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The Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought

Contents

ARTICLES

The Melville of Battle-Pieces: A Kindred Spirit

Huck Finn and Mr. Mark Twain Rhyme

Marriage in Hardy's Later Novels

To Have and Have Not: Hemingway's Hiatus

Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited: War and Limited Hope

The Achievement of Bernard Malamud

VERSE

The Hawk

july: becalmed

Borrowings

The Iguana

Crossing Kansas

Photograph of the Letter A

Porpoise or Not?

Once More

The Mountain Bird

Night Train

The Frog in the Jar

St. Louis by Moonlight

Abstract

in this issue. . .

WRAPPING UP a decade of academic publication is no difficult chore, especially since generous, gracious, and for the most part patient contributors have been prodigal in showering us with material-articles, poems, and reviews-for the past six or seven years. And our esteemed colleague, absent on sabbatical leave this past semester, had thoughtfully selected practically the whole of this Summer Literary Number prior to her departure for far-flung and deep-delving research on her Emily Dickinson. The result is a solid collection of entertaining, incisive, and insightful reading. The subjects of our six articles range from Herman Melville's attitudes toward war to Bernard Malamud's substantial and continuing work. Melville and Thomas Hardy wrote substantial volumes of verse, and Samuel L. Clemens was an inveterate rhymer, particularly behind the mask of Mr. Mark Twain when he was engaged in reporting the adventures, observations, and opinions of Huckleberry Finn. Hardy and Ernest Hemingway entertained curious and various views of women and the institution of marriage. Evelyn Waugh and Malamud were concerned with religion and religious faith and their relevance to human life and endurance. One colleague protested not so long ago that these men (Malamud aside) "are all dead." As a matter of cold vital statistics, this is true. But what they thought and wrote, what they had to say while they were alive and observing life around them, still lives. The essays following will help readers discover further reasons for the immortality which is one of the hallmarks of genuine art.

HERMAN MELVILLE (1819-1891) sounds contemporary when he speaks of war, as WILLIAM J. KIMBALL, associate professor of English at Converse College, Spartanburg, South Carolina, carefully makes clear. Professor Kimball, with his master's from Middlebury and doctor's from Pennsylvania State, has ventured into the War before this with articles in Civil War History and Civil War Times Illustrated and a book on Richmond during the war (published by Houghton Mifflin). He taught at Mary Baldwin College and Ohio University before going to Converse and has published articles in College English Criticism and the South Atlantic Modern Language Association Bulletin.

INTEREST in Mark Twain requires no apology or explanation to the editors of this journal. ROBERT L. COARD, professor of English at St. Cloud, Minnesota, State College, is a native of Quincy, Illinois, a scant twenty miles up the Mississippi from Mark Twain’s Hannibal, and now works in an office in the Riverview Building, just a few rods from the big river. With a Ph. D. in American Literature from the University of Illinois, Professor Coard has taught at the University of Nebraska, at Minot, North Dakota, State College, and at the University of Alabama; he has been at St. Cloud since 1960. He has published widely in American Speech, College English, Discourse, The Georgia Review, The Journal of Higher Education, Library Journal, Names, and Word Study, to name a few, the last of which carried another Twain analysis, The Dictionary and Mark Twain," early last year.

POPULAR INTEREST in Thomas Hardy's novels was revived last year when The Mayor of Casterbridge was made into a motion picture. While all reviewers may not agree, our third article may suggest the adaptability of other of Hardy's works to the cinema. Teaching the English novel course here is VICTOR JAY EMMETT, JR., a native of Boulder, Colorado, who finds Hardy's readings of women as stimulating as his readings of earth. After taking his A. B. in philosophy at Harvard, Professor Emmett earned the M. F. A. m creative writing at the University of Iowa, served as an instructor in English at Wisconsin State College, Oshkosh, for two years, and then returned to Iowa City to win his doctor’s is English two years ago. He joined this faculty in the fall of 1967.

ANOTHER MIDWESTERN contributor is JOHN S. HILL, Professor of English at Illinois State University, Normal. His field is American literature, and his doctor's degree is from the University of Wisconsin. His articles range the field from Stephen Crane to John Updike and have appeared in The Huntington Library Quarterly, The Mark Twain Journal, Modern Fiction Studies, The Poe Newsletter, The Southern Humanities Review, and Southwest Review. He has published two books on American naturalism and thesis style and is working on three more: a volume on American literature since 1900, a college anthology of American fiction and another of short stories. He was a Huntington Library research fellow in 1967.

FAR-RANGING fits CARL WOOTON, native Kansan with a Ph. D. from the University of Oregon where he was on the editorial staff of the Northwest Review and held both Woodrow Wilson and NDEA fellowships. Now an assistant professor of English at the University of Southern Louisiana, Lafayette, he teaches modern fiction and creative writing. His short fiction has appeared in The Ball State University Forum, The Georgia Review, Laurel Review, Literary Review, and St. Joseph Magazine. He is working on a novel of his own and planning a book-length treatment of Evelyn Waugh's novels. While he has previously published articles on poetry and drama, this is his first in fiction.

