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University Daily Kansan Monday. Feb. 16. 1959
Letters and the Arts
Conrad's Renaissance
By John S. Lewis
CONRAD THE NOVELIST, Albert J. Guerard, Harvard University Press, $5.50.
A recent literary phenomenon has been the sudden Conrad renaissance. For the first time since they were written, Joseph Conrad's novels have attracted the attention of first-class critical minds.
Albert J. Guerard, a professor of English at Harvard and himself a novelist, takes Conrad quite seriously. Conrad, a man of complicated temperamental conflicts, was committed, Guerard declares, "to order in society and in the self—doubled by incorrigible sympathy for the outlaw whether existing in society or the self." From this basic conflict within his own nature Conrad, according to Guerard, evolved a technique of "evocation and evasion," an attempt to impose a barrier between himself and his reader.
The essay on "Nostromo" is welcome because so little significant criticism has been written on Conrad's best and most ambitious novel.
Guerard corrects Robert Penn Warren's assumption that the novel offers a choice between self-deluding idealism and dehumanized savagery alone. He points out that Conrad offers a choice between Charles Gould's deceptive idealism and Mrs. Gould's idealistic perception.
Quite justly, Guerard sees "Under Western Eyes," a novel of revolutionary intrigue and clashing psychological conflicts as one of Conrad's three or four best novels. And he notes that in this novel Conrad is finally able to draw satisfactory portraits of women in tragic situations, a feat which the novelist never quite duplicated again.
Conrad suffered a decline with the publication of "Chance" in 1913. Guerard believes that this decline was caused by his attempt to write popular fiction not suited to his artistic temperament.
But Guerard suggests also that the far-reaching internal conflicts within Conrad's mind which helped him to produce his finest tales had been resolved in his later years. He was no longer interested in characters like Lord Jim caught in moral dilemmas and chose to deal with figures in the throes of romantic attachment, a milieu in which Conrad was notoriously unsuccessful. Guerard is, however, cavalier when he dismisses "Victory" as "moral melodrama."
Guerard's book is an important contribution to Conrad criticism. He has pointed out that Conrad "had a kind of inward seriousness" lacking even in Henry James and Charles Dickens and was better equipped to probe subtle conflicts of feeling than any earlier writer in English. Conrad was at his best when he was exploring "the tragic boundary-situation where choice is virtually impossible."
***
Mystery of M. Lender
Or, 'The Wandering Toulouse-Lautrec'
By Jack Schrader
Marcelle was one of the many Parisian Montmartre entertainers of the Gay Nineties whom Toulouse-Lautrec frequently pictured in his paintings and posters. The museum's Marcelle, a gift of the Watkins Fund, is usually displayed near the Browsing Room entrance and is part of the collection of modern art housed in the Kansas Union.
The University's Museum of Art owns a spendid example of one of Lautreec's well-known lithographs, a portrait of Marcelle Lender. Only one hundred impressions were made and this is number 57.
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, one of the nineteenth century French Post-Impressionist artists, is perhaps best known for his brilliant lithographs. He developed color lithography to the point where he used six or seven stones to create one color print.
But every once in a while Marcelle puts on a disappearing act, leaving behind her a few prizewinning photographs to mark her place. In fact, just recently Marcelle disappeared from the premises and was replaced by the Fourteenth Annual Photographic Exhibition from the University of Missouri School of Journalism.
Where does Marcelle go on her excursions? Is she hiding behind a door or in some dark closet? Has some art-loving professor abscended by her?
By Edward Weeks
The Peripatetic Reviewer
"The star by which I steer is literature, and the concern I wish to share with you is whether enough of our young people have anything more than a flickering interest in the light which has warmed and sustained me. . . ."
—excerpted from The Peripatetic Reviewer in the January, 1959 issue of The Atlantic Monthly
Dailu Hansan
"How can teachers arouse their classes to an awareness of words?
The Student Union Activities office informs us that she will be displayed somewhere else in the union until the photographic exhibition is over. Perhaps Marcelie will enjoy a change of scenery for a little while, but we wish we could have her back in a permanent place and not have to worry about her running off.
"We live in a country which places too little value on the precise use of words. . . .
...(the teacher) has it in her power to give us prescriptions which will change our lives. If our eyes light up at the mention of the knights of the Round Table she will know how to make Malory or Tennyson approachable. And even if we resist books with all our might, even if the sports page is all we hanker for, she may leave with us, deep in the subconscious, echoes of a beauty we can never quite forget."
University of Kansas School of Medicine
Founded 1889, became biweekly 1904, triweekly 1908, daily Jan. 16, 1912.
