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The Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought

Contents

ARTICLES

Whores and Horses in Faulkner's "Spotted Horses"

The Sound and the Fury: The Emotional Center

Jane Austen's Plots

Melville's Literary Debut in France

Chance in Hardy's Fiction

Winesburg, Ohio: The Escape from Isolation

VERSE

My Daughter Swinging

The Remnants

A Happy Ending

Bread of Famine

Cup by Smith That Homer Praised

The Schools of Love

mary whitehorse comes to my hogan

The Knowledge of Centers

Skull with Arrowhead: Allen County Museum

To My Love, Assigned Here by the Sun

Sweeping

Late Summer

Abstract

in this issue. . .

COMES JULY and the editors take their yearly vacation from worrying about the fate of the world, which looks both unpleasant and imminent, and concern themselves instead with literature, which concerns itself with the individual. In short, our Summer Literary Number has come round again, and as usual the emphasis is upon American authors. Not that we have a conscious bias, even though the editor-in-chief teaches American literature to college students who so far have been generously willing to find it relevant-and the more contemporary the more relevant. But it has occurred to us, and pretty often, as we sit poring over the manuscripts pouring onto our desk, that students of our native writings are remarkably verbal and even intense about their specialties. At times we ask ourselves wistfully whether there is nothing stirring in the contemporary literatures of other lands, and are delighted to be able to present a fresh and indeed contemporary look at that belated neo-classicist, Jane Austen, and a new interpretation of Thomas Hardy and those "strange conjunctions" with which he puzzled and at times upset his readers, including this editor; but still we find ourselves wanting something more from abroad arid something perhaps a trifle nearer our own outrageous times. Among the Americans William Faulkner retains his preeminence by means of a novel but persuasive reading of his "Spotted Horses" and a careful and detailed study of the emotional center of The Sound and the Fury. We also make our contribution to the reviving interest in Sherwood Anderson and to the strong and continued interest in Herman Melville.

OUR AUTHORS are DONALD E. HOUGHTON, professor of English at Sacramento State College, California; Assistant Professor CAREY WALL, teaching English in the University of California at Los Angeles; our colleague, Professor VICTOR J. EMMETT, JR., of Kansas State College of Pittsburg; Assistant Professor DUANE EDWARDS, of the Department of English, Illinois State University, Normal; Assistant Professor HENRY J. YEAGER, Department of Foreign Languages, Rutgers University, Newark, New Jersey; and finally, BARRY D. BORT, associate professor of English at the State University of New York at New Paltz.

A LIVELY, initially puzzled correspondence with Donald E. Houghton produced the information that there are not two versions of the "Spotted Horses" story, as we had all along supposed, but in actuality three. Further correspondence led to our choice of a short and pungent title among the several alternatives proposed by our obliging author. Professor Houghton has the A. B. degree from the University of Washington, the A. M. from Columbia, and the Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Minnesota. He has published articles in a number of the learned journals, among others the AAUP Bulletin, The English Journal, Emerson Society Quarterly, and Western American Literature. He has been teaching English at Sacramento State College since 1955, with time out, in 1962-63, for a year as Fulbright Lecturer in American Literature at the University of Cairo and at Ein Shama University, Egypt.

OUR SECOND Faulkner author, Carey Wall, did her undergraduate work at the University of Michigan and her graduate work at Stanford. She has taught at Queens College, City University of New York, as well as at UCLA. Her article "Drama and Technique in Faulkner's The Hamlet" appeared in Twentieth Century Literature. The present article is part of a broader treatment of the book in her as yet unpublished book-length study of Sound and four other Faulkner novels-As I Lay Dying, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom! and The Hamlet. She is currently working at a book on Henry Green's novels.

WITH HIS STUDY of Jane Austen's plotting, Victor J. Emmett makes his second appearance in THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY, his analysis of the marriages in Thomas Hardy's late novels having appeared in our Summer Literary Number a year ago. He has also published a study of Matthew Arnold in the Kansas State College Graduate Bulletin, and his article on Conrad's "Youth" is scheduled to appear in the fall issue of Connecticut Review. Originally from Boulder, Colorado, Professor Emmett earned his A. B. at Harvard and his M. F. A. and Ph.D. at the University of Iowa. He has been a member of our English Department since 1967.

AMONG other "strange conjunctions" is the fact that Thomas Hardy, the subject of Professor Emmett's July 1969 article, has come round again in the current literary number. Duane Edwards, author of this year's study, received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in 1968, where he majored in the Victorian period and minored in Greek, not quite a "strange conjunction" but at least an interesting one. He combines these interests by teaching a course in the novel and another course in ancient literature at Illinois State University, Normal, where he is in his second year, and he has recently completed and submitted to one of the journals a comparative study of Hardy's Tess and Euripides' Phaedra. In addition he has "nearly completed a collection of short stories." We have the pleasure of publishing his first article.

ADMIRABLY equipped to research the literary debut of Herman Melville in France, Henry J. Yeager notes as his specialty the teaching of ninetenth and twentieth century French literature. He has the A. B. from Franklin and Marshall College, the Certificate of L'Institut d'Etudes Politiques, Paris, and the Ph.D. from the University of Paris, where his dissertation was distinguished "avec la mention honorable." He has written on Jean Genet for the French Review and Encore and on Cambodia for the New York Times. As work in progress he mentions a study of French criticism of Herman Melville since World War I and preparation of a student edition of Genet's Les Bonnes. An active and varied career includes military service as an officer in the U.S. Air Force, summer courses in a number of European universities, and other summers spent as a tour conductor. After five years at St. John's University, he joined the foreign language department at Rutgers, where he has been teaching various French courses since 1966.

