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Wednesday. May 4. 1960 University Daily Kansan
By M. K. McKinney Assistant Instructor of English
RATS, LICE AND HISTORY, by Hans Zinsser, Bantam Books, 50 cents.
The author of this book, which was published in 1934 as a hard cover and in 1960 as a paperback, should have added to the title "and anything else that comes to mind." For Dr. Hans Zinsser (1878-1940), one time Professor of Bacteriology and Immunology at Harvard, uses the excuse of writing a biography of typhus fever to comment on many things that are seemingly irrelevant. He protests in his preface "against the American attitude which tends to insist that a specialist should have no interests beyond his chosen field — unless it be golf, fishing, or contract bridge." Further on, he wants to know, "Why should a man look at the world through only one knot-hole?" Believe me, the doctor has more than one knot-hole.
THE HEADINGS of his chapters are reminiscent of those in "Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews." For example, Chapter I is titled "In the nature of an explanation and an apology"; Chapter V "Being a continuation of Chapter IV, but dealing more particularly with so-called new diseases and with some that have disappeared."
Just as Fielding seemed to write about whatever happened to come to mind, so did Zinsser. Sometimes it is difficult to see just what the connection is between the biography of a louse and his discursions, but the author assures us that all he has put into this book before Chapter XII is necessary for "the Preparation of the Lay Reader."
ZINSSER IS "full of matter"—from his preface to the end of the book. What does it matter that the first twelve chapters are preparatory and that Chapter XIII is the one in "which we consider the birth, childhood, and adolescence of typhus"? This book, in addition to being a biography of a louse, is about art and science, about biography, about the lack of clarity of T. S. Eliot's poetry and about the clarity of his prose, about religion (he says that it is to Kepler's credit "he never wrote a book on God and the Universe"), about the origin of life, about the effect epidemics have had on the course of history, and about many more things.
But I find myself wanting to tell too much about the book. If you want to get a glimpse of a great mind playing over many things that interest it, then I suggest you buy this book. Zinsser's style is always clear and to the point, and the word pawky is used by someone to describe it. Whether you are an entomologist makes no difference; this book is for anyone who appreciates good writing. This is not a book to be read but once. The first time the coruscations are appreciated above all else, but the subsequent times one will like to take his time to ponder over the many worthwhile things the author has to say about many things.
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By Calder M. Pickett
Associate Professor of Journalism
THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE, AND SELECTED STORIES by Stephen Crane. Signet Classics, 50 cents.
When Stephen Crane was covering the Spanish-American War, he is said to have registered great pleasure when he realized that "The Red Badge of Courage" really described war. He was born six years after the Civil War ended, and his creation of the Battle of Chancellorsville and the coming to manhood of a youth under fire was entirely imaginary.
His depiction of the youth, the tall soldier, the loud soldier, the tattered soldier and others and their reaction to battle has held up as one of the great naturalistic works of our literature. More than 50 years later, when John Huston filmed "The Red Badge of Courage," this story of battle had such relevance that the Army acquired a print of the film as an example of how the war was fought.
"THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE" is more than just naturalistic. Dreiser provides naturalism, in his murky prose. So do Norris and London and Garland. Crane's "Red Badge" is matchless writing as well. Its opening paragraph is one of the best known descriptions in fiction:
"The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting. As the landscape changed from brown to green, the army awakened, and began to tremble with eagerness at the noise of rumors. It cast its eyes upon the roads, which were growing from long troughs of liquid mud to proper thoroughfares..."
And there is that sentence that closes Chapter IX;
"The red sun was pasted in the sky like a wafer."
IT IS A SHORT NOVEL, and one of the most tightly written in American fiction. Like Mark Twain before him, and Hemingway after him, Crane knows how men talk, and never does "The Red Badge of Courage" possess the affected language of much of the fiction of late 19th century.
A word about the short stories in this new paperback: Those which Signet includes are "The Open Boat," "The Blue Hotel," "The Upturned Face," and "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky." Of these the best known are the first and the last. "The Open Boat" is a dramatic description of men battling the sea, the kind of work that recalls Homer's doomed Negro in "Gulf Stream," that shows Crane's naturalistic debt to Darwin. "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky" is a minor vignette about a sheriff who meets an old adversary after returning with a bride, and about the disgust of the enemy that the quarrel now must come to an end.
Letters
A Measuring Stick
Editor:
During the past several weeks the Daily Kansan has published, via editorials and letters to the editor, the views of various individuals concerning the candidates for the Presidency. I may be mistaken, but if I recall correctly, personalities were the concern of the contributors.
I should like the editor and the readers of the Kansan to look past personalities and discuss the parties they represent. Or rather what the individual candidates stand for, since the voter should theoretically vote for the latter rather than the party.
WE HAVE today liberal (Democratic) and conservative (Republican) elements in government. However, the shading from left to right allows us to distinguish among them. (For instance, Harry Byrd, a Democrat, is as conservative as Taft was.) In the main the liberals have given us the following:
1. Government is the master of everything. It owes everybody a
Richard M. Nixon
The conservative element . . .
living, whether he wants to work or not. It owes everybody a pension and now they, the Democrats and their labor cohorts, intend to force medical care down our throats. According to them nobody needs to provide for his own old age or need he take care of his parents. Just where does individual moral responsibility stop and public interference begin?
2. To accomplish all this, they have and expect to continue to rob Peter to pay Paul. This is called redistribution of wealth, when it actually robs the willing, the gifted and the enterprising of the incentive that built the country in the first place.
