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University Daily Kansan Thursday, Dec. 8, 1960
Salute to the Sage
Perhaps America has no national purpose. Perhaps our stature and prestige are on a long toboggan slide ending in oblivion, as critics both domestic and foreign have so often claimed.
IF WE ARE ON THE DECLINE, IT MAY well be because we have no vituperative, acid-tongued Puck of letters to match the man who barged through smoke-filled council rooms and cocked a cynical ear to the whispered conversations of dignitaries great and small during the greater part of the last half-century.
Henry Louis Mencken, the Sage of Baltimore, sawed off more limbs behind him, deflated more bags of gas, and exposed more sacred cows to the searing light of sarcasm than the American boobery has ever known. He was wrong on many occasions, errant in judgment on others and maliciously bitter often.
But his principal service to humanity (his word was boobery) was the damming of the sacrosanct adulation that runs like a strong, syrupy tide around public figures.
This was Mencken.
Writing on the inaugural address of Warren Harding, perhaps the most incompetent president in our history, Mencken said:
"I RISE to pay my tribute to Dr. Harding. Setting aside a college professor or two and half a dozen dipsoniaiacal newspaper reporters, he takes the first place in my Valhalla of literati. That is to say, he writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash."
We wonder what Mencken would have done to the general from Abilene.
Mencken's wit is not something that arrests the reader, stopping him in mid-paragraph. His prose is more like a spiked ball that tumbles along under the impetus of his wit and phrasing, now showing a point, now rolling smoothly.
He gave the boobs he wrote for new words to titillate their tongues; paralogy, voluptuaries, pawky, and many others. The average reader could not hope to define them exactly—but when Mencken used them in context, they were sharply illuminating.
AND THIS WAS the magic of the man. Somehow, through some strange, almost chemical reaction between the act and the words he used to describe it, Mencken gave his readers a real understanding of the complex events he lampooned—and he showed them that the "great" men who walked in the glare of publicity put their pants on like anyone else.
Witness how sharply he caught the public mood following the election of Harding in 1920:
"The Gamalian plurality in the late plebiscite was so huge that contemplation of it has distracted the public attention from all subsidiary phenomena. One gapes at it as a yokel gapes at a blood-sweating hippopotamus; its astounding vastness makes it seem somehow indecent, as a very fat man always seems somehow indecent."
We mourn the passing of the Sage. There is no one writing today who can compare with him. He used ridicule like a harpoon, and seldom missed what he was aiming for. And ridicule is what we need today, in a time when our commentators are dealing with complex issues in grave and portentous writings that lend little to the public understanding. We need another Mencken.
— Frank Morgan and Bill Blundell
Athletic Scholarships Scored
Editor:
I am portrayed in your newspaper as having had the value of athletic scholarships demonstrated to me. I deny it.
My question was this. In view of the dependence of college football on athletic scholarships, into which of the following categories could it now be said to fall—sports, education, commerce, or professional entertainment? My implication naturally was that since sport, by definition, should be pursued for its own sake, and since education concerns the mind, it could only be classified in one of the latter two categories: that
... Letters ...
is, either as commerce or professional entertainment.
The attitude of the Fair Practices committee seems to be that competitive bidding for players (commerce) is not permissible, but that athletic scholarships (that is, professional entertainment) are perfectly legitimate.
Of course, to enforce this very artificial distinction, a body of standards and an elaborate theology is required, as extreme as anything ever imagined by the Jesuits.
For example, it is permissible to take a lift from the alumnus of another school if you are satisfied with your own sport facilities and
scholarship, but a deadly sin if you subsequently transfer. This is true even though no proof can be adduced that "sport" as so much as mentioned.
This means that our sports tribunals, confused by the tortuous contradictions of university sports morality, judge not in the light of evidence, but simply on suspicion and a pessimistic view of human nature. Of course, experience suggests that this pessimism is normally justified — but the fact remains that justice is being administered on a percentage basis.
LITTLE MAN ON CAMPUS
My conclusion is that athletic scholarships produce these unhealthy alternatives inevitably, and all scholarships therefore should be granted only to those in financial need or with superior intellectual ability. The university does not exist to produce a winning football team. University sports should be amateur, not semi-professional.
"NO CLASS HERE TIL NINE."
P. S. It is contestable whether this system even produces superior athletic prowess. In one recent year, the only undefeated KU team was a soccer team, composed exclusively of bona fide amateurs. More power to them.
Denis Kennedy
Lawrence Graduate
Student
Short Ones
HOLLYWOOD — (UPI) — Location workers for Walt Disney say they have found Donald Duck's double.
They say they found a rock formation outside Mona, Utah, that is a dead ringer for the movie cartoon character.