SEVEN YEARS AGO Barry Bort made his first appearance in the QUARTERLY with an article on Robert Frost. We are glad to welcome him back with his study of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio and its people like "twisted little apples" that are nevertheless curiously sweet. Professor Bort has the A. M. and Ph.D. degrees from Brown University. His most recently published articles are on Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier and Thackeray's Vanity Fair.

TWELVE poems, ten poets, and half of the ten are new to our pages. First of the newcomers, T. ALAN BROUGHTON writes that he is an assistant professor at the University of Vermont, Burlington, where he teaches courses in creative writing. Recent acceptances include The Quarterly Review of Literature, Discourse, Descant, Poem, Prairie Schooner, and The Quest. The poem with which he makes his first appearance in our journal is from an unpublished book of poetry entitled The Necessary Love. . . . We are pleased to offer first publication to DAVID BRUCE GOLDIN, now living in New York and working on a sequence of poems largely based on the mythology and symbols of the western American Indians. . . . WILLIAM K. HATHAWAY is new only to our pages. His poetry has appeared in a number of the little magazines, among them The Iowa Defender, New: American and Canadian Poetry, Foxfire, Trojan Horse, Epoch, and others. Eight poems appeared in the Doubleday anthology edited by Geof Hewitt, one poem in the Bantam anthology, Intro II, edited by R. V. Cassill, and four poems are scheduled for publication in a Quixote Press anthology edited by Douglas Blazek. He has the A. B. from the University of Montana and the M. F. A. from the University of Iowa and is now teaching in the freshman humanities program at Cornell University, Ithaca. . . . Our fourth newcomer, NORMAN H. RUSSELL, is also new only to us. The present poem is one of five hundred that he has written about Indians, attempting to create or recreate a society of people as he thinks they once were or might have been--one which was a part of and cooperated with its environment; it is about a real person, a leader of her people, who has done much to reduce the "white man's disease," tuberculosis, among the Navajoes, although the name "mary whitehorse" is fictitious. For the past twenty years Professor Russell has taught botany at several colleges and universities and is now teaching at Central State College, Edmond, Oklahoma. Since he began to submit his poems about two years ago, he has had many acceptances from such journals as Prairie Schooner, The Massachusetts Review, Poetry Northwest, Nimrod, The Denver Quarterly, and The South Dakota Review. His first book of poems, "at the zoo," was published last summer by the JRD Press, Smithtown, New York, and two Indian poems first published in 1968 in The Little Square Review have been chosen for the third volume of The American Literary Anthology. His one-eighth Cherokee, he says, "only partly explains my writing about Indians." . . . Of our last new poet we are sorry to be so scantily informed, but the distances are great and the strikes have been numerous, and our winged letters appear to go tardily. YUKI SAWA, a young Japanese writer, was introduced to us by his friend and colleague, Edith Shiffert (whose own work has appeared in recent issues of the QUARTERLY and will appear again in the January issue). The poem by Yuki Sawa, which commemorates his father, appears in his own English version, an earlier Japanese version having already appeared in a leading Japanese literary journal. He has collaborated with Miss Shiffert on a book of translations from modern Japanese poetry soon to be published, and his own poetry has appeared not only in Japan but also in the Southern Review and other American journals.

TURNING to our old hands, we come first upon SAM BRADLEY, whose two poems in this issue continue a wonderful series begun in July, 1965, and including six earlier poems plus an article. Currently (1969-70) he has been doing a year of research at Duke University and the University of North Carolina as a fellow in their Humanities Cooperative Program and is working on a book of African poems. . . . Although we had a pleasant meeting not so many months ago with fellow English teacher, BRUCE CUTLER, of Wichita State University, it has been a good many years since the July, 1961, issue in which we first published some of his poetry. We gather that he has been a busy man-four Fulbright grants, the most recent being a lectureship last year in American literature at the University of Zaragoza, Spain; publication of his book A Voyage to America by the University of Nebraska Press, 1967; editorship of The Arts at the Grass Roots, 1968, and of the poems of May Williams Ward, In That Day, 1970, both for the University Press of Kansas; and a television series for Channel 13, New York, in 1968, called "Approaching Poetry," which is now being shown on tape on various ETV stations around the country. . . . GIBBONS RUARK, of the University of Delaware, whose first poem with us appeared in the recent January issue, returns with two more poems of a poignant tenderness. . . . From Kearney, Nebraska, where she is a member of the Kearney State College faculty, NANCY G. WESTERFIELD reappears with a fine new poem called "Skull with Arrowhead" (this appears to be our Indian number, just as the January issue was our tribute to the air age) . She has been very busy since we last heard from her, publishing in Prairie Schooner, Kansas Quarterly, Christian Century, Poet Lore; and a poem done in collaboration with the subject and entitled "Pullman Cat" appeared, appropriately, in a trade journal called Cat Fancy. . . . We have saved MENKE KATZ to the last because we had somewhat more than common to say about his long poem "Bread of Famine," which appears in this issue. Knowing our usual space limitations, editor Katz (Bitterroot) accompanied his long poem with two excellent and self-contained excerpts, leaving it to us to make a choice. After much back-and-forth amongst our own editors, we declined the Solomonic responsibility and elected to take his magnificent "Bread of Famine" in its entirety. Picking through the pen-and-ink daisies that decorate his correspondence, we have discovered that this poem too is a part only of a much larger work, a book to be called Burning Village, which will deal with his childhood in Lithuania. Best of luck, Menke Katz!

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