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Summer Session Kansan Tuesday, July 14, 1959
Horizon-and Van Gogh
For just one thing alone, the July 1959 edition of the brilliant new magazine, Horizon (price, $3.95), is worth the money—almost. This one thing is an article entitled, simply, "Arles."
Now this is a magic word, for anyone who has loved the sun-splashed paintings of Vincent Van Gogh. Arles is the city in Provence where the wild painter sat in the hot sunlight and reproduced the yellows, reds and greens of the landscape.
Horizon's article on Arles begins with an entrancing 17th century map of the city, which was once a great city, founded by the Greeks, named by the Gauls, made splendid by Roman emperors, and holy by Christian saints, as Horizon puts it. There are contemporary photographs of the city, including a full-page view of an Arles avenue that was once an important cemetery in Europe. Another photograph shows a vast arena, where men and beasts once fought for the pleasure of the Roman conquerors.
Then come the Van Gogh paintings—seven beautiful pages of them. Here are wonderful reproductions, in the style that already is associated with this unique (yet probably doomed to fail) class magazine.
Here is a Van Gogh self-portrait, "The Painter on the Road to Tarascon," the frenzied Vincent, bags, canvases, brushes, on a tree-lined (yet amazingly yellow) cobblestone road. Here is Van Gogh's springtime view of Arles and its peach orchards, so peaceful that one can hardly believe Van Gogh painted it.
In the south of France, searching for sunlight and its effects, Van Gogh painted "Cafe Terrace at Night," which almost has noonday glare; a yellow house in the Place de Lamartine, scene of
one of his wild quarrels with Gauguin; a drawbridge, done in lovely blues and greens, called "Pont de l'Anglois," and the hospital garden of the asylum, where Van Gogh went after one of his quarrels with the equally temperamental Gauguin.
Horizon, in its new issue, is not restricted to Arles, however. This is what makes the issue a treasure. A magazine of the arts, Horizon has a little of each, including somewhat popular arts. Here are other offerings of Horizon:
"Metropolis Regained," with photographs and diagrams (including one of the master plan for Fort Worth), a visionary approach to what the city of the future might be.
"A Bernstein Suite," a sketch of the already celebrated Leonard Bernstein, almost a legend in his late thirties.
"Mrs. Gardner's Palace of Paintings," the story of a celebrated art collection, with color prints of Crivelli, Rembrandt (his "Storm on the Sea of Galilee), so unlike his rich brown and red portraits), Raphael, Botticelli, Titian and Bellini
"The Theater Breaks Out of Belasco's Box," an article by Walter Kerr describing designing ventures that are new horizons in themselves.
"Where the Dance Enacts Daily Life," several pages of photographs of African natives, who use the dance as an expression of life.
"The Last Universal Man," a sketch of Alexander von Humboldt, the great philosopher-scientist-explorer who died a century ago.
Finally, what Horizon calls "the greatest Hellenistic literary discovery since the Renaissance," a lost play of Menander, "The Ccurmgeon," which the magazine prints in its entirety.—CMP
Daily Crossword Puzzle
ACROSS
1 Young horse.
5 Soft leather.
10 Nobel prize physicist.
14 Confess.
15 Gold-plied movie statuette.
16 Resistance group in Greece.
17 Measure out.
18 Meeting for public discussion.
19 Insect stage.
20 Clergyman.
22 Omnipresence.
24 Great Italian actress.
26 Social slight.
27 Government document.
31 Type of harp.
35 Fatima's husband.
36 Churchill's daughter.
38 Squalid.
39 Italian capital.
41 Fire iron.
43 Former middle-weight champion Olson.
44 Leather fastening.
46 Make better in spirit.
48 Recent: Comb. form.
49 N. Y. ballplayer.
51 First extra hole in golf.
53 Mischievous
children.
55 Uncanny.
56 Type of industrial set-up; 2 words.
60 Konrad Adenauer, for example.
64 Minstrel.
65 Mr. Dionne.
66 First-rate.
68 Precious stone.
69 Treated with a nostrum.
70 Untitus (permission to depart).
71 Relaxation.
72 Inveigle.
73 Hard wood.
DOWN
1 Temporary quarters.
2 At an end.
3 Late French novelist.
4 Sports attire.
5 Blarney.
6 Entertainment for service men.
7 Light tan.
8 Does finger-painting.
9 Royal fur.
10 A representative democracy.
11 His: French.
12 Baptist: Abbr.
13 Englishman's two words of
surprise.
21 Enjoys a mid-
night snack.
23 Prison: Br. slang.
25 Faulty play in
baseball.
27 Social affair.
28 Fond farewell.
29 Mr. Legree.
30 Leased.
32 Foolish.
33 Consent.
34 Material for
thread, bristles,
etc.
37 Punter on skates.
40 Sir to action.
42 Turncoat.
45 Jewels.
47 Used to be.
50 Embroidered
robes of Jewish
high priests.
52 Hard taskmaster.
54 Wise lawmaker.
56 Musical
instrument.
57 Familiar name
for writer
Hemingway.
58 Historic spans of
years.
59 City in central
Italy.
61 Facial expression.
62 Pier Angel's
first name.
63 Narrow strip of
land.
66 Verse: Abbr.
India's Hope In Holy Men
WASHINGTON — The Indian government hopes to persuade the nation's holy men to work for the good of the world they renounced.
Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru has urged the holy men, or "sadhus," to support the government's attempt to raise India's villages from their age-old penury. The sadhus have vast influence among India's illiterate millions, and can help in breaking down the walls of ancient customs that have hampered attempts to introduce modern agricultural techniques and industrial machinery.
