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The Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought

Contents

Prose

Seven Years of Southern Resistance

Thucydides: Our Contemporary

The Transcendental Hawthorne

Irwin Shaw: An Extended Talent

Poems

Black Feathers

Marais des Cygnes

Epithalamium for Lovers on a Beach

Abstract

in this issue...

WITH this number, THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY rounds out its second volume and thus completes two years of publication. It seems obvious to the editors at least that this milestone has more significance than the mere issuance of the eighth consecutive number of our quarterly. In a very real sense, this publication has reached a kind of maturity, the basic evidence of which is contained in the table of contents in this issue. From its inception, it has been our aim to offer a broad selection of articles on various subjects of contemporary significance. Throughout our first year the editors found it necessary to seek out, humor, and cajole contributors, but we have now passed through that stage of development. This current number is made up entirely of unsolicited contributions, carefully selected from relatively abundant materials submitted to us over the past six months. The result, we think, is a broad variety designed to appeal to many diverse interests.

IT SEEMED entirely appropriate to the editors meeting on May 17, 1961, to select as our first article for this issue an analysis of Southern reaction to the May 17, 1954 decision of the United States Supreme Court. Freedom Riders were this spring beginning to write another chapter in this particular phase of current American history. Few American problems seem to occupy more space in newspapers and more time on television than violent events transpiring in Alabama and Mississippi. The times seem to require a reasoned review of events over the last seven years preliminary and preparatory to what some observers have come to call the final act in the dramatic struggle for equality of treatment for all Americans. Fortunately JAMES W. VANDER ZANDEN offered us an article with just the reasonable perspective necessary. For the past seven years he has been a close student and observer of the tangled questions of American race relations, particularly in the South. As both student and teacher in Georgia and North Carolina, he has had many opportunities to study the problem at close range, and his articles have appeared in many distinguished American journals including The South Atlantic Quarterly, The American Journal of Sociology, and The Journal of the History of Ideas. Readers of THE MIDWEST QUARTERL Y will recall his discerning discussion of "Sit-Ins in Dixie" which appeared in our October, 1960, issue. He is now assistant professor of sociology at Ohio State University and working on a textbook on American minority relations for Ronald Press.

IT IS A FAR CRY from the American South of 1961 to Greece of the fifth century B. C., but it is the contention of Felix M. Wassermann of the Division of Humanities at Kansas Wesleyan University, Salina, that the thoughts and political observations of Thucydides are as current and applicable today as they were 2,500 years ago. The editors agree substantially with Professor Wassermann. He has been a student of philology in general and of the great Greek historian in particular for more than forty years, a fact which has given him a great deal of satisfaction both intellectual and personal and which on occasion has caused him some trouble. When he was traveling through Turkey about thirty-five years ago carrying a Greek copy of Thucydides, he was arrested on the coast of Asia Minor as a Greek spy. The Thucydides with his notes in it was considered prima facie evidence of his guilt, and he had "the more interesting than pleasant experience of spending two days in a Turkish jail" therefor. Last summer while hospitalized at Salina, Professor Wassermann and his surgeon fell into "such a lively discussion a but Thucydides" that they both forget the medical purpose of the surgeon's visit. Professor Wassermann is a native of Manheim, Germany, with degrees from Heidelberg, Munich, and Freiburg. He has held many academic posts at both German and American colleges and univerities, and he has been a member of the faculty at Kansas Wesleyan for the past decade. He belongs to the American Philological Association, the Modern Language Association, and the Classical Association of the Midwest and the South. His numerous articles and reviews on Greek drama, conservative humanism, Burckhardt, von Humboldt, and Thucydides have appeared in English, German and Italian journals.

AS ANOTHER CONTRIBUTION to the Centennial of Kansas statehood we offer an extended verse treatment of the preliminaries to the Marais des Cygnes Massacre, one of the bloodiest chapters in the territorial history of Kansas, a crime perpetrated on May 19,1858 by Charles Hamelton and his pro-slavery followers. Hamelton rounded up eleven Free State men and marched them to a ravine near Trading Post in Linn County where he lined them up before a firing squad. Five of the eleven were killed and five wounded. The site is preserved today as a state memorial park. This massacre attracted immediate national attention and inspired the abolitionist poet John Greenleaf Whittier to write one of his most impassioned poems beginning with these lines:

"A blush as of roses, where roses never grew! Great drops on the bunch grass, but not of the dew."

