adds a final footnote for the latter: "In the event that any non-addicted reader of these pages feels he can face the idea of actually trying some science fiction, his best plan would be, rather than plunging with set teeth into the welter of the magazines, to get hold of a volume of short stories by any of the practitioners mentioned earlier in tones of respect."
One of those writers—called by Amis "the most consistently able writer science fiction has yet produced"—is Frederik Pohl, once my agent. And a book such as he describes is available in "Left Turn at Thursday." But the stories are minor Pohl, though competent enough and enjoyable, and not really in the satiric tradition which Amis so admires.
It is these two aspects of the book—his placing Pohl atop his list of science fiction writers and his conviction that satire is the touchstone for good science fiction—that drew down the wrath of this country's science fiction authors and readers. Those and his assumption that the contribution of Pohl's frequent collaborator, the late Cyril Kornbluth, "was roughly to provide the more violent action while Pohl filled in the social background and the satire."
I have heard the Pohl-Kornbluth collaboration described as a game in which, after they agreed upon a general theme, one would start writing as fast as he could and continue as long as he could and then wander off to nap while the other sat down at the typewriter. The game was to leave the collaborator in the worst possible predicament.
Poul Anderson, who is referred to three times in the Amis critique but without comment, would be ranked by many authorities as at least Pohl's equal, although perhaps somewhat uneven in his prolificity. He is represented by a recent paperback, "Strangers From Earth," which is illustrative of his minor works—the sort of stories which may be most typically science fiction in their concern for the conflict of ideas rather than the conflict of individuals, excent as they represent or espouse ideas.
In contrast is Mildred Clingerman, who exemplifies not only that rarity, the female science fiction author (there have been perhaps no more than a dozen) but also the part-time author, a breed who may have done more for science fiction than those who labor full-time in the vineyards. The feminine touch is obvious in these stories—sometimes delicate, occasionally macabre, always concerned with the small, personal situation rather than the big idea.
Amis has provided a personalized map to the kingdom. Collections of stories such as these—although, except for the Clingerman volume, they may be routine competence—are the kingdom itself.
Daily Hansan
University of Kansas student newspaper
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