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The Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought

Contents

ARTICLES

The Literary Naturalist as Humanist: The Last Phase of Theodore Dreiser

The Art(s) of Poetry: Jones and MacLeish

Melville's Redburn and the City

Dos Passos Et Al.: An Experiment in Radical Fiction

Prologue to the Sad Comedies: Graham Greene's Major Early Novels

Characterization in The Scarlet Letter

VERSE

Van Gogh

Remembrance from a Dream in 1963

From Wolf's Butte

For Birds

The Deaf-Mute

A Day on Lake Biwa

Children's Books

At Joe Sunthimer's

At the Scene of a Car-Train Collision

The Son, at Sea

The Death

Abstract

in this issue. . .

FOR ITS NINTH Summer Literary Issue THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY explores the hitherto unexplored humanistic side of literary naturalist Theodore Dreiser, discovers an interesting relationship between the "Black Art" of LeRoi Jones and the "Ars Poetica" of Archibald MacLeish, examines the fourmillante city at the heart of Herman Melville's Redburn, considers the experimental techniques of John Dos Passos and his followers, analyzes the major early novels of Graham Greene as prologue to the sad comedies of the later period, and makes a new and searching scrutiny of the characterization in Nathaniel Hawthorne's troubled masterpiece The Scarlet Letter. Our authors are R. N. MOOKERJEE, of the English Faculty at the University of Rajasthan, Jaipur, India; KATHLEEN GALLAGHER, instructor in English at Morgan State College, Baltimore, Maryland; HAROLD T. McCARTHY, professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; JOHN M. REILLY, associate professor of English, State University of New York at Albany; SANFORD STERNLIGHT, professor of English, State University of New York at Oswego; and WALTER SHEAR, professor of English, Kansas State College of Pittsburg.

As POINTED OUT by Professor Mookerjee, Theodore Dreiser has been discussed frequently enough by humanist critics but "invariably as the target of their attacks." That Dreiser also held important humanist attitudes and beliefs may come as something of a surprise, and yet the evidence now available is impressive. During a stay in the United States as visiting Fulbright Fellow, Professor Mookerjee became engaged in a study of Dreiser's social criticism, working on a doctoral dissertation at the University of Indiana and making full use of the special collections of Dreiser material, both published and in manuscript, at the Universities of Indiana, Yale, and Pennsylvania. He is now at work on a book-length study of Dreiser which is expected to appear simultaneously with this July issue of the QUARTERLY. He received his master's degree in English literature at the University of Allahabad, India, in 1956, and his doctoral degree at the University of Rajasthan in 1968. He has taught at the University of Allahabad and at Rajasthan College and since 1962 has been on the English faculty of the University of Rajasthan. He has participated in numerous seminars on American literature and has published in leading Indian journals, including The Indian Journal of American Studies. His most recent publications include articles in The Asian Response to American Literature (New Delhi, 1971) and American Literature ( March, 1971). He is now studying the social thought of Upton Sinclair.

TO US it is a matter of some interest and pride that Kathleen Gallagher should make the first submission of her first article to this journal and that the editors should decide at once and unanimously not to let it go out of their hands. The QUARTERLY had not previously published any study of the important work being done by LeRoi Jones (Imamu Ameer Baraka), and this article seemed a particularly good one to begin with. We might also point out as pretty much of a record the fact that an article received on February 15 should be accepted on April 12 and in print by July. We shall not say how young Miss Gallagher is other than to note that she took her undergraduate degree quite recently at the College of Notre Dame of Maryland, Baltimore, and completed her M.A. in August, 1970, at Morgan State College, also of Baltimore, where she has been teaching English during the past school year. She now thinks of taking a leave of absence in order to begin work on the doctorate.

IN A RECENT LETTER Harold T. McCarthy informed us that his study of Melville's attitude toward the city, the Liverpool of Redburn, grew out of a book he is now working on, tentatively entitled "The Expatriate Perspective," concerned with the ways in which a stay in Europe altered American novelists' perspective on American culture. The reader soon perceives, however, that this is more than a study of mid-nineteenth century Liverpool or its reflection in a very similar mid-nineteenth century New York; it illuminates the city of our own times as well, with its growing pockets of misery and decay. Professor McCarthy has published a book, Henry James: The Creative Process, and a number of articles, the most recent being on Nathaniel Hawthorne, Studi Americani; Herman Melville, Emerson Society Quarterly; Mark Twain, Arizona Quarterly; and Henry James, American Literary Realism. In 1964-65 he was Fulbright Lecturer on American Literature at the University of Copenhagen, and during 1967-69 lectured on American literature at Italian universities and was Consultant on American Literature for the University of Rome.

CALLING ATTENTION to a neglected experiment in radical fiction, John M. Reilly points out that, beginning with John Dos Passos' novel Manhattan Transfer in 1925 and continuing sporadically for a decade or more, there was some attempt on the part of leftist writers to create a kind of group novel in which the individual was subordinated to the collective identity. The experiment failed, he suggests, not because it was creatively unviable but rather because there was no political and economic revolution on which it might continue to feed. Professor Reilly has the B. A. degree from West Virginia University, the M.A. and the Ph.D. from Washington University (St. Louis), where he wrote his doctoral dissertation on Richard Wright. His article on James Baldwin appeared in Negro American Literary Forum, another on Jean Toomer's Cane in Studies in the Novel, and he has written "Afterwords" for the Harper Perennial editions of Native Son and Black Boy and has edited with a critical introduction Twentieth Century Interpretations of Invisible Man. Other articles have appeared in Emerson Society Quarterly and in Phylon. Among his honors are a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, a Danforth Teacher Grant, and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. Since 1963 he has been a member of the English Department of State University of New York at Albany, where he was promoted to Associate Professor in 1970.

