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VOLUME VIII . - FALL, 1964 NUMBER 1

CONTENTS

Purslanée Revisiting a ee
Essay by Sanford Peele

She Was: or Herons _...___ fie eu ees ee Ae! page 4
Poem by Charlotte McMichael

hie) RCN ee page 5
Story by Guy Beining

A chapter from Virtue in Four Positions page 8
from a novel by Antoni Gronowicz

Blackberries. and: Credit... a page 10
Poem by Dwight Pearce

On Sartre’s Literary and Philosophical Essays _-- page 11
Essay by John Clement

20) 1 (MUS Megara ane yceecese egal ae Aa Ea page 12
Poem by Charlotte McMichael

Horace Farlowe - ssh oe! page 13

Three O’Clock ; page 21
Story by Albert Pertalion

Reviews page 25

Julian, Gore Vidal
by B. Tolson Willis

The Lost City, John Gunther
by John D. Ebbs

The Story of Miechelangelo’s Pieta, Irving Stone
by Vernon Ward

The Modern Short Story in the Making, Whit and Hallie Burnett
by James Forsyth

Always Never-Ever 3 page 26
Poem by Pat Scott

To Mariwin page 30
Poem by Gale F. Morgan

tT Wik wor mourn ee page 31
Poem by Charlotte McMichael

Contributors page 32

The REBEL magazine is published by the Student Government As-
sociation of East Carolina College. It is printed three times a year in
November, February and May by Owen G. Dunn Co., New Bern, North
Carolina.

Manuscripts are always welcomed, warmly. Send for consideration
to the REBEL magazine, Box 2486, Greenville, North Carolina, or walk
up to 30614 Austin Building, East Carolina College.

PURSLANE: REVISITING

by

SANFORD PEELE

I came upon Bernice Kelly Harris’ Purslane at
the age of thirteen in a search for a reading plea-
sure alternative to the apathy produced by the
grim little selections to be found in state-approved
texts, though at that time I had no knowledge and
less concern for the profound reasons as to why
the eighth grade should read something called
eighth grade material. At thirteen, philosophic
despair for the reading matter put forth by public
educators was happily confined to my discovering
that if what was read in school was reading and
what I dragged home from the library on week-
ends was likewise reading, then there were two
types of reading, and I would do well to make a
distinction. Interest was the final and absolute
judge; thus were sheep and goats imperiously di-
vided, the former being those books you had to
have because being thirteen demanded adventures
got up in all the mystical regalia of distant and
improbable geographies of imagination made im-
mediate. The latter were those books you must
read to expand vocabulary in a particular way, to
improve logic of a particular kind, and to prepare
for the next grade.

I hasten to add; I did not then, and I do not, now
despair for the reading matter and the manner of
its being taught in the public schools. It is a mir-
acle that anyone should come to read at all, much
less live with words long enough and intimately
enough to add reading to his canon of pleasure
equal to a good sunrise, or spring, or any other
occasion that brings being -alive to keenest
awareness, I have arranged with myself, in the
light of prophecies fulfilled, to absolve my edu-
cators and their books from the charge “but it
doesn’t apply to me.” It all too obviously does.
Perhaps there might have been room for the math
and sciences if I had not made such neat distinc-
tions between what was good and what good for
me.

What has this bit of biography to do with Mrs.
Harris’ Purslane? Nothing. But it might go some
little way toward illuminating a personal discovery

of a particular experience—in this case literary,
Purslane—that can be encountered again and
again over a period of many years; and enjoyed,
upon each new encounter, for the growing discov-
eries the reader is ready to make. And to be ready
in the most private, physiological, emotional and
intellectual sense of ready—a readiness not cal-
culable by school or teacher or even self until self
is so far into the experience that there can be no
turning back—is to lay a trap for learning that
no teacher may take responsibility for. It may be-
gin in the classroom, or in the woods; and might
just as well end in either place without the respon-
sibility to and for the thing incurred ever shift-
ing from the individual. It is this individual re-
sponsibility for experience, seen as it works itself
out in the complicated pattern of communal life
lived among people whose entwined destinies con-
stitute a spiritual as well as physical sense of com-
munity, that occasions this response to having
read Purslane again.

The title fascinated me. Purslane. I liked strong
nouns for book names, and Purslane had to be the
name of something. Before turning page one, I
had experienced two sensations that would re-
turn, in all the freshness of first encounter, on
each subsequent reading of the book. First were
the words, Neuse River. They came out of the
opening sentence with an overwhelming impact;
this Neuse River couldn’t be my Neuse River. My
Neuse River was private; you didn’t write books
about it. You lived there. And not since Peter
Pan was locked out of his home and into my im-
agination had I been so seduiced as when Bernice
Kelly Harris gave me her Nanny Lou, that superb
little Protestant, and my second and deepest im-
pression on first reading Purslane.

There were many names, family names, refer-
ences to aunts and uncles and people who were
dead and could only be remembered by the very
few. All of this made me faintly uneasy. It was
like being with my grandmother and her friends,
where you might know some of the people brought

up in conversation but by no means all. And those
you didn’t know were spoken of with such inti-
macy and precise remembrance of detail that you
somehow forgot you had not been there, at the
picnic on a given Sunday in a given year. Purslane
hardly counted at all that first reading. It was a
chronicle of my family and community life to be
relished as the conversations overheard from the
adult world and the observations I personally made
about the town in which I lived. Only one time
in my reading of the book did Bernice Kelly Har-
ris, in the role of author, intrude upon the flow of
narrative. Nanny Lou had bargained with God
for a safe passage back to the mainland, after a
storm had sprung up and severely compromised
the pleasure of her first trip to the beach. One by
one she sacrificed her little horde of shells in hope
of appeasement, finally offering God the supreme
gift of her paper dolls in exchange for firm earth
beneath her feet. When the moment came to of-
fer, separately and finally, in fistfulls her dolls to
the open fire, I rebelled against an injustice the
author must alone be held accountable for. Oh to
have popped Mrs. Harris into the oven in heartfelt
exchange for every one of the humble effigies!
There was something unlovely and unnatural
about that sacrifice; and while I now consider it
among Mrs. Harris’ finest insights into the pivotal
moment of a child’s receding into adulthood, I
still cannot encounter it without a sense of un-
sponsored desolation too grim and final to offer
satisfaction beyond the artistry of its presenta-
tion.

Now thirteen years and a number of readings
later, I have discovered in Pwrslane an insight in-
to the pained and imperfect attempts of the in-
dividual to find meaning and richness in his search
for a balance between the dictates of a personal
psychology and the demands of human society. A
turn of the century rural setting gives Mrs. Harris
the advantage of having a closed society to deal
with; closed in the sense that any disturbance,
whether from within the framework or without,
occasions such reverberations as can be felt by
nearly every member of that society. A new teach-
er comes to take over the school, and immediately
the entire community is involved. The first white
tenant family to farm in the township arrives on
the Fuller farm, and their arrival is the concern
of the whole community. Nothing is entirely
closed, however, and the errant and ungovern-
able mysteries of human nature insinuate them-
selves beneath the ritual of habit and circum-
stance to force the individual to reassert his re-
sponsibility as a thinking, feeling, separate and
whole agent, before he lends his voice to public
pronouncement and action. is
» The primary authority in Purslane is. the
church, Protestant and puritanical. The puritan-
ism is ameliorated by the earthy nature of a farm-
ing community and the healthy Protestant habit
of dealing with God on the grounds of acknowl-
edged mutual respect.. Community life, spiritual
and cultural without distinction between the two,
centers around the church. Members are chastised
and rewarded before the church body when they,

acting out of some grievance or good, involve
other members in a situation that disturbs the
smooth course of social order. The feud between
Aunt Airy and Aunt Sugar over an accumulation
of slights, real and imagined, is finally brought in-
to the church proper to be handled as an affair of
communal significance, threatening the stability
of a happy norm. There is no questioning of so-
ciety’s right. to bring»the women to a public facing
of their private grievance. It had ceased to be
private with the taking of sides by friends and
relatives.

As Purslane moves toward its close, a series of
beautifully detailed occasions of public celebra-
tion serve to illuminate the early accumulation of
solitary character vignettes. A host of figures,
heretofore confined for the main part to revealing
relationships between individuals, emerge in an
orchestration of specific community spirit, and be-
yond that, an indication of what draws man into
society. Scenes of life lived in the school room, in
the winter chill of hog killing, at quilting parties
and on coon hunts give way to the greater rituals
of marriage, birth and the laying away of the dead.

The aberrations and grand eccentricities of hu-
man nature are fourid in Pate’s Siding tolerated
and, on occasion, indulged because they belong
and are a part of what a society knows as its own.
Uncle Sim of the stocks and bonds, empty pockets
and too delicate condition for work, is shifted
from household to household; the women appre-
ciating his rare complements on their cooking and
the men, his good talk about financial affairs up
North. Discrepancies between the Christian life
on this earth and the sometimes ungoverned de-
mands of the flesh are met with good humor and
occasionally unabashed grace when revival times
call the fallen forward on a final stanza of su-
preme good faith that all can be forgiven. Too
much liquor and a view of the churchgoer as hy-
pocrite are perpetual and favorite stumbling blocks
to be removed with perennial group enthusiasm.

But it is for the fact of death that Mrs. Harris
appropriately gives her greatest compassion for
living. In two instances, she brings the final act
of living into such sharp and unsentimental relief
that terror for the fact of one’s own inevitable
end is annihilated at the spectacle of what we can
do for each other in a fraternity of spirit when the
power of profoundest individualism passes. The
dying of the old woman, Charity, ensconced in a
pantheon of husband, children, friends and a life
of good will lived well, moves toward its close with
a rare beauty and a precision of certainty among
the survivors that “God doeth all things well.” At
her last, the lifetime of shared suffering between
husband and. wife, asserts itself inj) a bond that
will not let Charity tell her man-to, leave their
bed, that she might die in peace. Hers is the sacri-
fice of not suffering profanely, of keeping to the
end a charity for the beloved. It is the.ritual—
the eating of the.funeral meats, the.sitting up
with the dead while talking of crops to.come and
the life old Charity lived, that shatters the pur-
est sense of loss; and allows the living a little
peace until they can make a memory of the dead.

The death of Calvin Fuller closes the novel.
Charity’s death had been the deepest sounding of
the community’s ability to consolidate its rich-
ness of cultural and spiritual experience in the
face of its loss of a member. There is victory over
death in the long continuum of shared experience
canonized in memory that she passes on to her
friends. Calvin’s death offers no consolation.
Young and unhappy in a doomed romance, he dies
by his own hand, married to a bride he nor the
community knew or loved; and when the com-
munity comes to witness his being walked from
one end of the bare porch to the other, his legs
rhythmically switched to keep him from falling
into the poisoned sleep he desires above all else,
they know the panic of having their comfortable

answers swept away in the great overwhelming
question, Why?

