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A Guide to the Novel
It is high time a wide-awake social psychiatrist (if there is such a thing) published "A Standard Guide to the Modern American Novel." Surely a foundation could be found to finance him. In a special chapter devoted to alphabetical-numerical symbols, the scientist could establish ten categories under which novels currently being published in America could be classified. At a cost of one million dollars annually, a Federal Bureau of Novel Classifications, or FBNC, could require that all novels shipped over state lines bear an FBNC classification tag. The benefit to readers and book reviewers alike would be immense. The tag, with its pity little alphabetical-numerical symbol, would be a down-to-earth guide which no dust jacket could overcome, over-ride, or obscure.
A key to symbols, by means of which reviewers, censors, women's clubs, police organizations, librarians, pedestrians, motorists and conductors, could find out what the book was without having to read the thing, might go as follows:
KEY CODE TO SYMBOLS
(FORM 90-XK-20, U.S.-FBNC, GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE)
TYPE A-1: Beautifully written, superb characterization, extremely sensitive, each sentence a perfect jewel, entire work deeply moving and highly symbolic, but essentially dull as hell. Contains few verbs, only a sprinkling of dialogue, but a great wealth of description in passages out of which the cliches have been laboriously and conscienciously removed, much after the manner and method of an old yard man weeding out crab grass.
Type B-2: Every character wants more and lives in or near New York City and drinks too much. (Not recommended for AA members, but endorsed by American Beverages Group, International Association of Beverage Importers, Manufacturers and Marketers.) The boss is a louse (metaphorical), the firm's clients are also lice (metaphorical), it's a lousy [sie] world in which everybody earns high in the five figures, including the protagonist who is thirty-four-year-old louse (metaphorical) scheming to get the vice-presidency. Author is or was in public relations and/or advertising. (Protest from K-90-XK filed with FBNC by American Association of Advertisers and/or Public Relations Executives.) In 600 pages the protagonist re-lives the lousy (metaphorical) entirety of his life and somehow commits all seven of the seven deadly sins and violates all Ten Commandments one by one and in order, only to throw away all of this careful preparation for big business success and become, on page 600, a martyred Madison Avenue Saint pickled in a great big dry metaphorical martini. The writing is like ad copy, persuasive, exotic, erotic, occasionally scatological or flamboyant by turns. The Author's Agent sold this novel's outline six months before the author began dictating the actual manuscript, to seven different people for $85,000 (total). Before leaving for European vacation, Agent struck out all dull passages, re-wrote the ending, had mss. mimeographed and delivered to buvers.
TYPE C-3: A tour of bedrooms, bathrooms, brothels, alley-ways, insane asylums, rest homes, army barracks, cheap hotels, tenement hallways, barns, attics, haystacks, hedges, ditches, thickets, fantastically crowded subways and elevators, basements, coal bins, motels, tourist homes, rooming houses and occasionally, even five thousand feet up in a flying airplane. (Association of Amalgamated Censors notified on form 2K-S4, waivers, protests, 290 forms and Permission to Publicly Burn Forms must be filed ten days in advance with FBNC District Offices.) Swell reading.
Type D-4: Same as C-3, but set one, two, or three hundred years ago.
Type E-5: And then suddenly everything went black.
Friday. July 14, 1961
Type F-6: "This great big land is mine. Get down off that horse, Jasper Cain!"
Type G-7: Inspector Horatio Griffin decided to take a v
Type G-7: Inspector Horatio Griffin decided to take a vacation. Type H-8: "You play ball with us Murphy. We'll make you governor of this state."
TYPE 1-9: English is this author's adopted tongue. Publishers who adopted him in turn write: "We must candidly admit that this author writes better in his adopted tongue of English than any native American which we know of now to be in existence or even dead, for that matter, or any Englishman either."