NO STRANGER to our pages is Sanford Sternlicht, whose study of the major early novels of Graham Greene appears in this issue. Poems and articles by Professor Sternlicht have been appearing in our pages over the course of the past ten years. Most recently he has had articles in Papers on Language & Literature, Florida Quarterly, and Ball State University Forum, and he has had poems in several of the reviews and is writing chapters for university press books on William Golding and Samuel Beckett. In September, 1969, he was an ACLS-MLA delegate to The International Congress of Modern Languages and Literatures in Islamabad, Pakistan, where he read a paper on twentieth century western drama as a language of dissent. This coming August he will be Assistant Director of the Theatre Colloquia at the World Shakespeare Congress in Vancouver, B. C., Canada.

OUR COLLEAGUE, Professor Walter Shear, shares with this editor the pleasure and responsibility of teaching American literature in the English Department of our own Kansas State College of Pittsburg. He is always a good man to turn to when we need a book review or a specialist opinion on some phase of our own literature, and we turn to him often and gladly. In earlier issues we have published several reviews and two of his articles, an analysis of Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography ("Franklin's Self Portrait," October, 1962) and a Malamud study ("Culture Conflict in The Assistant," July, 1966). The Malamud article has recently been reprinted by the New York University Press in a critical anthology entitled Bernard Malamud and the Critics, edited by Leslie and Joyce Field. In recent months other articles have appeared in College English and Renascence. A native of Wisconsin with a doctor of philosophy degree from Madison, Professor Shear has been a member of our English Department for the past ten years and during the last several years the director of our graduate program in English.

AMONG the July poets is our old acquaintance VICTOR CONTOSKI, his first QUARTERLY poem having appeared as long ago as October, 1965. In recent years he has received his doctorate from the University of Wisconsin, taken a job teaching American literature and poetry at the University of Kansas, had a good selection of his work published in the anthology 31 New American Poets (Hill & Wang, 1969), and begun a series of programs over the University of Kansas radio on contemporary American poetry. . . . A slightly older acquaintance is CHARLES EDWARD EATON, whose poems have been appearing in our pages since January, 1965. His fifth book of poetry, On the Edge of the Knife (1970), has recently won the Roanoke-Chowan Poetry Cup awarded by the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association. His short stories have been appearing regularly in Sewanee Review, Southwest Review, Kansas Quarterly, and elsewhere, and he is at work on his sixth volume of poetry. ROBERT FLANAGAN, whom we first published exactly two years ago, has two poems in this issue. He now lives in Delaware, Ohio, and teaches at Ohio Wesleyan University. His poems have appeared recently in Beloit Poetry Journal, Hierophant, Northeast, and the English journal Poetry and Audience, and a number are to be included in a forthcoming anthology, Doctor Generosity's Almanac: 17 Poets. . . . Beginning with last January, we have had a poem or poems by JOE SHEFFLER in every issue; we might call it a pleasant habit. Mr. Sheffier lives at Granby, Mass., and has finished a dissertation on Robert Creeley for the University of Massachusetts. He tells us that, lacking employment, he will probaby be plying his trade as a professional house-painter. . . . EDITH SHIFFERT is another recent and valued contributor, whose poems have been appearing in the QUARTERLY with some regularity since January, 1969. Mrs. Shiffert teaches English at Kyoto Seika Junior College, Kyoto, Japan.

OUR NEW POETS are also five in number, a balance we are always pleased to achieve. GEORGE BARR, after getting his start in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, moved to New England and took a degree at the University of New Hampshire. He now teaches English literature and creative writing at Westbrook College, Portland, Maine, and publishes his poems in North Country, Maine Times, Small Pond, The New England Review, The Isinglass Review, and elsewhere. . . . EDWARD GOLD lives at Hyattsville, Maryland, and we hope in time to know more about him. . . . ED OCHESTER teaches Renaissance poetry and contemporary literature at the University of Pittsburgh, and has had two books of poetry, We Like It Here (1967) and The Great Bourgeois Bus Company (1969), published by the Quixote Press of Madison, Wisconsin, both being reprinted this spring. His poems have appeared in a number of magazines, including Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, Hanging Loose, Perspective, Trans-Pacific, and Beloit Poetry Journal. LARRY RUBIN teaches English at Georgia Tech, Atlanta, and has taught American literature at the University of Krakow, 1961-62, on a Smith-Mundt Award, and at the University of Bergen, Norway, 1966-67, and the University of West Berlin, 1969-70, on Fulbright Awards. He has published two volumes of poems, The World’s Old Way (University of Nebraska Press, 1963) and Lanced in Light (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967), both of which have brought him awards and distinctions; and he now has a third collection, All My Mirrors Lie, going the rounds of the publishers. Individual poems have appeared in leading magazines and reviews, both in the United States, and in Canada, Great Britain, France, and Austria, as well as in fourteen poetry anthologies. . . . Our last poet, W. D. VALGARDSON, is a visiting lecturer in creative writing at neighboring Cottey College, Nevada, Missouri. His work has appeared in such journals as Canadian Forum, The Fiddlehead, poems '68, New Student Review, and the Icelandic English language quarterly, 65 degrees. He has done writing and broadcasting for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

IN THIS ISSUE our poetry editor reviews the new book of poet GIBBONS RUARK, a contributor to this journal and a welcome visitor to our campus, where he read his poetry to a large and appreciative audience of students and faculty.

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