Miss Harris has been responsible to her reader
and to her material. Though the book is pervaded
with nostalgia, there is no retreat from the com-
plexity of living into easy answers. If the sym-
metry of personal experience merging with so-
ciety produces a unity that occasionally has the
faded quality of a 19th century print, a look that
is human but posed, that is her prerogative as an
artist, her way of telling the story. As an artist,
she knows the degree to which a human being may
find solace, in the social order, for what Yeats
Pat “the pain and uncertainty of his setting

orth.”

SHE WAS OF HERONS

CHARLOTTE McMICHAEL

She was of herons

cocking their feather throats
above circles of water minutes
about to waver breast-deep in.

She was of crows

sitting solitary on branches

with no noise to focus the day with
or to whistle green seeds for growing
not too much past black where all is dark.

She was of brown wrens
no October wind could scurry
brush-tailed back under directional timing
no back tracking seasons could delay.

She was of counterpoint bird
pipering on ocean sands
leaving marks for crabs to disfigure
and gone the memory
twice kept for shells and salt.

She was of lace
long marked to broken ash
when cinders hold up a new flame of bird,
but the feathers twist underground
leaving only the melody mark of song.

4

THE BARGAIN

by

GUY BEINING

It was Friday when I passed him; Saturday
night I was knocking on his door. He was bent
like the fish in the pail and stood right under the
light bulb which hung from the middle of the ceil-
ing. It was uncovered, washing the room, making
it more naked and bare than it was. The planks
were full of dirt and rusty nails; everything was
revealed right at once. Cigar boxes full of wrap-
pers, and coffee cans full of nails and ashes from
the cigars. His belt hung open, and he was finger-
ing a bottle, bay-colored. When I handed him the
money I could smell the cane liquor from his
breath. He had a muddy mouth, and the broad
expanse of his lips was contorted into a scowl.
Bertha Lee was in the other room; I heard her,
and whenever I got drunk I swore I smelt her.
Every time I came I was drunk.

“T ain’t leading you to her,” Abe cried out,
“She’s my daughter I know that for the truth.”
The wooden floors were far apart and you could
smell the ground. Like the room, Abe’s whole ap-
pearance was revealed almost at once. He had
already kicked off his shoes, and I could see the
wrinkles on his stomach through the holes in his
shirt. His face looked crumpled in his half sleep.

“Aren’t you planting this year?” I asked. He
drew up his legs and his bony knees shot up.

“What? Beans, peanuts or beans, maybe cot-
ton. No, I’ll fish. instead.”

“Fishing don’t make you money.”

“My hands are through being hired. Those
watermelons were the last of my planting. You
can tell your daddy.”

His cigar was wet and shiny, resting on the
orange crate by his chair. He lit it again with a
wooden match on the floor planks, mixing sulphur
with the ground smell and that of Bertha Lee.
Perfume seems to putrify the strong substantial
smell of the earth. Her odor made Abe nervous.
“That smell kills the substance meant for our
lungs,” he said once.

I would take her outside; I always did in the
beginning, but then that changed the night it
began to rain.

I remember that the rain came down hard on
the tin roof, like pebbles thrown into a pot. And
I knew that I’d have to stay if it didn’t let up, and
I felt it wouldn’t. It was a steady downpour that

or

could last all night. Abe swore at the rain and
squeezed the money I had given him. Squeezing
nard as if he thought it would become liquid like
the rain. His forehead was damp. I heard the
bed creak in the other room where Bertha Lee
was. It was a humiliating sound, but I was full
of liquor, and could only laugh at the rain making
a thousand little silver threads on the windows.
Abe had emptied his bottle of cane liquor, and
I wondered how he never got drunk.

“Why did you come tonight?” he asked. “You
saw it would rain.”

I couldn’t stop the rain or myself. I said it to
myself as if to him. I could almost see his skull
when he lit a match, cupping it close to his mouth.
I slept with her there that night, and from then
on if it rained or not.

Another night. It was eight o’clock and the Sa-
vannah train came rushing by. It wasn’t quite
dark yet and the light looked strange lighting up
the ties between the tracks that didn’t quite need
lighting up. The tracks were no more than three
hundred feet away, making the roar of the train
deafening for a steady minute. The shack trem-
bled humbly. The train was what made me
nervous like Bertha Lee’s perfume made Abe
nervous. I knew where I was when I heard the
ground stammer and seem to break up. The
train always shook a little sense, and then regret,
into me. I came too damn early; I’ll have to wait
for the dark to come.

“T came early.”

“I know what you done. I saw you walking
down Grove Lane yesterday and I wondered
when’s he coming, but I didn’t look your way,
and we passed, but I knew you’d be coming.”

“You were carrying a pail of fish,” I said
laughing.

“IT feel good when I fish. Right out in the hot
sun for hours; right into the chill of evening;
I still feel good.”

“The water’s your salvation.”

“T don’t get to plant no more, but I get by. The
water’s always got something.”

“Your salvation.”

His eyes got darker, and they seemed harder.
There are raisins in his eyes, I thought. He looked
the same as the time when the rain came. The

eyes becoming small like raisins, then liquidy.
His grizzly hair looked setaceous. When I was
little I thought such hair would prick.

A solemnity came about, a secrecy of sound.
And I stood in the quietness as if everything I’d
ever thought was being used up to make the dark.
It was cinerious outside; not dark yet. It was
like looking at a clock, waiting for the dark to
come.

Abe got up from his chair, making no noise
at all, as if he didn’t want to disturb the silence.
He got down another bottle of cane liquor from
the cabinets above the sink. He sat down again
and with his eyes half open he began to drink.
He rinsed his mouth with the first gulp, and then
rested the bottle on the floor and got back to his
cigar, wet and shining where his muddy mouth
had been.

“Your daddy’s letting you run loose now, huh?
I see you all about,” he said in a dead tone.

“On my own good time. I put in my work with
him, then I’m through, and he knows it.”

“You can’t drive a car now, huh?”

“T done busted everyone he’s let me use and
then some, but still he won’t take me off the trac-
tor. He knows I drive hard but I get things done.
I don’t mind breaking in the land, especially in
the spring, when the earth is down hard. It’s
a satisfaction, plowing in those even furrows.
They always come out even.” ; :

“T done through with farming; just going to
fish now.”

I was trying to listen for Bertha Lee, but I
couldn’t hear her. I knew she’d be wearing her
red skirt. A nigger will always wear something
bright. I always said to myself she was half
white, knowing she was a quadroon at best, yet I
heard my father say she looks like a mulatto,
so I kept telling myself she was, but when I was
drunk I forgot about the whole thing and didn’t
try to divide her up. She was good for what she
was.

I now sat down on a little stool off in the corner;
I sat looking out at the half light trying to figure
out Abe. Hating him now for making me wait;
wondering why he still had pride in his old age,
and why he held on to his last child so.

My father said that Abe had been a good farmer.
He’d first moved into the region eleven years ago.
I was just nine at the time, and I didn’t pay no
attention to Bertha Lee then. She was just six
and looked like any other little nigger girl.

I heard him that first time talking to Father
about how dedicated he would be in his work,
since he had nothing but a little child to take care

“My wife done left me, and my sons the same
after her. I got me a hoe and I got me a sickle
and I done worked in the fields since I was ten.”

My father would pick him up every day, and
he’d sit in the back of the truck with Bertha Lee
who he took with him everywhere he went. And
his hounds would jump in after him. And they’d
bark and carry on in the wind from the truck’s
motion, and Bertha Lee would just look straight
at Abe, trusting in him, He’d work a good twelve

hours out in the fields and he did that for ten
years, and then last year he began to drop off
coming to work in his little Ford coupe. He
said that he was getting old and felt the weather
more, but he was out fishing and he would trap
some. I knew this because he taught me how to
set a trap the right way.

Then one day in the autumn I was passing his
shack. It was early in the morning. The ground
looked dusty from the frost which covered every-
thing. I had my 30/30 rifle with me and was
going up the dirt road toward Grove Lane and
beyond Widows Creek. His shack looked so calm
and dispassionate covered with frost. The sun
was just beginning to reach over one side of the
roof. One of the hounds started barking, then they
all ran up to me and began to dance about my feet,
kicking up the frosted ground. They were beg-
ging to go with me. I was pushing them away
with my legs when Abe stepped out. He walked
up to where I was and told the dogs to move on.
He finally shouted so loud that they cringed back
to the shack and hid under the steps. Abe was
wrapped up in several shirts and a jacket with
a hood that rested loosely on his head. He was
chewing something in his muddy mouth and look-
ing at the ground where the dogs had scratched
it up. He looked bent like the fish in the pail.

“You’re up early boy.”

“Hunting calls for that,” I said, putting my
fingers over my lips which felt stiff and dry from
the cold.

Smoke was beginning to whirl up from the
chimney. Bertha Lee was fixing the fire. I had
come upon her the other evening and eyed her
longer than usual. That was shortly after Father
had said she looked like a mulatto.

“I got a problem, boy,” he said, wiping his
muddy mouth.

“T ain’t surprised, you not working and all.”
ee his head a little more, ignoring what I’d
said.

“I want to kill one of my dogs. She’s going to
have puppies I reckon and I can’t keep no more.
_ to shoot her, but I can’t.” He glanced at my
rifle.

“No shells?”

“No, I’m scared to kill her. God might strike
me down.”

“Want me to kill her?”

“Tl pay you. I’ll give you fifty cents a dog.
You can kill them all.”

I began to laugh inside, but looked hard at
him. ‘“That’s wholesale murder!”

“T got to get rid of them but I can’t.”

Bertha Lee stepped out and threw some scraps
to the dogs. She had on a white robe, but she still
didn’t look black.

“Do you want me to kill them dogs?” I asked
er.

“They’re not mine,” she said indifferently, and
then closed the door behind her.

“How old is she now?” I asked looking at the
door where she had appeared.

“Seventeen. Yes seventeen this past October.”

“She'll be going off soon won’t she?”

“Someday I guess. Someday.”

“She ain’t bad,” I said; he looked kind of
strangely at me.

“Them dogs ain’t no good to me, but I done sat
right before them and tried to shoot them but I
couldn’t. Tied them up to a tree, but I couldn’t.”
He spat on the ground. Abe hardly had any teeth
and had no force behind his spitting. Part of it
trickled down his sharp, unkempt chin. His lips
fell back together. He’d been chewing a cigar tip.
The little pieces of tobacco slid from his muddy
mouth every so often.

“You don’t think God can strike me?”

“T’ll pay you, I says I’ll pay you.”

“This rifle’s too powerful. It'll splatter your
whole yard with their blood.”

“I got the .22 I was going to use all loaded up.”