PENNSYLVANIA is the native state and habitat of SANFORD PINSKER, assistant professor of English at Franklin and Marshall College, Lancaster. He took his A. B. at Washington and Jefferson in his home town of Washington and then went to the state of Washington for his master's and doctor's degrees from the University in Seattle. His particular field of concentration is the Jewish and Yiddish novel, and his articles have appeared in The Chicago Jewish Forum, Critique, Jewish Digest, Jewish Heritage, Jewish Social Studies, The Modern Language Quarterly, The Reconstructionist, and The University of Windsor Review. His notes, reviews and even poetry have also been published in a variety of periodicals from Conradiana and Northwest Today to Cape Rock Quarterly and Wormwood Review. The University of Southern Illinois Press will soon publish his The Schlemiel as Metaphor: Studies in the Yiddish and American Jewish Novel in its Crosscurrents series.

OUR DOZEN POEMS are the work of eleven poets, five of them with earlier appearances in THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY, the other seven stepping on to our paper stage for the first time in this issue. The familiar quintet, whose various work we have published at intervals over the past four years, includes BURTON L. CARLSON of Beston, Virginia; NANCY ANN DIBBLE of Iowa City, IVAN DOIG of Seattle, CHARLES EDWARD EATON of Woodbury, Massachusetts, and NANCY PRICE of Cedar Falls, Iowa. Carlson, a native Hoosier with Yale divinity training, now works for Manpower Assistance Project, Inc., which he helped found in Washington, D. C. His work requires travel all over the country--for example, St. Louis--to give technical assistance to job training programs. . . . Miss Dibble is a native New Yorker working for her Ph. D. at the University of Iowa where she took her Master of Fine Arts degree two years ago, about the time we first published one of her poems. . . . Ivan Doig grew up on farms and ranches in Montana and is a free lance writer living in Seattle. While his bachelor and master's degrees from Northwestern University are in journalism, he holds a Ph. D. in American History from the University of Washington. He writes extensively on western topics and is now working on a biography of a frontier lawyer. His poem "Drought" appeared in our issue of last July. . . . Mr. Eaton's poems have been widely published and justly celebrated in a sterling variety of journals from Commonweal to The Sewanee Review. Abelard-Schuman published his fifth collection of poems, On the Edge of the Knife, early this year, and he is working on a sixth volume of poetry and a second collection of short stories. . . . Nancy Price is an instructor in English at the University of Northern Iowa where her husband is Howard J. Thompson, professor of history. Her poems continue to appear in an enviable variety of journals including The Atlantic, Commonweal, The Nation, and Today. She is working on her doctorate and studying with George Starbuck, head of the Writer's Workshop at the University of Iowa.

VENTURESOME beyond our custom, we present our readers with the work of six men and women new to these pages but hardly novices. For example, WILLIAM V. DAVIS has published articles, critical essays, fiction, poetry, and reviews in numerous journals including the Ann Arbor Review, Discourse, The Georgia Review, The Kansas Quarterly, Poet and Critic, Southern Poetry Review, and many others. His work will appear in several forthcoming anthologies including The New Generation of Poets, and Best in Poetry 1969. He holds a Ph. D. in English from Ohio University where he taught before going to Central Connecticut State College, New Britain, where he is assistant professor of English. . . . ROBERT FLANAGAN has his A. B. from the University of Toledo, his home town, and the master of arts from the University of Chicago where he was an associate editor of The Chicago Review. He teaches creative writing at Slippery Rock State College in Pennsylvania and has published in Menke Katz's Bitterroot, Descant, Folio, The Northwest Review, and many others. A collection of his poems, Not For Dietrich Bonhoeffer, is due out this year, and he (an ex-Marine) is working on a novel about a Marine recruit. . . . An exceptional case is that of MARGARET E. HAUGHAWOUT (1875-1964), a member of the English faculty in this college from 1923 until her retirement in 1951. She won her A. B. at Hastings College in Nebraska and her master's at the University of Nebraska, taught at Hastings and at Alma College, Michigan, and was dean of the Knox school for Girls at Tarrytown, New York, before becoming superintendent of schools in Fillmore County, Nebraska. Last January a room was named for her in our Porter Library and dedicated to her memory in exercises which included the reading of a selection of her poems. . . . JOHN A. LYNCH of Framingham, Massachusetts, is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame who has studied under Wallace Stegner at Stanford University. His poetry has been published m The Antioch Review, Chicago Choice, Commonweal The Critic, Four Quarters, and Modern Age; his short stories have appeared in The Atlantic, New Mexico Quarterly, Perspective, and Prairie Schooner. . . . . ROSE ROSBERG is a New York City librarian living on Riverside Drive. Her work has appeared in Fiddlehead, The Quarterly Review of Literature, The Southern Poetry Review, and elsewhere. . . . And F. EUGENE WARREN instructor in English at the University of Missouri Rolla holds the bachelor's and master's degrees from our mother institution, Kansas State Teachers College at Emporia, and has various experience as a hospital orderly, truck driver, and cable TV lineman. Grist, Human Voice Quarterly, Poetry Bag, Quixote, and South & West are some of the journals which have published his work.

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