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"All education is an awakening, and the teachers of English are the buglews who bring us to our feet...
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Represented by National Advertising Service, 420 Madison Ave., New York, N.Y. News service: United Press International. Mail subscription rates: $3 a semester or $4.50 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.
Money, position, and painted femininity are made paradoxically artificial and real by poverty, imprisonment, and disease. The power of the imagination leads to life's finest distillations and to its most humiliating folly.
I wish someone would buy me the other five volumes of Machen's excellent prose. Few books pursue the will-of-the-wisp of sex so fervently, and thus this one must certainly delight those readers who seek a supple, purple surface.
Both follow a literary mode of self-confession; a way of life becomes a way of stylizing life. But in Casanova's shifting poses, the pivotal seductions are alternately glorifications and degradations which betray an essential failure in life itself, the failure of the heart to correspond with the mind.
University of Kansas student newspaper
Those who follow the literature of autobiography know the polarities of expression in the extravagant bravura of Cellini and the emotional laxative of Rousseau's "Confessions."
The book is an artistic panorama of recollections by an aging hedonist who seeks neither apology nor repentance for his license. An imaginatively heightened instinct that mocks the old code of amour courtois by democratically fluttering from brothel to salon, from opera house to a cardinal's ante-chamber, is balanced against an opportunistic shrewdness that adjusts its notions of "honor" to every new setting.
The stark reality beneath the formal courtship pattern in Pope's "Rape of the Lock" is part of the grossness in Casanova's gambles, skepticism, sexuality, and disguises. Astonishingly similar in tone and manner to Boswell's "London Journal," the "Memoirs" are testaments to an age of paradox; honor and corruption go hand in hand as the search for "good taste" pursues a pattern of consummation and disaster.
News Department ... Douglas Parker, Managing Editor
Business Department ... Bill Feitz, Business Manager
Editorial Department ... Pat Swanson and Martha Crosier,
Co-Editorial Editors
But for the serious reader of the "classic," the book has solid worth in its humor and its sententiousness, both trying hard to ignore the "skull beneath the skin." The Casanova created here is neither bad nor good; he is only a man.
Lucrezia, Henriette, Nanette, Marton and the talented Therese are indeed plums for a still beardless boudoir adventurer. Yet Volume I is not merely a series of those titillating amours for which this 18th-century man is a by-word.
"I am neither one nor the other."
By Gordon W. Bennett
THE MEMOIRS OF JACQUES CASANOVA: VENETIAN YEARS, trans. by Arthur Machen, Putnam's, $5.00.
"I fear you are a libertine and an unfaithful lover."
By P. Gangadhara Rao
Oh! Beautiful hilly campus,
Lovely Lawrence KU campus,
Please don't send me away.
Keep me for sometime here.
Yes. I know
It is not you and I
Who decide my stay.
There is one, whom I call
Middle man, in my way
Who says "You can't stay."
The beautiful part of spring,
The early days of fall,
Even the windy winter,
And the hot summer—
Every moment I love.
Oh! I hate to leave.
I want to stay with you.
Walking with a book
Roaming for your look
Doing many things
Which I never thought
Which nobody expected
To create a chapter
Remarkable
In my burdensome life,
I spent many days
And many nights.
Whenever people ask me
When I will be leaving
I curse them in my heart
I answer them with my smile.
I guess
It may be human nature
To poke their dirty noses
Without knowing other's nature.
Why should I leave
Why shouldn't I stay
Yes. Here. Here.
With you my friend.
Poetry Corner
I never told you before
I went to down-town
At some places to eat
They refused me to serve
Because I am black
That is my skin color,
That was first time in life
To know color has credit
To give people preference
By way of difference.
It may be funny But sad in a way,
I don't want
To sell myself
By telling them
That I am from India.
I am a human first
And an Indian next
Is it not the truth?
I saw many places
As I know many people
But you are the best
I like you the most.
\* \* \*
Ode to a Statue
By John W. Hargrove
O young mass of shining bronze,
You who glare so defiantly
'O'er stadium and broad Kaw Valley,
Stand in noble defiance of all response.
O innocent Jayhawk all a' glitter,
You born of shining genius,
Gargoyle of the college omnibus,
Ignore thy detractors and be not bitter.
O New Bird Guardian of the Hill,
Watch, O watch thy neighbors
And their quiet petty labors.
For ill winds are blowing cold and chill.
O symbol of honored tradition,
Yon paint is not for the curb ...
No! 'Tis you they would disturb!
They are coming! You are truly undone!
O dripping, sticky woodpecker,
Bear thy coat of ignoble recompense
With an air of aristocratic silence;
Thy selfish squawk may bother yon necker.