“God ain’t going to bother with me,” I said
under my breath. “Tie them to a tree. I'll get
the: 22.

He ran toward the house calling the dogs, but
they sensed something and wouldn’t come out from
under the steps.

Inside the shack Bertha Lee was standing over
the wood stove; she turned around with her hands
on her hips. Then she waved her right hand in
front of her eyes as if she couldn’t see too well,
or as if there was a fly buzzing around her. I
grabbed the hand as if it were a weapon. It was
soft. I didn’t think it would be. It was soft like
a girl’s hand should be soft. I turned it over; the
palms were pink; her fingertips were smoky
buds. I noticed when I glanced up that her eyes
were large with wonderment; jet-black, glassy
fixities.

“No fellow ever touched your hand before?”
I asked slyly.

She said nothing; just stared steadfastly at me.

“I’m going to kill them dogs. Kill them all, just
for you. Look at your pa trying to round them
up.” I led her to the window. “See him on his
knees a-calling them, pleading with them. But
they ain’t to be deceived so quickly.”

She didn’t say nothing, just stared blankly out
the window. Her hand felt like it had turned to
wood.

“You're like the Petrified Forest,” I said laugh-
ing.

“Like the Petrified Forest?” She spoke in a
spirited way.

“That’s right.”

“Where are they at?”

“Someday I might show you.”

Abe was shouting fiercely at the dogs. Finally
he got a rope from his car and began pulling
them out one at a time.

“There’s a resolute man,” I said letting go of
her hand, which had made mine warm and wet.
Her hand was just as dry and cool as ever.
“Where’s the .22?”

She went into the bedroom with me right behind
her. Her body seemed to sway like the tops of
cane stalks. It was lithe, a figure in my mind of
early summer. She pointed to the wall over a
small bed. The .22 lay on top of two nails. I
went to the other bed. “This here’s yours, ain’t

it?” I began to pat it with my hand. She nodded
her head very slowly, as if she should be cautions
at the question. “You got the big bed and he’s got
the small one.”

“He don’t sleep well. He mostly sits up all
night.”

“Do you like to sleep in the dark all alone?”

“No. Why?”

“Well I’ll tell you...”

Abe shouted from outside, “They’re tied up,
boy. I got them all tied up.”

I grabbed the .22 and then turned to Bertha
Lee and sounded the words at her softly, as if
they were adhesive, a joining declaration, a sub-
mission and a contiguity of all past quests, yet
the words sounded hollow and foreign to my ears,
as if they were being forced from a dream.

“This time, this recognition, I can’t let by. You
wait here tonight and if my mind sees you as
I see you now, I’ll be calling.”

Then breaking that voice embedded in despera-
tion, I cracked with a burn of mortification, “Re-
member, I’m killing them dogs for you. You don’t
just clutter up space, making other people act,
you act too.”

She didn’t say anything, but stood there like
some goddess of light. But she was black. I left
burning with the neglect of my warm words.

Abe was looking mournfully at the tree. “I
had them like that yesterday. All bunched up
like that.” He turned his head away when I took
aim.

“You thinking God might make you an acces-
sory?” He didn’t reply, just kept his head turned.
“I’m killing them dogs for her, and she knows it.”

With each shot I said it. It seemed I could hear
the thud of the shot wedge into the dog’s body, and
with each shot it felt like I could hear more. Fin-
ally with the last one, I sensed the bullet spinning
its way, then the thud, and the spattering of blood
around the wound. The dog making one quick
yelp (that was real) and the copper bullet enter-
ing, and then submerged, in the pulsing, then
quaking and finally roiling, blood.

A kind of madness went through my mind. He
started to hand me the two dollars, which had
been crumpled in his dirty jeans, but I pushed
it away.

“T said I done it for her and she knows it and
now you know it.” I felt like a commander, an
embattled commander, after killing them dogs.
“And God won’t spare you less you fall clear of
this KILLING!’

He fell back a bit, moving toward the shack,
feeling his way with his hands as if it were
dark; with his eyes, upturned white arcs, staring
at me. White liquid, white hot with incompre-
hension. He dangled in front of me like a broken
twig. He was shaking and trying to say what
he felt, but he just kept shaking and I knew he
understood. -

And that’s how it happened. I’ve been giving
him the same amount as he offered for the dogs,
every time I come. I’ve done it every time but
the very first, for that’s when he paid me for
killing the dogs. That’s how he paid.
A CHAPTER FROM THE NOVEL
VIRTUE IN FOUR POSITIONS

by

ANTONI GRONOWICZ

THE GOLDHEAD

Supreme Court: Franklin Kapistrot, plaintiff,
against The Coast to Coast Railroad Company,
William S. De Jager and Bartholomew A. Leach,
defendants.

Examination by the defendant, The Coast to
Coast Railroad Company, of the plaintiff before
trial took place at the offices of Rollon, Casevant,
Small & Abdoller pursuant to oral stipulation.
Gilbert L. Lasher appeared as attorney for plain-
tiff. Rollon, Casevant, Small & Abdoller were at-
torneys for defendant The Coast to Coast Rail-
road Company, represented by Carroll A. Layton,
Esq. and Augustine 8. Neely, Esq. of counsel.

The participants confirmed: “It is hereby stipu-
lated and agreed by and between the attorneys
for the respective parties hereto that filing of the
within examination before trial be and the same
is hereby waived, and the attorney for the plain-
tiff shall be furnished with a copy thereof without
charge; it is further stipulated and agreed that
the witness may be sworn at the taking of his
examination before trial by any Notary Public of
the State; and that the witness may read, sign
and swear to this testimony when the same is
transcribed before any Notary Public of the
State; it is further stipulated and agreed that
all objections, except as to the form of questions,
be and the same are hereby reserved to the trial
of the action.

Franklin Kapistrot, the plaintiff, after having
first been duly sworn, was asked by Mr. Layton:

“May we have your full name, please.”

“Franklin Kapistrot.”

“Where do you live, Mr. Kapistrot?”

“13 Ulmus Street, New Pecunia.”

“What is your occupation, sir?”

“Researcher.”

“Do you know the defendant, William S. De
Jager?”

Yes, 1 Gur

“Could you tell us when you first met him?”

“On his train.”

“Where did you first meet Bartholomew A.
Leach?”

“In his office.”

“In Oldtown?’

TY on?”

“As I understand it, Mr. De Jager and Mr.
Leach said to you that the railroad was interested
in engaging you to write a book about Mr. De
Jager and the CCRR?”

“Yes; also in financing the book and me.”

“Did you make a promise to them at that time
that you would write the book?”

“Yes; I agreed to write the book, because Mr.
De Jager, Mrs. De Jager and Mr. Leach solemnly
promised me that if I would write a book accept-
able to them, they would not only buy one hundred
thousand copies, but also would put me on a
salary for two years at two thousand dollars per
month, grant me a white railroad pass plus all
expenses, and make me a wealthy man.”

“Mr. Layton,” interrupted Gilbert Lasher, the
short pleasant-mannered attorney for the plain-
tiff, “I do not want to object to anything, but the
contract, of course, speaks for itself.”

“Naturally, but I thought we might identify
it. Do you have the original contract, Mr. Lash-
er?”

“Yes, I have the original.”

“You do not want to identify it today?”

“Do you wish it?”

“Tf you have it with you, why don’t we?”

“All right.’”’ He passed the papers to Layton’s
well-manicured hands.

“Mr. Kapistrot, is this the contract that you
and Mr. Leach and Mr. De Jager executed?”

“Yes, Mr. Layton.”

“Mr. Kapistrot, did you deliver the outline and
two chapters of the book Willie the Whistle per-
sonally to Mr. and Mrs. De Jager and to Mr.
Leach?”

"Ves. | Gid."

“Can you tell what then transpired?”

“Mr. Leach, as a vice president of the CCRR
Public Relations Department, sent this memo to
Mr. De Jager and to the directors of the railroad,
‘Today Mr. Kapistrot submitted two chapters and
an outline for the book Willie the Whistle. This
is a most magnificent piece of writing, and I
think it will be a great book.’ ”

‘When did you next submit any material of the
book to the railroad, Mr. Kapistrot?”

“T think it was in December or January, be-
cause Mr. and Mrs. De Jager and Bart Leach gave
me a few other assignments besides the writing
of Willie the Whistle.

“What other assignments did they give you?”

“A number of social assignments—entertaining
Mrs. De Jager and her daughter Tessa; mixing
with important people and reporting to Mr. De
Jager what they said about him; evaluating a
novel, Brothers in Stalingrad, written by William
Wattson, the fiance of Tessa De Jager; and pre-
paring stories and articles about Mr. De Jager
for the American and Canadian press. Here is a
note from Bart Leach: ‘Dear Mr. Kapistrot, thank
you very much for the piece about Willie the
Whistle for the Detroit Free Press. Great! I
have sent it along today.’ ”

Mr. Lasher held a cigar in his left hand and
the paper in his right. “Do you want to see it?”

“Yes, if you please.’”’ Lasher handed the paper
to Mr. Layton, who asked Kapistrot, “Did Mr.
or Mrs. De Jager ever express dissatisfaction to
you with any of your work?”

“No. As a matter of fact, they praised me all
THe co

“He did not ask you that,” said Gilb Lasher.
“Will you please, Franklin, answer the questions.”

“All right.”

“Answer the questions, Frank. I want to get
out before seven o’clock tonight; no stories,
please,” Lasher repeated.

“Did you thereafter finish the book Willie the
Whistle, Mr. Kapistrot?”

Ton?

“Do you have the completed book with you?”

“The original is with De Jager, the two copies
are with the publisher. I have only my handwrit-
ten draft.”

“Mr. Kapistrot, can you tell us the role that

Mrs. De Jager was going to play in this book?”

“The book was supposed to be about both Mr.
and Mrs. De Jager and about the railroad.”

“Was she to play a major role or a minor role
in the book?”

“She played the role of the president’s wife,
plus some extras... and she asked me to dedicate
the book to her daughter Tessa.”

“Did you ever discuss with the publisher the
price at which your book was to be sold to the
public?”

“Yes; six dollars per copy.”

“Did anyone besides Mr. De Jager, Mrs. De
Jager, and Mr. Leach on behalf of the railroad
speak to you about purchasing copies of your
book?”

“Yes, many people. Roach, Berryman, Cole-
grove, Mellon, Puppett, even Amelia Leach and
four directors. They promised to buy about two
hundred and fifty thousand copies more; and Mrs.
De Jager said, ‘We’ll do everything possible to
satisfy you.’ ”

“T do not think,” interrupted Gilbert Lasher,
“you ought to go into these personal things.”

“What did these others say to you?” asked
Caroll Layton, with shrewdness in his black eyes.

“They clearly intimated that if I wrote plenty
of pages about them, they too would help to see
that I was well off.”

