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The Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought

Contents

ARTICLES

Ideas and Diplomacy--An Analysis of America's Cold War Diplomacy

Cyprus: A Treasure-House for Social Scientists

Adlai E. Stevenson and the Crisis of Liberalism

The Exorcism of England's Gothic Demon

Ingmar Bergman: Beyond the Realistic Image

Two Novels of Working Class Consciousness

VERSE

Insomnia

Improvisational Elegy for Emmanuel Shaw

My Brothers Die

Tapepoem: There is Again the Hand Through the Transem

Hurt

The Taxidermist

Long Island Spring

Cleaning the Tiles

Midden

Waking

Short Story

Abstract

in this issue. . .

WITHOUT A CRYSTAL BALL and with no faith in our special sensitivity to coming events (writing as we do in late October of the preceding year), we have no confident picture of the world to which this issue of January 1973 will be going out. We do not know who will be President, though we have our lively suspicions, nor whether the cruellest, bloodiest of wars will have come to some sort of conclusion, though we have our desperate hopes. But one thing we can be sure of, and that is, it is time—it is always time but especially now—to reexamine the suppositions on which we have acted and to discover, if we can, what went wrong and how it can be changed.

WITH THIS objective in mind we invited W. T. WOOLEY to assess the ideas and diplomacy involved in American cold war orthodoxy. And since it is useful and essential to have a sort of model of how irreconcilable differences can be somehow contained, modified and lived with, if not reconciled, we welcomed an examination by THEODORE A. COULOUMBIS and ELIAS P. GEORGIADES of that paradigm of ethnic conflict and political struggle, Aphrodite's sea-draped island of Cyprus. There is relevance too in examining how good men react to the stresses of the time, whether or not we agree with RODNEY M. SIEVERS, in his "Adlai E. Stevenson and the Crisis of Liberalism," that the hero weakened under stress and might even appear "irrelevant" to a generation that has no interest in history. From the unmistakable politicism of these three articles to an examination of England's (and America's) exorcism of the Gothic demon is not the large step it may appear, for L. ROBERT STEVENS is concerned with that impasse toward which British and American sensibility has moved, the fear and perhaps even the discovery that man ''has ceased to function," that he "can make anything work except his own civilization." ALAN CASTY returns to our pages with a study of that somber genius Ingmar Bergman, and JOHN M. REILLY, whose work has appeared on two earlier occasions in THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY, writes of a rarely studied genre of American literature, the novel of working class consciousness.

AN AMERICAN transplanted to Canada, W. T. Wooley received his bachelor's degree at the University of Illinois, his master's and doctor's at the University of Chicago, and has held Woodrow Wilson, University of Chicago, and National Defense Fellowships. He has recently published an article in The Historian concerned with "American Supranationalism" in the years 1945-1947, which has obvious relations with the present article. A specialist in American diplomatic history, Professor Wooley is in the history department of the University of Victoria, Victoria, British Columbia.

OUR SPECIALISTS in Cyprus have personal as well as professional interests in their subject. Theodore A. Couloumbis was born in Athens, Greece, but educated at the University of Connecticut and at American University, where he received his Ph. D. in 1964. He is now Associate Professor of International Relations at the School of International Service, American University. He is the author of Greek Political Reaction to American and NATO Infiuences (Yale University Press, 1966) and contributor of articles to various journals, anthologies, and newspapers. His colleague Elias P. Georgiades was born in Panayia, Cyprus, and studied at the Pandeios School of Political Science, Athens, Greece, the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, the University of Denver, and the American University, Washington, D. C. He has just completed a dissertation dealing with science, technology, and international relations, and is currently serving on the editorial board of the Journal of International and Comparative Studies.

THE NAME of Adlai E. Stevenson has been invoked on occasion in the presidential campaign just ended, and as Rodney M. Sievers has demonstrated, he is still a figure to be reckoned with. He has also been a subject of particular interest to our author, who wrote his doctoral dissertation on Stevenson and is currently engaged in further research on American liberalism in the post-World War II period. A native Kansan, Dr. Sievers received his B. A. degree at the University of New Mexico and his M. A. and Ph. D. in history at the University of Virginia, where he was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow. He has taught at St. Lawrence University and now teaches American intellectual history at California State University at Humboldt.

OUR SPECIALIST in the Gothic temperament, L. Robert Stevens, is an associate professor of English at North Texas University, Denton, is an associate editor for the journal Studies in the Novel, and has published in South Atlantic Quarterly, Southern Humanities Review, Victorian Poetry, and The Victorian Newsletter.