This selection is Part Five of a ten-part, book-length work by BRUCE CUTLER, a member of the English Department of the University of Wichita. Part One appeared in this year's Kansas Magazine; Part Two is included in Kansas Renaissance, an anthology of contemporary Kansas writing published this spring by Coronado Publications of Lindsborg, Kansas. Mr. Cutler is a Kansas poet who understands Kansas history and has a real feeling for the territorial period. The first edition of his The Year of the Green Wave (University of Nebraska Press) is sold out, and a second edition is already in print. Parts Three and Four of his Marais des Cygnes poem will be out, he hopes, by this fall.

AMONG STUDENTS of American literature the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne have stood out for many years as significant and substantial parts of the American record. While students and lay readers find it easy to agree on the important place of Hawthorne in American letters, it is not nearly so easy for them to agree on what Hawthorne believed or meant or understood or wanted his readers to understand. Consequently, Nathaniel Hawthorne is still a controversial figure and a subject of continuing interest. From several manuscripts sent us dealing with aspects of Hawthorne's literary work, we have selected for publication in this issue a carefully written brief designed to show that Hawthorne was a transcendentalist. The author, BRUCE R. McELDERRY, JR., is professor of English at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. He is a native of Iowa with the A. B. from Grinnell College and the Ph.D. from the State University of Iowa at Iowa City, and he taught English and American literature at Wisconsin, Western Reserve, and the State College of Washington before going to California in 1946. His major areas of interest are the Romantic and Victorian periods in English literature and American literature generally. He has recently provided an introduction to a new edition of Mark Twain's Contributions to The Galaxy (1868-1871), and he is also author of the introduction to a new edition of Hamlin Garland's Boy Life on the Prairie, in the University of Nebraska's Bison paperbacks. This book is now in press, and Professor McElderry's introduction to it originally appeared in the April, 1959, issue of The Educational Leader, predecessor to THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY. This summer Professor McElderry is working on a biographical-critical volume on Thomas Wolfe. He read his Hawthorne article in slightly different form in the English II section of the Modern Language Association meeting in New York in 1958.

IT IS ALMOST as far from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Irwin Shaw as it is from Los Angeles, California, to Baltimore, Maryland. The editors of THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY see no good reason for limiting all literary discussion to the works of dead authors, and therefore we were happy to receive an analysis of the work of an American novelist and short story writer who is still producing today. WILLIAM STARTT, who teaches freshman English at the University of Maryland, was born in Baltimore and has resided there most of his life except for two years in Japan with the United States Army and several more during which he traveled extensively His interests in literary criticism have centered around modern British and American fiction, but recently he has been engaged in considerable research in the relatively unknown literature of Australia and New Zealand. His contribution to this issue is the first instance in which this publication has ventured into the field of contemporary American literature.

TWO OF THE THREE poems in this issue (aside from Bruce Cutler's Marais Des Cygnes) are by writers new to THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY. MARION SCHOEBERLEIN has been writing since she was eleven years old and had her first story published at the age of thirteen. Her work has appear in various literary magazines as well as Good Housekeeping and The Ladies' Home Journal. She was included in the recent anthology Prismatic Voices (Falcon's Wing Press, Indian Hills, Colorado) which presented the work of about a score of contemporary artists. She has sold a number of children's stories and is currently compiling a book of them. Her interest in poetry developed out of the discovery that she could express herself and her generation better in poetry than in prose. While she resides in Illinois, she confesses that her favorite place to live in the United States is New Orleans.

Our other newcomer is WILLIAM FOX, JR., of Shaker Heights, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland, where he attended John Carroll University during World War II. Later he was graduated from Miami University at Oxford, Ohio. His background is anything but academic: after a number of years as a Navy officer he worked as an industrial editor for the Ford Motor Company and moved from there into advertising as an account executive for Batten, Barton, Durstine, & Osborn, Inc. For over fifteen years he has been writing poetry, and his work has appeared in America Sings, Anthology of Ohio Verse, U. S. Naval Institute Proceedings, American Weave, New Athenaeum and Flame. His poem, Weekend, which we publish here, "was born of the almost anaesthetic reawakening, as of a fighter after a knockout, that follows a frenetic week in the advertising business . . . when the realities of home, wife and child again assert their meanings and values against the harsh exigencies of a commercial world." He has received awards from both the Ohio Poetry Society and the Louisiana State Poetry Society.

Readers of our spring issue (April, 1961) will recognize E. H. TEMPLIN as the author of two short poems which appeared in that number. He is a professor of Spanish at the University of California at Los Angeles whose verse is appearing rather widely in American reviews and periodicals.

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