“Am I correct, Mr. Kapistrot, that all the
promises you have stated were merely to buy
copies of your book?”

“Two hundred and fifty thousand copies, aug-
mented by a hundred thousand, would mean a
tidy bundle of cash for me.”

“T will object to the form of the question,”
said the attorney for the plaintiff, playing with
a fresh cigar.

“Mr. Lasher, all objections are reserved for
the trial.”

“All right.”

“Mr. Kapistrot, how much money did you earn
last year?”

“It is not your business, Mr. Layton.”

“All right, I will not pursue it.”

Mr. Layton conferred with his colleague Augus-
tine Neely and asked a new question, “Mr. Leach
agreed that the CCRR was going to buy one hun-
dred thousand copies of Willie the Whistle for
his Public Relations Department; is that what
you want us to understand?”

“Can’t you read?”

AO agit!

“Here’s a letter from Mr. Leach.”

“T see. Is it not true that in your publishing
agreement your manuscript had to be satisfactory
to the railroad, too, as well?”

“Yes. It was satisfactory to the railroad and
to the publisher, Here are two more letters.”

“An: 1 Bee,"

At that moment Augustine Neely, a fleshy man
of about fifty-five, stepped into the questioning.
“By the way, I do not think this contract between
yourself and your publisher undertakes to specify
i amount of your royalty. Am I correct in
that?”

“Yes, the first page, Mr. Neely.”

“Oh, yes.”

“This has nothing to do with the CCRR and
the De Jager’s commitments. This is extra.”

“T see; I will withdraw that question. I think
you told us when you first met with Mr. Leach
and he discussed the arrangements he would make
with you, he told you that you would have to
get a publisher, did he not?”

“Ves,”

“You knew that the CCRR was not in the pub-
lishing business.”

“Yes, the CCRR is connected with everything
—hbanks, oil, steel, glass, and social work—but
not the publishing business.”

“Was it your understanding that there was an
agreement between the CCRR and the publisher ?”’

he Rd

“With respect to this book, Willie the Whistle?”

“Ves,”

“All right, I do not think I have anything more.”

“All right,” said his partner Caroll Layton.
“Do you have anything, Mr. Lasher?”

“Ne.

“Mr. Kapistrot,” said roly-poly Augustine, lift-
ing his two hundred pounds. “May I have a few
words with you in private, off the record?”

“Yes, why not?”

“We can’t have two books on the same subject,
Mr. Kapistrot.”

“What do you mean?”

“Tt is only fair, I think, to tell you that Mr. and
Mrs. De Jager have given the assignment to
Jack Small, Junior—as to why, I don’t know that
myself.”

“Oh, that’s the reason?”

“And you'll lose the case.”

“Why?”

“Simple: they have money, plenty of money,
over four billion dollars. They have power, tre-
mendous power here in the city, in the capital, in
the whole country.”

“Mr. Neely, help me.”

“IT? What can I do? Nothing.”

“But they cheated me!’

“Sir, they cheated you; they cheat their friends;
they cheat the whole nation; they cheat their
wives and husbands; they cheat even themselves.”

“What can be done?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“They can afford to cheat.”

“Why?”

“Because they’re fifthy rich. They’re builders
of America, they say.”

“Why don’t you tell the country, the world,
about their fraud?”

“Me?”

“Yes, you, you! You’re an important member
of their society and you have all the facts and
figures about them.”

“But, I also have eight children. They’ll put
me and my children on the blacklist for life. We’d
get no jobs above a clerk’s position, and even that
is questionable.”

“Perhaps it’s better to be a clerk.”

“They'll assassinate me.”

‘“Where’s the police, the law of the country?”

“Sir, the police and the law are on the right
side, on their side.”

BLACKBERRIES AND CREDIT

by

DWIGHT PEARCE

We can live on blackberries and credit
while social memories crowd backwards
through peoples who were joined as one
before the altar of monnaie.
There comes a time and times
when blackberries are gone
and credit becomes old stuff
and we choose briars.
What we can and will do escapes the stain
and we grow down, slowly down
before nada and nada vines.
Play the sweet sounds
loud and louder
until the juke stops
and blackberries brown and fade
and the watered credit laughs.

10

ON SARTRE’S LITERARY AND PHILOSOPHICAL
ESSAYS

by

JOHN CLEMENT

The original “man of a thousand faces” is Jean-
Paul Sartre, and nowhere is this fact more obvious
than in this rich collection of essays. The thou-
sand unsuspected facets of the writer who has
become the prototype of the modern philosopher-
existentialist are all exposed to the light: Sartre
as novelist, critic and philosopher; Sartre, as a
writer, on other writers; Sartre as tourist and
philosopher, exploring the values (to him) of
foreign lands, and Sartre as logician and semanti-
cist, probing the depths of the Hegelian-Marxist
ethic. But always and principally it is Sartre the
existentialist, exploring the significance of actions
and words, studying the lives of his fellow men
and looking for the meaning of existence with in-
sight and erudition.

One may at first be surprised at the thought of
Sartre as an essayist, but the novelist-playwright
seems to be at his best here. Whether this is due
to his considerable skill as a writer, which makes
him seem to belong to whatever style he writes
in, or because, as William Barrett says of him, he
is “. .. an idea man, an intellectual first. . Pa who
makes his writings burn and crackle by mixing
in just the right amounts of philosophy and litera-
ture, is left for the reader to decide. In any case,
however, one point is clear: Sartre the essayist
writes powerfully and appealingly, and it is with
some incredulity that the reader will find that
the essays were all written circa 1950. Even the
writer’s choice of subjects is in the main amazing-
ly modern: there are essays on conformity in
America, on the conflict of Marxism and prosperi-
ty in modern Europe, on the morals of writers—
an entire universe of those topics which one will
hear today and tomorrow being discussed in
literary circles. gs

For the dilettante not wishing to embroil him-
self in the complexities of Marxist methodology
or the novels of Dos Passos or Faulkner, the most
interesting sections are the three essays on Ameri-
ca, and of these the most penetrating by far is
the one on conformity and individualism. In
the land of free enterprise and rugged noncon-
formity, says Sartre, individualism “. . . implies
conformism. It represents, however, a new direc-
tion, both in height and depth, within conform-
ism.” The people of America show to an outsider

11

a fascinating array of types, the individuals
standing out in terms of an already abandoned
but still used Puritan ethic, the masses outstand-
ing in their uniformity. Much like the skyline
of New York, the many skyscrapers of individuali-
ty only point up their similarity.

Sartre’s point of view is not always critical;
the sharpness of his writing is mellowed by ad-
miration for the feeling of raw power in most
of the great cities and constructions of the U. S.
Indeed, in some sections of these three essays he
becomes almost whimsical in his fond contempla-
tion of American energy, while perhaps sitting
back a little and chuckling under his breath.

But elsewhere Sartre is back as of old, and the
acid is at its full strength. In an incisive critique
of Brice Parain’s Investigations into the Nature
and Function of Language, for example, one can
fairly feel the paper crackle. Parain is one who
has touched the extremes of surrealism, and as
one semanticist to another, Sartre condemns him
both for having gone too far out and for not hav-
ing gone far enough. Harking back to Descartes,
Sartre uses the cogito as a powerful weapon to
support the priority of self-understanding over
language, and from here to base all language on
self-understanding. Where Parain sees only the
confusion of a medley of different individuals
using a tool they cannot comprehend to convey
meanings that are not theirs, Sartre sees a striv-
ing toward order as each individual accumulates
knowledge and proceeds toward a better under-
standing of his fellow man, a process which makes
communication easier and leads to more knowl-
edge and more understanding, the whole culminat-
ing in that realization of one’s true position, which
constitutes existential freedom.

There are other riches in the book, also: a dis-
cussion on the semantics of surrealistic writing, a
redefinition of freedom from a Cartesian point of
view, an existentialist’s view of Aristotle, and
more. Atop it all is the pure joy of matching
wits with a mind of the first order, of leading, and
being led by, a master in the subtle art of living
and seeing. Death can remove the mind that
wrote, but it cannot touch the immortal joy of
living that may be sampled in these few pages.

I

CO The ceiling rides
yi MA with engravings.
[ cannot sleep.
I am rushed paper-weight up
with the moon taking its share
of reflections
from off white glass
near my bed.
The moon sighs
taller and taller
with metallic threads
ribbing outlines

by spared and fine over me.
I q
CHARLOTTE McMICHAEL I find up there

a star and tree design,
one encased ship,

a bead and wool wreath
all formed opaque

from off the gilded reflector.
I ride still taller.

A dolphin rides;

and still taller,

a powdering tub

spilling over me
ground cedar bark.

III
I see my mother
carrying a bread tray, ,
for my sickness was then a fever,
and her cool hand,
churned by yeast,
takes my burden away;
but wooden spoons turn me
back when I remember her gone.
I cannot sleep.

IV
Her death left no mahogany
list of woods or wooden ware
and with her gone,
I turn in bed
and find her pained with plan
the time we fed the winter birds
outside our kitchen window;
snow flaked our paned dimension
till we touched another time.
My mother wrapped her aproned
arms secure around that young day
and me and rocked my laughter
past a faceted knob
that opens no door.

V
And still taller and taller
I fall. f
Moonlight blows out
my flown motif
and my slender pea ‘
plays a woman’s profile on a plate,
etched honored and sad;
my mother made a mood,
a silksurfaced dream,
and made a moonstone
lie heavy on my sleep.

12

—

en

Horace Farlowe: Born, Robbins, N. C., 1938. Studied, North Carolina
State College, 1957-1960, with George Bireline, Joe Cox, and Roy Gussow;
Atlantic Christian College, 1960-1962, with Russell Arnold, B.S.; East
Carolina College, 1963-1964, M.A. N. C. Museum of Art, 1963 Purchase
Award. Recent one-man show, Garden Gallery, Raleigh.

15

16

Horace Farlowe’s studio at Raleigh is only a knight’s move from the
North Carolina Museum of Art (looking out the doorway, Knight to
King Bishop three).

Loitering around the King Bishop three square, around the eminently
rectangular factory building on it, of brick, with the tall, arched windows
which date it before the turn of the century, one notices that the general
tone of the place — second hand washing machines in the adjacent lot,
boarded up cellar windows —is something seen before associated with
young artists. One has made an appointment with Horace, of course, and
presently he arrives and unlocks a side door labeled 20014. Turn right, up
old gray stairs lit at the top by window light diagonally suspended in
dust; turn left at the top and look down a long high corridor into a rich
dark, occasionally relieved by various warm reflections of daylight. Follow
Horace down the corridor; half-way, he unlocks his studio door; turn left
into a large whitewashed room and southern light, admitted under a
twenty foot ceiling by four of the tall, arched windows. From the ceiling
hangs a piece of living room sculpture which Horacessays he made when
he once ran out of paint. On the wall adjacent to the light is an eight foot
square wall easel. Then the paintings.