This doesn't mean that all Republicans get a whitewash. In the main, however, they are for noninterference in private affairs. They are concerned with the individual freedom we consider so proudly as our national product. And finally just what is wrong with a balanced budget and fiscal responsibility? Isn't this what provides the maximum good for the greatest number?
3. The liberals have formed an unholy alliance with Labor. This has resulted in unions achieving monopoly power and in turn has led us out of the world markets. Today unions, which represent only $25\%$ of the working force, safely control $75\%$ of the Democratic members in Congress.
HOW DO the candidates stand when measured by the above? If you like it, then any Democrat you vote for will give it to you, with reservations. Humphrey will outdo Roosevelt, that glorified founding father of American Socialism. He will let the government spend and spend although it already is the most debt-ridden agency the world has ever known. You can't trust Symington. He can't even remember whom to blame for the so-called "missile gap." Kennedy and Stevenson? Two of a kind. Johnson is probably the best of the lot. He, by-the-way, would probably be a Republican but for the accident of his birth in Texas.
Ignatius Schumacher Hays graduate student
What kind of government do the readers of the Daily Kansan desire? Do they want a renewal of the group therapy idea, or do they wish to stand on their own two feet? What is your answer?
From the Magazine Rack-
The Stuffy Decade
"Today the United States may be suffering from a number of perfectly obvious ills but they are all connected with—and worsened by—something that is none too tangible. That something is an atmosphere, a climate of opinion, a habit of reacting.
"Where it came from is plain enough. We've grown unbelievably prosperous and we maunder along in a stupor of fat. We were badly scared by the Communists, so scared that we are leery of anybody who even so much as twits our ideas, our customs, or our leaders. We live in a heavy, humorless, sanctimonious, stultifying atmosphere, singularly lacking in the self-mockery that is self-criticism. Probably the climate of the late 'Fifties was the dullest and dreariest in all our history.
"This situation is the more striking because never in history has a nation been more ripe, more begging for mockery, for satire, for wit. Look at this lend today: We have a President, an overwhelming public hero, who persists in talking plattitudes straight out of the old days of the Rutherford B. Hayes Marching Societies.
"We have a Vice President, a front-running candidate for the Presidency, who is widely hailed by our press as a new man, a wonderful new man, because he intermittently stops using slander as a political weapon and has ceased making dogs the subject of his high policy declarations.
"We have an opposition party, a powerful opposition party in firm control of both branches of Congress, which for the most part is afraid to oppose on important issues. And there is its latest shining gladiator, Senator Lyndon Johnson—the choice for President of such cognoscente as Dean Acheson—a leader who most conspicuously demonstrates his statesmanship by a profound sympathy for natural gas and an extraordinary ability to compromise the heart out of basic legislation...
"We have an intellectual class in this nation with its own interesting characteristics. Much of it—railing endlessly against conformity and the gray flannel man—daily, more eagerly, seeks gray flannels for itself and daily, more eagerly, wraps tighter about itself a conformity to the Democratic party and to Sigmund Freud.
"We have a popular journalism that, with a perfectly straight face, talks on and on about the new American home and its principle of togetherness. Pursuing this theme, one of the most widely read magazines asks, in words that continue to baffle me: 'Why did you marry your wife?' Only because she was a woman?"
"We have other mass media, the great radio and television networks. Endlessly delivering themselves of paeans to the majority will and to freedom of speech, they quiver and reach for the blue pencil at the anticipation of twenty-eight letters from some minority religious or racial group, not to speak of the National Council of Women Chiropractors...
"This is not only a dreary situation; it is a downright dangerous one. It is hardly necessary to point out that as long as there have been human beings, laughter has been the most certain release from comfortable cerititudes, the greatest protection from inanity and hypocrisy, the surest spur to fresh, imaginative thinking.
"Even the American 1920s were justified, if they were justified at all, by the men of laughter. While the smog of Aimee McPherson, mahjongg, and Warren Gamaliel Harding lay thick over the nation, a band of inspired heretics frolicked away. There was a Fiorello La Guardia kicking up his heels in Congress; a Sinclair Lewis and a Will Rogers, each in his own way subjecting the scene to a persistent irreverence; an H. L. Mencken, endlessly clowning and cannonading, more than ready to explain that he continued to live in America for the same reason that people like to go to zoos. The program of these men was hardly positive; it was never intended to be. But they also serve who only speak the rollicking negative—particularly in eras of positive, so very positive thinking...
"Perhaps we are about to produce such a note. Now and again evidence appears that a good many of the most gifted minds in the oncoming generation are in a mood of Menckenism. (I say the mood of Mencken because of course it was this and not any specific ideas of his or his conferres which counted and would count.)
"But if the oncoming generation does not soon present us with the wondrous gift of laughter, somebody better had. The American civilization which we all cherish could go down either with a whimper or a bang, as the poet's phrase suggests. It could also end with us just sitting solemnly on our lawn chaises, overfed, oversanctified, and overbearing, talking a suicidal stuffiness."
(Excerpted from "Good-by to the Fifties—and Good Riddance," by Eric F. Goldman in the Jan. 1960 Harper's Magazine.)
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Our Active Censors
The California Teachers Assn. reports a teacher was transferred from a San Jose High School after she recommended a list of books including five novels which were subsequently removed from the library's shelves.
The novels are:
"The Sun Also Rises," Hemingway; "Catcher in the Rye," Salinger; "Brave New World," Huxley; "Look Homeward Angel," Wolfe, and "The Human Comedy," Saroyan.
Some parents said the books were "too sophisticated" for teenage readers.