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NORTH PROVIDENCE, R. I. — (UPI) — Antonio Pate, who recently celebrated his 100th birthday, apparently has a stronger stomach than most people at any age.
Pate has a fondness for a dish not seen very often — pizza covered by a pint of ice cream.
Daily Hansan
Founded 1889, became biweekly 1904, triweekly 1908, daily Jan. 16, 1912. Telephone VIking 3-2700
University of Kansas student newspaper
Telephone VIking 3-2700 Extension 711, news room Extension 376, business office
Member Inland Daily Press Association. Associated Collegiate Press.
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$3 a semester or $5 a year. Published in Lawrence, Kan., every afternoon during the University year except Saturdays and Sundays, University holidays and examination periods. Entered as second-class matter Sept.
17, 1910, at Lawrence, Kan., post office under act of March 3, 1879.
NEWS DEPARTMENT
Ray Miller ... Managing Editor
Ray Miller Managing Editor
Carol Heller, Jane Boyd, Priscilla Burton and Carrie Edwards, Assistant
Managing Editors; Pat Sheley and Suzanne Shaw, City Editors; John
Macdonald, Sports Editor; Peggy Kallos and Donna Engle, Society
Editors.
EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT
John Peterson and Bill Blundell ... Co-Editorial Editors
BUSINESS DEPARTMENT
Mark Dull Business Manager
By John S. Lewis Assistant Instructor of English
"ORLANDO, A BIOGRAPHY," by Virginia Woolf, Signet, 50c.
Until recently, only two of Virginia Woolf's novels were available in inexpensive reprints in the United States and none was obtainable in paper backs. With the possible exception of E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf was the most neglected major British novelist in this respect. The situation has improved immensely this year with the appearance of "Jacob's Room" and "The Waves" in a single paper back volume and "Orlando" in the attractive Signet Classic series.
But what are needed are good critical editions of Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster. The "Afterword" by Elizabeth Bowen, while interesting, does not help the reader to understand "Orlando."
SOME GUIDES are helpful. First of all, "Orlando" is a fictionalized history of English literature from the Elizabethan Age to 1928, the date of its first publication. But it is more than that. The sub-title, "a biography," and the dedication to Victoria Sackville-West show us that it is, in a true sense, a biography of the Sackville family from Thomas Sackville, Earl of Dorset, a Tudor poet and dramatist, to V. Sackville-West.
Orlando, the hero who changes sex in the late seventeenth century, is, of course, symbolic of English literature. And the novel — it is, after all, a novel — can be read as an elaborate joke. Some of the scenes are funny, particularly the occasional appearance of "Nicholas Greene" who is, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, a minor writer regaling Orlando with stories of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, and who becomes, in the Victorian Age, a rather seedy English professor. He does not change much over the centuries. As an Elizabethan, he laments that the great age of literature is past, the great age being, of course, the Greek. As a Victorian, Nick Greene, now Sir Nicholas Greene, decides that the great age of literature was, naturally, the Elizabethan. Orlando is not fooled on either occasion. Greene, the protagonist observes, "could say the finest things of books provided they were written three hundred years ago."
THE MOST STRIKING transformation in "Orlando" is not the protagonist's change of sex but the transformation at the beginning of chapter five of "Enlightened" England to the England of the Victorian Age. Suddenly a great cloud obscured the sun on the first day of the nineteenth century and the "great damp" transformed England into something that it had not previously been. Mrs. Woolf grew up during the final years of the Victorian Age, like most people of her generation, resented Victorianism as a child sometimes resents its father. The transmogrification which Mrs. Woolf describes is naturally biased but highly entertaining. Her explanation for the proliferation of lengthy nineteenth-century tomes is magnificent: "The life of the average woman was a succession of childbirths. She married at nineteen and had fifteen or eighteen children by the time she was thirty . . . Thus the British Empire came into existence; and thus . . . sentences swelled, adjectives multiplied, lyrics became epics, and little trifles that had been essays . . . were now encyclopaedias in ten or twenty volumes." The passage quoted is on pages 149 and 150 of this edition and ought to be savored by the reader in full. It is one of the best examples of twentieth-century wit.
"Orlando," we indicated, can be read as a joke but it is actually a serious statement on literature by a consummate literary artist. This novel appeals to the casual reader who wants light reading and appeals just as strongly to the serious reader. It is, perhaps, the only novel written in the tradition of "Tristram Shandy" but is, fortunately, lacking in the scatological fascination of its eighteenth-century predecessor.
Present in this edition are the pictures of Orlando and her associates which were left out of the British reprint. Mrs. Woolf posed for the pictures used in the first edition of the novel and their appearance in this edition is gratifying.