— —

17
19

eee

Life is an experience of man in search of himself. And the life of the
artist should not be of only giving through his creations but should really
be one of receiving or better understanding himself through the act of
creating. For art is not a profession that can be put aside with the blowing
of the 3 o’clock whistle, but it is a way of living centered around truth, or
rather, truth to one’s self. And so if the artist is to compromise, let it
be on matters extraneous to art; for to compromise in art is to lie with
the hope that you will not find yourself out.

—HORACE FARLOWE

THREE O°CLOCK

by

ALBERT PERTALION

“In the dimly lit regions of the soul,
it’s always three o’clock in the morning.”

I think Fitzgerald said that. I don’t know for
sure; or if he did say it that those are his exact
words. I do know that I like three o’clocks in the
morning, and I miss them sorely since moving to
Baton Rouge. You see, some towns have no three
A.M.’s; that is, no place, assuming you have the
right attitude yourself, where you can count on
finding the sometimes sad, oftimes talkly and
drowzily numb aura that is three o’clock before
daybreak. Baton Rouge is such a town. Oh, there
are cafes and eateries that stay open all night, and
even two Krispy-Kreme doughnut stands, but
these places never approach the feeling. Not the
feeling I’m thinking of now. Not the one I
associate with Foster McTaggart.

For all I know, the real three o’clock in the
morning might not stay at any place permanently.
Maybe it slips into an unsuspecting beanery like
Sandburg’s cat-footed fog, and just as quietly slips
away. I don’t know. I just know I like it, or its
offsprings: good talk, stories that would die if ex-
posed to ultra-violet rays, the sad hillbilly juke-
box music that the just-jilted waitresses always
play, and a drippy compassionate feeling for man-
kind that you can sometimes acquire. But espe-
cially the stories.

Before I came to Baton Rouge and the Univer-
sity, I lived in Hammond, and took classes at the
small college located there. Hammond is a little
town situated somewhere below the instep in the
boot that is Louisiana; and, in a better time than
when I’m writing, was known as the strawberry
capital of the world. During the picking and ship-
ping season (beginning late in March and lasting
through mid-May), hundreds of big company ber-
ry buyers with their straw hats and long Havanna
cigars would step off the Illinois Central’s crack
Panama Limited and move into Hammond’s Casa
de Fresa Hotel.

When buying strawberries didn’t keep these
fun-loving, money-spending men up half the
night, the local poker games did; and the need
arose for a place to drink coffee, eat breakfast,
sober up, and exchange lies about the day’s bid-
ding—for strawberries, cards, and the robust,

comfortably phlegmatic daughters of the Italian
berry farmers. The Casa de Fresa didn’t have a
restaurant then, so the Hammond Cafe, one of
those cavernous old restaurants that populate
small southern towns, started the practice of stay-
ing open all night during the berry season.

The berry season was a grand time of the year.
The bunting-hanging, queen-picking, street-parad-
ing season. For the Casa de Fresa—the house of
berries—Hotel, and the Hammond Cafe, and every
other commercial establishment in town, March,
April, and May were as much a banner season to
Hammond as the winter months are to the hostel-
eries and restaurants of Miami Beach. In those
good times, there were probably no dimly lit three
o’clock regions in Hammond, but the potential was
present.

Then the depression and the thirties came to
Hammond as surely as they came to the rest of the
country ; few people in Podunk, Kansas, could af-
ford strawberry ice cream, and molasses was
cheaper for biscuits than strawberry preserves.
The farmers formed syndicates and co-operatives
and the big companies ordered—if at all—berries
by wire. And if a yellow telegram was less color-
ful than a bandana-bearing, brow-wiping berry
buyer, it was also less expensive, and cutting costs
was an essence of the thirties. Sometimes the
buyers would come to Hammond anyway, but
when they stepped off the tracks they had hitch-
hiked in on, they found that WPA checks didn’t
cut as wide a swath as big-company expense ac-
counts. The House of Berries didn’t realize any
business from these infrequent visitations, but the
Hammond Cafe saw them all. The middle-of-the-
night eggs with steak breakfasts of the past gave
way to half cups of coffee, ordered with grimy-
shirted sophistication and accompanied by the
blase confession that the drinker had just lost a
thousand dollars in a poker game that had lasted
for two days. Thus was the foundation laid for an
edifice that could almost be depended on to exude—
for at least three months of the year—the atmos-
phere that, wanting the proper eloquence, I call
the three o’clock in the morning feeling.

The Hammond Cafe that I haunted in 1958
wasn’t the one that knew the elation of the twen-
ties and the depression of the thirties; it was
never even partially full during the late hours
when the cafe stayed open all night. The manage-
ment must have lost money in March, April, and
May; but tradition dies slowly in Hammond, and
the place still remained open all night during the
picking season as if expecting a hoard of long lost
berry buyers to walk in any minute. The big
empty cafe made a good place to study, and I used
to sit in back at a table from about two till five
A.M., when I’d go back to the dorm to shower for
breakfast and classes. I usually slept in the after-
noon. If I didn’t feel like studying, there was
usually one or two truck drivers who were good
for stories, or some students would come into the
cafe and start a conversation. There must have
been some congenital malignancy handed down
from the lies and stories of the old berry buyers,
because the talks that that lonesome hour and old
restaurant spawned seemed (like all malignan-
cies) more interesting than ordinary conversat-
ions at the college coffee shop.

One night I was just sitting—trying to get into
some Latin I had to translate—and listening to
the juke box, when Foster McTaggart came in.
Foster was something of a hypersensitive misfit
from my home town. Well, not exactly a misfit,
but he was usually bothered by any particular
status quo. We had been friends for years; not
really close friends, but we could always sit down
and talk to each other. I hadn’t seen too much of
Foster since the Christmas holidays when we had
gone duck hunting together. The trip had be-
come involved, and wasn’t too successful.

Before the hunt, I had to take Foster over to
the local skeet club so I could explain the twelve-
guage pump that I was lending him. He knew
nothing about shotguns, although he had been in
the service for three years. To my embarrass-
ment and the delight of the other club members,
he did most of the things that I told him were
wrong and still managed to beat my score the last
three sets we fired. Maybe he was something of a
natural shot if he hadn’t picked it up in the Ma-
rine Corps; who knows. I knew matters would be
different with live ducks. They were.

Our first morning out—after what seemed like
the longest and gaudiest Louisiana sunrise I’ve
ever had to sit through in a duck blind—we didn’t
see a single duck; we didn’t see a feather. I
couldn’t have been more disappointed; Foster
couldn’t have been more elated. He said he hadn’t
any idea that sunup in the marshes could be so
beautiful. I hadn’t any such idea either, and still
don’t. We moved the blind the second day, and
things started looking up. A pair of baldpates
passed over the decoys, circled, set their wings,
and glided in to a spot about thirty feet in front
of us. I modestly noted that the blind was in
perfect position. Foster was mesmerized. He
had that sunup watching look in his eyes. I
snapped my fingers to spook the birds up and
knocked down the hen when she was about ten
feet off the water.

22

“Why didn’t you get the drake, Foster? It was
an easy shot.”

Foster didn’t say anything. He was watching
the male baldpate. The startled duck had flown
in a long circle and was about to come back—for
the hen I suppose. A mallard would have flown
straight away, but this pattern was not unusual
for baldpates. I knew the drake would never land
again, and when he made a low pass over the de-
coys and his mate floating belly up in the water,
I cut him down with the remaining barrel of my
over and under. The one-ounce load of shot my
twenty-gauge carried was too light to kill the
bird at that distance, and after he fell, he started
swimming away through the marsh.

“Dammit, Foster, I’m empty; will you kill that
duck?”

He just looked at me. For a brief second, I do
believe Foster considered shooting me instead of
the duck.

“You can’t just let him suffer.” Somehow this
statement didn’t seem appropriate, but I knew it
would get some action. “At least put him out of
his misery.”

Foster finally brought the gun to his shoulder
and fired. The shot knocked the swimming duck
over, but he righted himself and kept swimming.
One of his wings was broken and it caused him to
move in a circle, but he fought desperately to
widen the arc and still escape. Foster had to
pump the mechanism of the shotgun twice and
fire three times before the duck lay still. By the
third shot, Foster was crying like a baby.

He handed me the pump and crawled out of the
blind to where the pirogue was hidden. He left
me in the middle of the marsh with my two dead
trophies.

One of the men we shared our camp with had
to paddle out to get me.

“That other fellow left for town. He told me
you were out here without a boat,” the man said.
“Say, what are you doing with two shotguns?”

Actually, I suppose I hadn’t seen Foster at all
since the duck hunt, so I was glad to see him come
into the cafe. Foster looked as if he hadn’t slept
in days and when he sat down at the table, he
smelled like he had been drinking cheap wine for
just about as long.

“What’s happening, Foster?”

He didn’t say anything; he just leaned back in
his chair and shut his eyes. When I was sure he
had gone to sleep, he sat up and whistled for the
waitress to bring him some coffee. He looked at
me and began laughing in the kind of laugh that
seems to propagate itself in weariness. Foster
kept giggling in that numb, limp way until I
thought he was hysterical. He laid his head down
on his hands, and finally running down he said
with mock gravity: “Don’t you think that in this
day and age of modern, scientific technology, ar-
chitects could design shit-house walls so people
couldn’t write on them?”

It was usually impossible to guess what was on
Foster’s mind, but I was almost certain that—
although they irritated him—the bathroom scrib-
blers were not what was worrying Foster.

”

“You know the brand new library?”

“Yes,’

“Well, the commode stall walls are a nice neu-
tral grey, just like a gesso ground for an oil paint-
ing, and the poets just can’t resist writing on
them. It seems to me the designers could have
thought of something. The building cost over a

million dollars.” He was talking about the new
library the college had just dedicated, and al-
though it was the latest thing in libraries, Foster
wasn’t satisfied with the bathrooms.

“Tf I could only change my habit of going out
in the middle of the day, I could use the bathroom
back at the dorm. I wonder what I could do about
ON ee

The question was rhetorical; he didn’t wait for
my answer.

“Thursday I was in the one on the bottom floor
before I went to linguistics class, and d’you know
what was staring me right in the eye?”

“What Foster ?”

He fished a note out of a pocket and passed it
over for me to read. The scrawling said: “Civil-
ization is a blessing to the unfit and the degenerate
—others it breaks and demoralizes.”

“Doesn’t that just kill your ass?” Foster said.
“T wonder if the bastard who wrote it realized he
was capable of such irony?”

“Maybe he copied it from Bartlett.”

“Probably, but can’t you just picture the poor,
demoralized bastard putting up his message to the
world right under the toilet paper?”