Type J-10: Art born out of pain, stark denial, painful reading, a pain in the somewhere of cruel nothingness rising out of a gigantic void of splintery crucibles, like somewhere stars, he thought once, while looking at his mother, type of thing. (I Don't Understand It Form 22-K filed and approved.) A typical example of J-10 will identify this category once, but perhaps, not for all. Example: "Swan's Exodus," Arty Book Co., 1959. The young author, Saxton K. Huppleman, Jr. (B. A. Horstwurst College, '33) is forty-eight-years-old. Following graduation in 1933 he was a 1934 Tackerman Fellow and the following year won a Kampmeyer Grant. In 1936 he got a Hutson Award, which was renewed twice for 1937-38. He wangled a Fulbright in 1939 and on the basis of his record got an Albright in 1940. The Army interrupted his productive years in 1941 but in 1945 he was again a Tackerman Fellow. In 1946 the "Tarrytown Review" accepted but did not publish the only story Huppleman had written so far and sent him to Italy on a Tarrytown Fellowship which carried him through 1948. He was out of work for three months in 1949 before the Steegle Foundation discovered him and gave him a seven-year endowment during which young, gifted Huppleman hurriedly produced the slim (less than 100 pages) volume, "Swan's Exodus," his first novel. It is the tenderly confusing account of a gifted young artist trying to keep body and soul together in a cruel, unfriendly world.
(Excerpted from "A Modest Proposal" by Jesse Hill Ford in the Georgia Review)
Pakistani Has Awed Crowd In Congress
WASHINGTON — (UPI) — The tall, stern soldier towering over the speaker's rostrum was winding up a lesson in history and civics before a joint session of Congress.
Speeches by foreign dignitaries are old hat to Washington lawmakers, but this was something different. The ramrod - straight man with the dark moustache had gone half an hour without a prepared speech.
Now he was warming up to foreign aid—something his country wants plenty of. He was speaking in British-accented English but used sharp American idioms, just as a congressman would.
"It's not a vote-getter," he told the Congressmen. "And we are a long way from you. We need this and we need that. You are getting a bit tired of this story."
The audience laughed. Indeed, many were getting tired of it.
But the speaker's eyes flashed and his finger waved at the laughing congressmen. "I suggest to you that you had better not get tired of it." he snapped.
No foreigner had ever dared talk that way to Congress, but Mohammad Ayub Khan, President of Pakistan, did and he got away with it. The chamber burst into thunderous applause.
The laughter stopped, a congressman gasped, and the whir of newsreel cameras suddenly seemed deafening.
"I felt like I ought to be offended," said one congressman, "but I wasn't."
"You have great world obligations," Ayub told the engrossed lawmakers. "You cannot hide from them no matter what you do."
"In the event of real trouble there's no other country in Asia you'll even be able to put your foot in." Ayub said. "The only people who will stand by you are the people of Pakistan.
"Provided you are also prepared to stand by them."
Avub's speech had been scheduled for 20 minutes, but it stretched out to 50 before he finished, after numerous interruptions for applause.
Enaptured congressmen compared Aubud's speech with one by Winston Churchill. They called his blunt, off-the-cuff talk "magnificent," "incredible," "terrific," and "great."
Ayub told the legislators that "we are pressing against you today as friends . . . but if we don't make the grade and, heaven forbid, we fall under communism, then we will be pressing against you again—but not as friends."
One lawmaker gave it the ultimate praise: "I couldnt have said it better myself."
He warned that if the Pakistani public isn't assured a decent living for its people "in, say, 15 or 20 years, we shall be overtaken by communism."
Normally taciturn, Speaker Sam Rayburn assured Ayub later that "no country in the world" deserves U.S. aid more, and told him that he was a "man with iron in his backbone and brains in his head."
Ayub, who took control of his government by force, has never been elected to anything. But his oratory amazed Congress.
House GOP leader Charles A. Halleck said he "wouldn't want him (Ayub) to run against me in Indiana."
Rep. John W. McCormack, House Democratic leader, called it "the most unusual speech I have ever heard delivered in my 33 years here."
Short Ones
When a man is dead, they put money in his coffin, erect monuments to his memory, and celebrate the anniversary of his birthday in sst speeches. Would they take any notice of him if he were living? No!—William Hazlitt
If good men were only better,
Would the wicked be so bad?—
John White Chadwick
... Books in Review . . .
By Harold Orel
Associate Professor of English
KANSAS RENAISSANCE, edited by Warren Kliewer and Stanley J. Solomon, (Lindsborg, Kansas: Coronado Publications, 173 + xiv pp., $4.00)
This handsomely printed volume includes a witty introduction by Allen Crafton. It traces the four phases of the social history of Kansas, and the corresponding kinds of writing that grew out of them: "the period of exploration and of the migrations across the territory of the lands farther west," "the migrants from the East, the vanguards of civilization" "the homestanding era," and "the period of the vanishing frontier, the years of social and economic transition." But no grand claims are made for Kansas regional writing; the best of it has been done by out-of-staters; and what we should look for here is evidence of imaginative power, the "authentic creative impulse" that is more surely pointed to in the subtitle, "An Anthology of Contemporary Kansas Writing," than in the title itself.