Some leading sadhus already have joined in support of India's five-year plan, but it is uncertain how many others will cooperate in the modernization program. There are hundreds of thousands of sadhus, though no one knows exactly how many, the National Geographic Society says.
A sadhu—meaning "one who has renounced"—has given up the pleasures of secular life. He may have been a prosperous lawyer, doctor, or engineer, but when he becomes a sadhu, he leaves his family, position, and possessions, and wanders about the country with a begging bowl, dependent on the charity of the people he meets. His wardrobe consists of a saffron-colored robe or a cloathin.
By self-denial, he hopes to turn his thoughts from material things. He undergoes long fasts and vigils, in the belief that only through reunciation, penance, and meditation can a man approach God.
An electronics company has announced the development of a weightless fuel utilizing high frequency radio waves. This could be a boon to other scientific advancements. However, the whole thing will probably break down when advertisers start competing for time on the new waves.
Dailu Hansan
UNIVERSITY
(Published Tuesdays and Fridays)
NEWS DEPARTMENT
News Room Phone 711
Editor Janet Juneau
Associate Editor Ray Miller
BUSINESS DEPARTMENT
BUSINESS DEPARTMENT
Business Officer
Business Manager
Bill Kane
By Calder M. Pickett
Associate Professor of Journalism
INVASION: '44, by John Frayn Turner. Putnam, $3.95.
This has been the summer of the 15th anniversary of the historic landings on Normandy, and of the subsequent race for the Rhine that culminated in the end of the war less than a year later. In detailed documentary fashion, moving from the foot soldier slogging through the beach to the Eisenhower-Montgomery command, John Frayn Turner tells of D-Day.
It is a story that begins before 1944, for the landings had long been contemplated and planned. With the entry of the Americans into the war in 1941, the debate began: Europe or the Pacific? Turner, an Englishman, observes that Roosevelt "wisely chose Europe," and thence went along with the Churchill plan, including the 1943 assault on Sicily that led to the conquest of Italy.
D-Day is carefully detailed: Allied paratroopers seizing the exits from the assault beaches; planes humming overhead; amphibious boats moving through the water to deliver Europe and avenge Dunkirk.
Eisenhower's now-famous decision is discussed: whether to go ahead in view of adverse weather reports: "Many of the men herded in small landing craft, unused to the sea, were taking their antisickness pills before the craft weighed anchor... The squat craft rode out the storm somehow, while the wind tore at the silver-gray barrage balloons overhead—protection against enemy air activity which fortunately could not possibly exist today."
And the landings from the air—men clambering out of gliders into grainfields, into the countryside dotted with trees, lined with hedgerows, marked by canals, the countryside that became so memorable in months to come, as Caen became a familiar word in American headlines.
And the GI, as earthy as in a Mailer novel, chewing his gum as he reached dry sand. "Goddam, we're on French soil!" someone shouted.
Turner describes well the epochal scene. His report will become an essential part of the history of the war, whether dealing with top level decision or incidental sidelights such as that of LCT 921: "Then suddenly a torpedo erupted volcanically on her port side near the wheelhouse. Spray spurred over the deck as in the middle of a monsoon. A man fell before the blast. The metal hull and casing crumpled as if made of cardboard leaving a great gap through which the sea splashed in." But the craft survived, as "Overhead two hundred and fifty transports towing gliders droned across the sunset sky on their way to the beachhead."
It seems almost unfair to point out that in the first sentence of this popular historical study of the first months of the Confederacy, former Kansan Manly Wade Wellman (or his proofreaders) makes a gross factual error. "It was December 2, 1869, and the men rose before seven o'clock that morning in the deceptively quiet little town of Charlestown in western Virginia."
THEY TOOK THEIR STAND, by Manly Wade Wellman. Putnam,
$4.50.
Unfair because Wellman's book is a worthwhile study, told with pace and feeling, of the era that began with the execution of John Brown. Brown died in 1859, not 1869, and western Virginia, of course, had become West Virginia by the latter year.
"They Took Their Stand" borrows its title from that popular fighting song of the South, written by a northerner, "Dixie." It details chiefly the experiences of the Confederacy as recorded in diaries, letters and histories.
Three persons provide the framework, and not Robert E. Lee or Jefferson Davis, though these two frequently are paraded before the reader. One is the fire-eating Virginian, Edmund Ruffin, who, though well along in years, mounted the ramparts and helped fire on Ft. Sumter. Another is Thomas Jonathan Jackson, a stern and pious man who was not instinctively of military nature but who gained immortality at Bull Run as the great "Stonewall." The third is the South Carolinian, Mary B. Chesnut, who recorded her impressions of the South in wartime in one of America's most famous diaries.
Though Wellman builds his narrative around these three and their reactions to the building of the Confederacy, he does not neglect other figures. Here is P. G. T. Beauregard, the Louisianian who commanded the firing at Sumter, whose name became almost the symbol of the southern general. Here is Robert Barnwell Rhett, editor of the Charleston Mercury, who attended the secession convention of South Carolina and published news of the secession ordinance on the front page within minutes of the vote of approval.
Here is the withered little Georgian, Alexander Stephens, the unionist who became vice president of the Confederacy. Here is Jubal Early, who opposed secession and became a cavalry leader who ranged far and wide in the Shenandoah valley, stirring up so much trouble for the North that Sheridan's men swept through the valley in 1864 and reduced it to ashes.
Wellman does not write with the skill of Bruce Catton, nor the irony of T. Harry Williams, to mention two reputable writers of the Irrepressible Conflict. But he tells an effective tale. From the execution of Brown, the Kansan who swept from Osawatomie to Harpers Ferry like a flaming torch, to Bull Run, where the northern leaders, come to see a picnic and the end of the war, fled with retreating troops to Washington, Wellman does good service to the Lost Cause.