Foster started his limp, fanatical laughing again
and I was sure that he wasn’t so upset just over
the philosopher.

“What’s really bugging you, Foster?”

“What’s bugging me? What’s bugging me?
Why, man, civilization. I’m broken and demoral-
ized. Can’t you see?” He kept laughing.

I just sat and looked at him. After awhile, his
gurgling trailed off and he sat there with his head
down. Eventually, Foster would tell me what was
bothering him, but I would have to wait.

“Al,” Foster started off hesitantly. “I can’t go
back to my room.”

“What d’you mean, didn’t you pay the rent?”

“Yes, yes.” The two affirmations slipped out
as patient sighs to my corny question. “I paid the
rent—it’s my roommate. I can’t... I’m not going
back to the room while that bastard is living
there. I’m not going to stay in the same room
with him.”

Foster’s roommate was a graduating senior who
was studying business, Willie Maynor. About all
I knew about Willie was that he drove Foster
crazy. Foster was constantly arguing with Willie
about his attitude toward people and business.
Foster was sure that his roommate was a born
charlatan and would become rich and write a
book about his life.

“Can’t you just see some scout master using
Willie as an example of what ‘good hard work’ and
starting at the top will get you?” Foster said af-
ter one of their harangues. Foster claimed that
Willie knew—or cared—nothing about ethics and
he was afraid his roommate was a true represen-

28

tation of the business man.

Such naivete from anyone else but Foster, I
would have sloughed off as being phoney, but not
Foster. He could brood for days, missing classes
and doing little more than just moping around
town wondering about people and what they some-
times did to each other. He was fascinated with
Arthur Miller’s Willie Loman. Foster couldn’t
have identified himself with Willie, but he thought
they were both guilty of the same thing—‘ringing
up zero.’ When Foster doodles on his notebook,
the scratchings usually took the form of some
synonym of zero. I used to kid him about his
negative attitude; one time I checked Norman
Vincent Peale’s book out of the library and left
it on his bed. I thought it was funny, but Foster
only reacted seriously to the content and asked me
if I really thought Peale believed that stuff.

“I hope he does since he wrote it,” Foster had
said. “Sometimes I wish I could.”

“Well anyway, Willie’s grandmother died about
four days ago. He came back yesterday—that is,
day before yesterday; I keep thinking it’s still
yesterday, but it’s a little after three isn’t it? Any-
way, he told me about his grandmother dying. You
know about Willie and his new job don’t you?”

“What about it?” I leaned back and gave the
coffee sign to the waitress. Foster’s conversation
would never win any prize for continuity, but he
gave you all the details, no matter how disjointed-
ly.
yeWell—you know Willie—look ahead, be pre-
pared, get there first and all. He started talking to
some pharmaceutical company at the beginning of
the spring semester about a job when he gradu-
ates. Well, they hired him over a month ago, but
he doesn’t start working until after graduation.
They pay him about half salary, and all he does is
study up on the drugs he’s going to be selling. He
calls it ‘detailing to physicians,’ but it’s selling. I
don’t see why you don’t know all this; Willie’s
been bragging his ass off.”

Actually, I heard of Willie’s new job from one
of his friends, but I was sure Foster’s version
would be more interesting.

“So Willie’s grandmother had all sons, four of
them, and...”

The story was circuitous even for Foster.

“|. He’s always bragging about how his grand-
father only took time off from his business long
enough to get sons with his wife. Can you imag-
ine anyone but Willie bragging about such a
thing? She not only had sons, but leaders in the
business world. Leaders. And they all—at least
three of them, one didn’t get married—had sons.
When Willie’s grandfather died about three years
ago, all his benevolent boys managed the business
for their mother. They bought her a little house in
the suburbs and hired the best nurses to stay on
the place. She wasn’t even sick; that shows how
generous they were; they wanted the very best for
their mother. I asked Willie why they didn’t just
let her live with them, and he said, ‘Aw, she’d
rather have a place of her own and be independ-
ent.’ Independent, hell, they gave her a spending
allowance every month, because ‘she was senile

and would just give money to anyone who asked
for it, not even checking to see if it was a recog-
nized charity for income tax deductions, if she
had control of Grandfather’s estate.’

“About two months ago, they all found out that
Grandmother Maynor had an incurable disease. I
don’t know what, but she must have had it for
some time before the nurses took her to the hos-
pital, because after she went in, she didn’t last
very long. Those premium nurses they rented
must not have paid much attention to her. Then
they all got really concerned because the doctor
told them that ‘Mrs. Maynor might would live a
little longer, but she was in such a state of mental
depression that it would surely have the effect of
speeding up her death.’

“You know what I think, Al? She wanted to
die unhappy. The men who surrounded her had
never let her do anything she wanted to, and I
think she at least wanted to die registering her
feelings about her life. Unhappy, that’s what her
life was. Even if they were her own flesh and
blood, I think the idea that her body had been the
matrix for such a tribe of pharisees was too much
for her, and dying in a depressed state of mind
was her only way of expressing herself.

“But you know they wouldn’t even give her the
right to die the way she wanted to. Can you be-
lieve that? They wouldn’t let her die that way.”

While he was telling the story, Foster’s normal-
ly pleasant voice had lost its quiet resonance and
had turned flat and hollow sounding with the vol-
ume level rising in a slow crescendo. I was about
to quieten him a little when he paused in his speak-
ing and just stared down into his cold coffee.
When he continued talking, his voice was soft and
deliberate, starting the bolero from the beginning
again.

“But my roommate fixed his grandmother. He
had been studying about a new drug that his com-
pany was introducing. It seems that certain types
of gloom induce physical conditions in the brain.
Some cavities fill up with fluid or something. This
perpetuates the feeling of depression. So this
pharmaceutical company developed this drug that
physically drains these cavities. No matter what

the patient is thinking about or wants to think
about, the goddam drug drains the cavity and
their gloom disappears. Willie told Mrs. Maynor’s
doctor about it and since it ‘could do her no harm,’
he agreed to giving her the drug. That was about
three weeks ago. When Willie came back from the
funeral, he told me the story and, in that sancti-
monius canting that he can fall into, said that ‘he
would always be proud that he had helped his
grandmother die happy.’ Can you believe that?
Can you believe it? Poor little shriveled-up wo-
man. Pushed around all her life by those bastards
and then stripped of her dignity in death. You’d
think a person could at least die like he wants to.
Oh, no, Grandmother! You have to make your
exit from this farce with a shit-eating grin on
your face.”

Foster was almost screaming by this time; I got
up and pulled him out of the cafe with me and into
an empty street that echoed his shouts.

“Tm not going back to the dorm, Al. I’m not
staying in the same room with him. I’m not.”

“O.K., Foster, you don’t have to.”

Foster had a sort of fragile sensitivity ; I won-
dered if it would ever let him be happy. No sleep
and telling the story he had walked around with
for two days had left him limp. He was exhausted.
I leaned him against the facade of the cafe and
said: “Wait here just a second.” I ran back in-
side to pay for the coffee.

“You could have waited and paid tomorrow
night,” the painted cashier said.

I started to ask her how’d she know I’d be back
tomorrow, but I just picked up my change and
started out to Foster. We were in the middle of
April, with a month and a half of three A.M.’s left
before the cafe started closing at night again. I
knew, and the cashier knew, that I would be back.

Foster was where I had left him, and we walked
slowly down the oak-arched street that led to the
college, passing on our way a large barn-red build-
ing that loomed darkly above the branches. A
bright neon light on the roof blinked out its story
for all the sleeping world of Hammond to see—
first in green: The Casa de Fresa Hotel; and then
in red: House of Berries.

REVIEWS

Visions and Revisions
by
B. TOLSON WILLIS

Julian. Gore Vidal. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company,
$6.95.

Julian Augustus, Julian the Apostate, A.D. 361:
last of the Flavians, last successful Caesar of Gaul,
last of the Hellenistic emperors of Rome.

Julian, the man: his struggles with the enter-
prising and highly organized Christian church;
the intrigues of the court eunuchs coupled with
the bloody suspicions of his immediate predeces-
sor, Constantius; the rebellious Germanic tribes
and the proud Persians on the borders of a Rome
lacking the polar magnetism of a leader or world
view.

His mission: a return to the old gods, the over-
seers of high Greece and Rome.

The catalyst: a watered down version of Plato’s
philosopher-king.

His answer: a leader of military brilliance who
read and expounded the old way.

The unfolding of the life of this man and his
times is the chosen task of Gore Vidal in his first
novel in ten years, Julian. Vidal presents a man
of staid conviction in an age of frustration and
change. The novel develops out of the interaction
of these two forces; and in a consideration of the
overview of this situation, one is struck favorably
by the author’s ability to capture the spirit of the
age embodied in the innerly tormented and out-
wardly attacked man of the 4th century (follow-
ing the Nazerine) whose world and actions give a
clear indication of some of the causal factors re-
sulting in the centuries of other-worldliness which
were to come. The generalized mortal fear of the
uncertainties of this temporal world fill the pages
of Julian. The sense of decay is to be felt every-
where. This insecure world needs some answers,
fast; Julian and his Christian bishops offer two
possible ones. The dramatization of these pos-
sible choices is where Vidal does his finest work.

The novelist presents these primal forces
through character as well as recreated circum-
stances. No doubt, Julian does see himself resur-
recting the Ozymandiased remains of Alexander
the Great as a blueprint for recapturing past
greatness. But all about him, his Christianized
generals and advisors conspire against their em-
peror whom they consider a scatter-brained an-
tique. His military successes they cannot ques-
tion; but the motive behind them, a re-establish-

25

ment of the old Hellenistic borders, and his
extensive plans for further campaigns, in spite of
short supply and popular unrest, seem to them am-
ple reason for revolt.

That Julian was, in truth, a Manfred-on-the-
mountain is further pointed out through the ac-
tions and attitudes of his two squeamish teachers,
Libanius and Priscus, who wring their hands on
the outskirts of conflict and just hope that their il-
lustrious names will not be soiled by implication
in one of Julian’s overzealous schemes; otherwise,
they are content with their own sense of reputa-
tion and a few worldly comforts.

The 4th century struggle between figures and
social forces throughout the Empire may be ap-
proximated in terms a little more immediate than
the implications of Julian’s allegiance to a pagan
past against an ardently Christian present. To
simplify, it is as if one were able to peep into a
contemporary university hangout and eavesdrop
on two select tables. At one, a group of students
consume beer furnished by a long-winded vision-
ary at the head, who insists that much of this new
physics offers more problems than satisfactory
answers to the already existing ones hampering
our quest for the stars; and that we would do bet-
ter just to modify and perfect what Von this or
that had done in the forties when we took over
where the Germans left off. But those enjoying
the free beer insist, through the suds, that on the
contrary, anyone up-to-date and fully oriented
should be able to realize that the post-Einsteinian
way is already too well established as the only way
to get to the moon, and beyond, in our time.