THE POEMS ARE, I THINK, THE WEAKEST SECTION OF the anthology, partly because they contain echoes of work that is not necessarily first-rate, and partly because technique occasionally calls attention to itself and distracts us from subject-matter. But the anthology contains much of genuine literary merit, and the University of Kansas, which has enjoyed close relationships with more of these writers than any other single place, may well be proud. Edgar Wolfe's Trial by Ice, a novelette that deals with the daily rounds of a social worker in an economically depressed community, achieves its effects by honest observation and a compassion for people who can never articulate their deepest feelings. The final confrontation between an embittered, drunken, unemployed truck-driver and the frightened social worker is well prepared for.
The shorter stories — "Old Galloway Laughed," by Nelson Antrim Crawford, "The Prince of Egypt," by Warren Kliewer, and "O'Shaughnessy's Revenge," by Kirke Mechem — deal with widely differing subjects. Crawford's study of a printer who has no patience for cowl youth hits directly at the kind of meanness and cruelty that a certain kind of middle age can develop into, and Kliewer's story of children frightened by a gypsy boy is well told by "the innocent eye" and becomes an achievement of point of view. Mechem's story, called "a Kansas Fairy Tale" by the author, will remind many readers of the kind of Irish legend that Lady Gregory and Yeats were so fond of translating into contemporary lines.
"Kansas Renaissance" contains three one-act plays, two of them by well-established writers (Langston Hughes and William Inge). The third, by Stanley J. Solomon, is by far the best: "Eurydice Abandoned" converts to the jargon of jazz a myth that has always, up to now, been taken dead seriously. The characterization is clean-cut, the dialogue always funny, and I suspect that it will play wonderfully well in any theatre that takes a chance. Hughes's play, "Soul Gone Home," is dryly unsentimental, but fairly slight even for a curtain-raiser. Inge's oddly titled piece, "To Bobolink, for Her Spirit," transfixes forever the kind of creature that haunts celebrities for autographs; but the subject seems hardly worth the skill that Inge lavished upon it.
THE BOOK, IN BRIEF, IS A MISCELLANY WITHOUT A unifying theme, but it proves its intended point, that people who grow up in Kansas or who like Kansas well enough to come here for their education have important things to say, developing talent, and the enthusiasm to carry through the hard work that all good writing requires. It will please many readers.
CHAPTERS OF ERIE, by Charles Francis Adams Jr. and Henry Adams. Great Seal (Cornell Press), $1.45.
"These modern potentates have declared war, negotiated peace, reduced courts, legislatures, and sovereign States to an unqualified obedience to their will, disturbed trade, agitated the currency, imposed taxes, and, boldly setting both law and public opinion at defiance, have freely exercised many other attributes of sovereignty."
Thus speaks the younger Charles Francis Adams in this important document of the Gilded Age, a volume that students of the era certainly should be acquainted with. These "Chapters of Erie" are articles written for publications of the day by Adams and his brother Henry. They are brilliant descriptions of an America subverted to the whims of the spoilsms.
The spoilsmen, in particular, are Daniel Drew, Jay Gould and Jim Fisk, who, in their railroad battle with Vanderbilt and their efforts to control the Erie Railroad, run roughshod over anyone in their path. One of the chapters describes the cornering of the gold market, a little crisis perpetrated by Gould and Fisk.
Only Fisk, of these three, is a charming scoundrel. Gould was as cold as they come, and Drew as piously evil. What these men were able to do to acquire wealth and power is a sad commentary on America of almost 100 years ago.
WATER, THE MIRROR OF SCIENCE, by Kenneth S. Davis and John Arthur Day. Doubleday Anchor, 95 cents.
Here is an exceptionally well-done paperback original that deals with water on both the scientific and philosophical levels. Davis is the Kansan who wrote the exceptionally good "River on the Rampage" of eight or so years ago. Readers of that book will recall how well he treats the problem of water, and they will find a similar treatment here.
Davis and Day start by showing us what an unusual substance water is. They deal with its peculiarities, its discovery, its uses, its relation to other materials, theories concerning it, and its meaning to all of life.