THE ARTICLE on Ingmar Bergman which appears in this issue is part of a chapter from a book by Alan Casty, Development of the Film: An Interpretive History, which is to be published by Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich later this year. This is a third appearance for Professor Casty in our journal, where he continues to keep us informed about current trends in the ever-enthralling genre of the movies. He still teaches English at Monica City College and film history and aesthetics at U. C. L.A. and writes or edits an increasing number of well received books and anthologies, among them being The Films of Robert Rossen (Museum of Modern Art), The Dramatic Art of the Film (Harper & Row), The Act of Writing and Reading (Prentice-Hall), and of course the forthcoming book from which the present article is drawn.

THIS IS LIKEWISE a third appearance for John M. Reilly. He is still teaching at State University of New York at Albany, where he is now an associate professor of English. He too is a prolific writer, three essays on Richard Wright having appeared in the latter half of 1971 in Studies in Black Literature, Colorado Quarterly, and Resources for American Literary Study, as well as the article on "Dos Passos et al" which appeared in our July 1971 issue. In 1972 still another essay on Wright appeared in Journal of Black Studies, and an essay on Chester Himes was scheduled for publication in Journal of Popular Culture as well as numerous smaller articles on contemporary American writers in the book Contemporary Novelists of the English Language, ed. James Vinson (London: St. James Press, 1972).

TURNING TO OUR POETS, we welcome a new poem by PETER COOLEY, who appeared in our pages as recently as the issue of Winter 1971. He is still teaching creative writing at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay and has had poems in recent issues of New American Review, Yale Review, and Esquire. . . . In this issue S. J. MARKS concludes the fine series of poems begun in our October issue. . . . GIBBONS RUARK returns with two poems after a longer absence than we like to think of. We remember with lively pleasure his visit to our school in mid-November 1970 and his poetry reading to a large and responsive group of students. . . . It was no later than last July that ALBERTA T. TURNER alarmed some of our friends the poets by a fascinating account of what Computer 360/ 50 did to a poem of hers originally published in our journal. After a first suspicious glance at the manuscript of the poem appearing in this issue, our Poetry Editor observed with relief that it proved how incomparably better a human being is than a computer. Personally we rather enjoyed the wild and unexpected humor of 360/50. By the time this issue appears Poet Turner will be enjoying a winter vacation in the Canaries. . . . It has been a little over five years since MRS. E. F. WEISSLITZ has had a poem in our pages-our loss, we admit. Last summer an unfortunate breakdown in planning deprived us of an expected visit with Mrs. Weisslitz in Boston—our loss again—but we can say that she is still living in the near neighborhood of Boston and still writing poems.

OUR CUSTOMARY HEARTY WELCOME goes out to our four new poets. MICHAEL CADNUM, a native Californian, presently a student at the University of California at Berkeley, has published in The Writer, and is now working on a novel and a book of poetry. . . . PETER C. FOGO, another native Californian, born under Sagittarius (a Leo nods acknowledgement), has done some traveling in his twenty-five years. Schooled in Gary, Indiana, and at the University of Nevada-Reno and Northern Michigan University, he wrote last spring from Marquette but gave us a return address in Houston. This is his first publication, he says, "in a widely read, respected journal," which entitles him to a full bow from Leo. . . . LOUIS PHILLIPS is the author of The Man Who Stole the Atlantic Ocean (Prentice-Hall) and The Cuban Manifesto which is soon to be published. Poems of his have appeared in Mademoiselle, Epoch, The Ohio University Review, and other magazines. His full-length play, The Last of the Marx Brothers' Writers, has been recently optioned for a possible Broadway production. . . . CHAD WALSH was a founder and for many years an editor of The Beloit Poetry Journal. He is a professor of English and writer-in-residence at Beloit College. His fifth book of verse, The End of Nature, was published in 1969 by the Swallow Press. He has twice received poetry awards from the Society of Midland Authors and the Council for Wisconsin Writers, and gives frequent readings on college campuses. He has held Fulbright lectureships in Finland and Rome and has had two periods at Yaddo. In addition to poetry he has edited two texts, Doors into Poetry (Prentice-Hall) and Today's Poets (Scribner).

BEFORE QUITTING this issue, we should like to notice an event of more than local interest sponsored by the Student Senate of Kansas State College. A joint reading by Allen Ginsberg and his father, Louis Ginsberg, drew listeners from three other State schools, and from Missouri, as well as a good turnout here in Pittsburg, setting a precedent, we hope, for other readings by well-known poets. In our most optimistic moments we think of a Poetry Festival. We were gratified too that our guests found so much of interest in Big Brutus, now the world's second largest power shovel busily tearing down the landscape, and in the printing home of The Appeal to Reason and the Haldeman-Julius Little Blue Books. Poems by Louis Ginsberg have appeared in THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY. In this issue his latest book of poems, Morning in Spring, is reviewed by poetry editor MICHAEL HEFFERNAN.

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