Meanwhile at the second table, the two old uni-
versity professors, both on edge from listening
to the echoes of sophomore lectures, deliberate as
to whether they should, or should not, have an-
other cup of Expresso, particularly since both
have experienced some insomnia as of late. But
they decide, after much discussion, to have an-
other round. They are confident that a review of
tomorrow’s lectures on the existence of God and
Truth, respectively, will provide more than ade-
quate somnolence to counteract any excess of caf-
feine they may choose to imbibe.

And to round out the presentation of our cap-
tain of the board, we must carry him from the
table and his beer drinking friends, forward with
his ideas, from the Harvard Club to the White
House. Such were Julian and his associates.

Unfortunately, Gore Vidal chose to use one of
the oldest and most cumbersome machines in the
history of prose fiction as a means of revealing
his Julian; the diary—letter exposition. He allows
us to see the characters and incidents of Julian’s
life and times almost exclusively through re-
capitulations found by his two old teachers in the
Memoirs of the dead emperor. I say exclusively,
for the only other indicators are the marginal
notes and casual correspondence of Priscus and
Libanius who tell us nothing of consequence. The
twosome, however, do provide some comic relief
from Julian’s harangue, occasionally interchang-
ing news about the one’s amazing virility beyond
his years as opposed to the other’s complaints ot
the necessity of reducing his intake of culinary
delights because of his unaesthetic predisposition
to gout.

But the dramatically conceived and immediate-
ly envisioned lives unfolded in such narratives
as I, Claudius and Claudius, the God by Robert
Graves are sadly absent here. The characters and
incidents in Gore Vidal’s Julian seem to be desper-
ately trying to break through the wall of time
that separates them from Julian-of-the-Memoirs’
ability to recreate. The effect of this rendering
upon the reader is a damaging one.

For example, the parting assurances of Rich-
ardson’s Pamela of her being ‘still virtuous’ kept
the reader alive in the early novel; here unfortun-
ately, they find no counterpart. We have been as-
sured far too many times of the emperor’s pristine

mold to count on a juicy reversal at some pain-
fully late date. Julian’s death at the hands of his
discontented army, however, does add symmetry
to his old teacher’s concluding remarks, for’ then
Julian too has become history.

The variety and swiftness of change, as well as
diversity of character, available to the novelist
who wishes to explore such an age as the 4th cen-
tury A.D. in themselves stimulate the reader. But
Mr. Vidal has not been able to provide the essen-
tial ingredient—immediacy ; immediacy that spurs
on recounted man and years, and in the process,
irrevocably thrusts the reader into the thick of
things. In retrospect, the author’s statment in
his prefatory remarks “The Emperor Julian’s
life is remarkably well documented” makes for
a rather drab irony.

ALWAYS NEVER—EVER

by
PAT SCOTT

Always wailing nightingales chanting alleluias of

yesterday’s messiahs

in never-ever enchantment of a beckoned sigh.

Endless tides rise skyless and splash against the

moon

yet beyond the sand, the tides tease endlessly

Motionless in a dirge of devotion cast aside

with spoiled fruit in a garden of idol gods

Infinitely patient as a spider meandering across

his woven rainbow

The doll is caught freely in the steaming Inferno

thrown into a hallowed holocast

Carelessly the slave drives waves of uninformed
ragdolls

always accepting the being of one as of the other,

never rising always contented as vultures to

pick the flesh of the unforgiven

Sanctus, Sanctus, Dominus, the unforgiven rise in the

beckoned sighs

Sanctus, Sanctus, Dominus, never-ever as the
sand replies

Virgins rejoice at the judgment of a savior.

26

The Story of Michelangelo’s Pieta

The Story of Michelangelo’s Pieta. By Irving Stone. Garden
City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1964. 60 pp.

The Pieta, which means in English the Pity or
the Sorrow, is regarded by many as Michelange-
lo’s masterpiece in sculpture. Since having been
brought from Rome to be displayed in the Vati-
can Pavilion of the New York World’s Fair last
summer, it is of special interest to Americans.
This representation in white Carrara marble of
the crucified Christ resting in the right arm
and on the draped knees of the sorrowing Mother
Mary is beautifully pictured against a_ black
background on both the front and back hardboard
covers of the present edition of Irving’s Stone’s
The Story of Michelangelo’s Pieta.

Those wishing a full account of Michelangelo’s
life should refer to Stone’s biographical novel The
Agony and the Ecstasy, for though the present
volume tells about all that is known regarding
the creation of the Pieta, it tells only enough
more to provide sufficient context for compre-
hension; it focuses rather sharply on its subject.

The brief prologue observes that Columbus was
discovering America while Michelangelo was do-
ing his earliest carving leading up to his sculpture
of the Piet& in 1498-1499. Then a biographical
sketch fills in the artist’s early life, training, and
sculpture until he was commissioned by Jacopo
Galli, a Roman banker, to carve a Bacchus.
Among Galli’s friends was the French Cardinal
Groslaye, a Benedictine, who visited Michelange-
lo’s workroom to see the unfinished Bacchus and
was moved to say, “I can feel the blood and muscle
under your marble skin.” So impressed was
the Cardinal that he commissioned Michelangelo
to carve a lifesized sculpture for a niche in the
Chapel of the Kings of France in St. Peter’s.
Thus Michelangelo turned from the profane to
the sacred and the result was the Pieta.

But not until after the sculptor and his teen-
age apprentice Argiento had experienced priva-
tions and sacrifices comparable to those experi-
enced by M. and Mme. Curie in turning tons of
pitchblende to find a bit of radium, was the
Piet&é completed. Indeed, the human-interest as-
pects of the struggle through cold, hunger, and
disease in a leaking and crumbling studio to pro-
duce the immortal Piet&é must engross any read-
er; the reciprocal loyalty between Michelangelo
and Argiento is as impressive as the Pieta itself.

Meanwhile Cardinal Groslaye died, and the
Pieta had to be smuggled into its intended niche
in St. Peter’s; Michelangelo could not call at-
tention to his own work. He could not forever
bear, however, standing by as a spectator hear-
ing the Pieta attributed to rival sculptors; so

_ one night by candlelight he carved upon his work

‘Michelangelo Buonarroti of Florence made this.”

27

An epilogue traces the history of the Pieta
through several moves to its present location.
One could hardly expect a sixty-page book so
full of struggle and human concern as this is
and centered around a subject so important to
religion and art as the Pieta to be boring, and

it is not.
—VERNON WARD

The Lost City

The Lost City. By John Gunther. New York: Harper and
Row, Publishers, 1964. pp. x-594. $5.95.

For the reader who has become familiar with
Gunther’s “inside” books (Inside U. S. A., Inside
Africa, Inside Asia, etc.), The Lost City provides
an “inside” look at the journalistic world of old
Vienna during the years immediately prior to the
rise of Hitler. The book is a novel and, conse-
quently, contains much fiction; however, the at-
mosphere and flavor of Vienna during the early
1930’s is real—at times, almost too real.

The novel is centered upon the lives of Mason
Jarrett, chief correspondent in Vienna for a Chi-
cago newspaper, and his wife Paula. The plot
enmeshes both, but principally Mason, in the
economic decay of Austria and in the conditions
that made possible the formation and success of
the Nazis. The chief conflict is the complete fall
of the A. G. O. (Allgemeine Osterreichische Ge-
sellschaft), the chief bank of Austria, and Mason
Jarrett’s own involvement with the A. G. O. In
a most credible manner it is shown that Mason
was partly responsible for the fall of this bank.
Mason, also Paula sometimes, keeps fast company
with journalistic colleagues and their friends,
both male and female, and the details (often sor-
did) of the personal lives of friends of the Jar-
retts are interwoven skillfully with events in
the lives of Mason and Paula and history.

Parallel to the insecureness of the time is the
sense of non-permanence in the marriage of
Mason and Paula. Mason’s intense love affair
with the Austrian artist Erika makes clear his
feelings of incompleteness and non-fulfillment;
Paula’s temporary sterility, complete practicality,
and her all-pervading love for her husband add
to his problem. Mason becomes involved with
other women, even after Paula has presented him
with a son. She, out of loneliness, has affairs of
her own. Life to both, however, proves kind, and
there evolves eventually a closeness between the
two which is complete.

Gunther writes in a racy, journalistic style.
The book reads fast because the life and events
depicted move quickly. He has _ successfully
brought to life his fictitious hero and heroine;
their problems are extricably human and uni-
versal. Suspense and interest are maintained,
and the conclusion comes naturally. It will be
worth your time to take a look inside old Vienna,
“The Lost City.”

—JOHN D. EBBS
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|
Hi
il

The Modern Short Story
in the Making

The Modern Short Story in the Making. By Whit and Hallie
Burnett (eds.). New York: Hawthorn Books, Inc. 1964.
405 pages. $6.95.

The Modern Short Story in the Making is a
collection of previously printed short stories
edited by Whit and Hallie Burnett, editors of
Story magazine, whatever that is. For the most
part, the stories are early works of people who
have become some of our leading contemporary
writers. Like many anthologists, the Burnetts
could not resist putting some of their own work
in the book. More on that later. Most of the
stories, fortunately, are ones which are seldom
seen in anthologies; that is one of the best points
of the book.

The book is divided into seven parts, each with
an introduction of its own. We needn’t go into
that because it is a customary thing to do and, in
this case particularly, is important for only tak-
ing up space. Following each of the stories is
a short biography of the author, and, if possible,
an interview of about ten questions which, for
the most part, also do nothing more than take
up space. One of the questions is: “What are
the qualities necessary for a good short-story
writer?” The writers tried to answer that as
best as possible without outright mentioning
talent. Erskine Caldwell, for example, answered:
“An extraordinary familiarity with words and
their usage.”’ Which is a big help to all of us.

Leading the book is Norman Mailer’s “The
Greatest Thing in the World,” an undergraduate
attempt at writing while still at Harvard. That
is fortunate because you don’t have to read Ad-
vertisements for Myself to understand the thing
It is not a very good story and Mailer is honest
enough to admit it and even compares his work
at eighteen to the work of Truman Capote at
the same age, which is much better. This upset
the editors who “consider Mailer unduly harsh
in retrospective judgment. He permitted his
story’s inclusion in this workshop book with the
provision it be noted that it was written when he
was eighteen and that as a short story writer
he has done relatively few since ....” I really
can’t blame Mailer for wanting to make that
clear because his first published work should not
be interpreted by anyone to have been written
about the same time as his better works. Per-
haps he realized that William Styron would
probably make fun of the story, so he wanted
to set the record straight in print.

“Clothes Make the Man” by Jesse Stuart is
the second story. It is about a lumberjack who
géts tired of the quiet life and decides to cause
an uproar. He takes off his clothes and stands
on the side of a mountain next to the road and
yells like a wild man. The results are hilarious.
Unless standards are changed, this story will
never be considered any great literary piece,
_ it is very funny, and that is what Stuart was
after.

James T. Farrell has a very tightly construct-
ed little story called “A Casual Incident.” Like
many writers, Farrell chooses not to use quo-
tation marks to indicate dialogue. The editors
were kind enough to give the reader a footnote
explaining that in this story and in another.
Thank you, Mr. and Mrs. Burnett. The story
is a conversation between a young man and an
older man who is homosexual. They met near a
religious meeting and the homosexual is trying
to talk the young man into visiting his apart-
ment. The conversation, of course, is very awk-
ward, but it reads very well and does a good job
of illustrating the characters. This story shows
more of the making of a good writer than any
of the introductions or interviews in the book
because it shows the training a writer must go
through.

Mary O’Hara’s contribution is her famous
short story “My Friend Flicka,” which has been
made into a novel and a movie, and in the process
made a fortune for the author. When it was
first published as a short story, it brought $25.
In a way, it is sort of a typical story about a boy
who fights to get a horse and then has to fight
keep it, but it is more than that. The talent lies
in how she can get into the actual feelings of a
child. That is the magic, something that most
authors shouldn’t even try.

Whit Burnett’s “Sherrel’”’ is an unusual little
story which shows a lot of promise, but that is
all. The story is told by a boy, eighteen, who
believes that he is responsible for his younger
brother’s death nine years ago. His brother, who
was five, died of scarlet fever. He insists that he
killed his brother “not by giving him sickness,
but by meanness.” This could have been an
excellent story had Burnett pursued it a bit
further. Had he taken more time, and gone into
the mind of the older boy to a greater extent, it
could have made a very good novella. What there
is of the story is marred by the inclusion of a
very long, paragraph by paragraph, analysis by
Edward J. O’Brien. Naturally, it is quite a fa-
vourable analysis, if you like that sort of thing.
An editor should never include his own creative
work. If for no other reasons, just out of some
sort of ethical standards. That goes for Oscar
Williams and Louis Untermeyer.

Erskine Caldwell’s “The Windfall” is a funny
story about a woman and her husband who in-
herits some money. The husband refuses to let
his wife so much as touch the money. That night
she tries to sneak over to where he has hung
his pants and get a look at the money. He sees
her just as she reaches for the pants. She lies
there all night and just as. morning comes she
crawls over to the chair where the pants are
draped. He catches her again. It goes on and on

like that until the husband decides that he isn’t

wise enough to handle that much money and
turns it over to his wife. She, in turn, gives it
to the maid so she can get married. I don’t think
that makes much of a point, but it is very amus-
ing.

“Rest Cure” by Kay Boyle is the story of an

old author who is visited by a young publisher.
The old man is an invalid and knows he is about
to die. The young publisher is very patronizing
and very careful to say that he is sure the old
man will still turn out a lot of material and he
hopes that he can publish all of it. The old man,
based on D. H. Lawrence, tries to put the pub-
lisher out of his mind by examining a lobster.
The black eyes of the lobster remind him of the
eyes of his coal-miner father and dew-like sub-
stance on the lobster’s lip reminds him of his
father’s mustache after drinking beer. It is a
rather weird account of an old man’s mind and
its play with the past and the morbid certainty
of the future.

Modern literature deals a lot with society’s
persecution of the individual and how one should
strive to keep his identity even if he is in the
minority. “Seventy Thousand Assyrians” by Wil-
liam Saroyan is about a proud Armenian and an
Assyrian who wants to “get over it’? because the
greatness of his people is washed up. This is an
experimental short story which is as much essay
as it is fiction. Saroyan explains that a man
should not be so bitter about the course of history
but try to make the best of his heritage. The
Assyrian who spiritually destroys himself is as
guilty of the downfall of his people as the Arabs
who massacre them.

George Sumner Albee’s “The Top” is one of
those symbolic things which is supposed to
summarize all America in one sweep, but doesn’t
do a very good job of it. The main character,
Jonathan Gerber, works for an organization
which is housed in a building shaped like a pyra-
mid. If you haven’t figured that out, it stands for
the Great Seal of the United States. Clever.
Gerber works on the eighth floor and the object
is to get to the top, the American ideal, so to
speak. After working there for over twenty years,
Gerber is promoted and given an elevator pass
which will allow him entrance to floors above his
own. When he goes up to the top floor, the 15th,
which must be reached by stairs from the 14th,
he finds nothing but rubble. There we have the
top of the ladder as seen by someone who never
made it. If Ray Bradbury had thought of this
story first he probably would have been able to
do something with it.

Another story which was expanded into a
movie is Kressmann Taylor’s “Address Un-
known.” Normally, when an author uses a let-
ter in a story, it is just a cheap trick to explain
something he hasn’t got the talent to portray.
Miss Taylor’s story is an unusual thing which
is composed of nothing but letters and does not
fall into the category of cheap trick. She presents
the letters as being written in the early 1930’s
between two native Germans, one living in Ger-
many and the other, a Jew, living in the United
States. We are shown how a man during the
rise of Hitler slowly turns against his once close
Jewish friend and learns to hate him. Another
story about the persecution of the minority, but
done in a very unique and forceful way. The Jew
continues to write the man in Germany despite

29

their differences and the fact that he has been
asked not to write because government suspicion
has been aroused concerning their correspond-
ence. The last letter from the Jew is returned
“Addressat Unbekannt,” address unknown. It’s
an odd twist and leaves you with a rather funny
feeling.

The longest, and, in my opinion, the best story
in the anthology is Katherine Ann Porter’s “Noon
Wine.” Miss Porter has an annoying tendency
to turn out flawless stories. She does it slowly, but
they are perfect, and it is somehow disgusting
to see someone do it right all the time. Every-
thing she does is put together just the way it
should be, never too much or too little of anything.
There are so few good women writers around
these days, Miss Porter probably feels she has
to do what she can to make up for the others.
In “Noon Wine,” Olaf Helton, a Swede, gets a
job on Royal Earle Thompson’s farm. The farm
had never been real productive, and was some-
what run down, but through Helton’s hard work
it is turned into a rather productive place. Hel-
ton seldom ever speaks, he just works quietly and
lives by himself in a shack behind the house. He
doesn’t drink, and seldom goes into town. After
he has been there for nine years, a man named
Homer T. Hatch comes by the farm to tell Thomp-
son that Helton is crazy. He says that Helton
killed a man, was declared insane, and later es-
caped from the asylum. This is the force in
Miss Porter’s work. A man practically works
himself to death to redeem himself and is de-
stroyed by a force which should have been buried
by the act of his redemption.

There are many other stories in the book,
twenty-two of them in all, most of them good,
but the explanatory material is not, which shows
how a person can botch up a good thing. When
they are put together along with the notes, it
comes out looking like a bad textbook. In the
notes on Norman Mailer, the editors seem almost
vindictive. Some of the notes seem picked just
to glorify the editors. They are just too obviously
biased. The least they could do was be subtle
about it. However, despite the efforts of the Bur-
netts, the book is not ruined. It is saved by the
calibre of the fiction in it, and it should be read
only for the stories.

—JAMES FORSYTH

TO MARIWIN (To Shake Such A Time)

by
GALE F. MORGAN

Mariwin,

had we known a privater affair

in some primal Then,

ere man created God—created man—
and asked, and gratefully received

of his own creation

the gift of guilt—

We might have gotten better odds on love.

Even though
laboured love lost;

even now,

I feel the sweet-remembered devil-touch
of pale, trembling hands on Baptist flesh,
and in the afterglow

the spirit bears again the blow

of a jealous Frankenstein’s chastening rod.

Even though

the Image-monster, grown rawly real,

is condor-eyed ;

new-promethean fire I bring

to warm a guilt-cold culture’s unrequited love.

Even so,

if this be treason,

make a boast of it

and down the icy fear the Monster feeds on.

Pray,
will you come again to me and lay the odds on love.

30

I WILL NOT MOURN

by

CHARLOTTE McMICHAEL

I will not mourn
night riding
black asters
decking the slide
that otters use
for tag and touch-me-not.
Or Eurydice ladies
letting fly
their saris
to catch dry wind
in their
designs.
Or jugs drinking
water cups of sun
that resign to
evening dips
and come
with me.
We picked lemons by the roadside;
our shadows not close, not far away
and after our gathering, we drank
tea together on straw in moonshade,
watched red berries shift into morning
on a bed of otter down
and yet
I will not mourn
yesterdays, even the
ankling
of clams
round your barefeet
in past walking away.
I wait an ownership
of otter cries;
salient black aster
lost
and you.
I will not mourn.

31

CONTRIBUTORS

Contributors: Sanford Peele, poet, English instructor, a director of the
Poetry Forum; Guy Beining, New York writer; Antoni Gronowicz, New
York writer, has published several biographies and a novel; John Clement,
student; Albert Pertalion, instructor in the Drama and Speech Department ;
B. Tolson Willis, poet, a director of the Poetry Forum; Vernon Ward,
English instructor, poet; John D. Ebbs, Professor of English; James
Forsyth, student.

This issue of the REBEL features selected poems by members of the
East Carolina College Poetry Forum. Charlotte McMichael, Dwight
Pearce and Pat Scott are student members; Gale F. Morgan is a cor-
responding member from Raleigh.

Joe Brannon made and developed the pictures for the article on
Horace Farlowe.

STAFF

Editor, Thomas Speight; Associate Editor, Dwight Pearce; Art Editor,
W. Louis Jones; Business Manager, Jan Sellers Coward; Copy Editor, Ann
Regan Barbee; Book Review Editor, Robert Malone; Typist, Margaret
DeLong.

SUBSCRIPTIONS

Subscriptions to the REBEL now available. Three dollars for three
issues or one dollar and a quarter for single issues. Send requests to the
REBEL magazine, Box 2486, Greenville, North Carolina.

32

THE POETRY FORUM

EAST CAROLINA COLLEGE
TO DISCUSS AND READ
POETRY

SEEKS REGULAR AND CORRESPONDING MEMBERS
_ MEETINGS THIS YEAR ON ALTERNATE THURSDAYS
8 O'CLOCK IN 30614 AUSTIN BUILDING

SEEKS BOOKINGS FOR PUBLIC READINGS
EXPERIENCED: RESPONSE HAS BEEN SOMEWHAT
PHENOMENAL 3

DIRECTORS: SANFORD L. PEELE
B. TOLSON WILLIS
PAT R. WILLIS

WRITE TO: POETRY FORUM
BOX 2605
GREENVILLE, N. C.