•  
  •  
 

The Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought

Contents

ARTICLES

Samuel Johnson and the Psychology of War

Lawrence Ferlinghetti as Elphin's Bard

Charles Dickens as a Critic of the United States

Chekhov's Two Great American Directors

Moonlight and Shadows: The Big Bands, 1934-1974

Big Fourteen: Howard N. Meyer's The Amendment That Refused to Die

POETRY

Skipper

The White Sheep's Version

The Falcon/Her Dreams

The Daydream of Falling

Long Distance

You

The Omens

Performing Dogs

Houdini

Prey and Predators

Political Poem I Swore I Would Never Write

Elegy for Roethke

Abstract

in this issue. . .

SHORTHANDED for many months, this journal heartily welcomes a new member to its Editorial Board, CALVIN H. MERRIFIELD. A member of the Kansas State College faculty since 1961, he is a professor in the department of psychology and counselor education, has bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Missouri, a Ph. D. from the University of Wyoming, and has published articles in a number of professional journals. We were amused to learn, however, that he began teaching, somewhat informally, in a very different field. During a stint in the U.S. Marine Corps his obvious literacy caught the attention of his superiors, and through 1945-47 he was kept busy teaching English to his fellow Marines. His deskmate was George C. Scott, who has since gone on to achieve a modest amount of fame in still another field. Following their military service both young men attended the University of Missouri, where Scott discovered his taste for acting and his ex-deskmate discovered an interest in psychology. We are glad to give Dr. Merrifield a fresh new interest.

THE WELCOMING of a new member to our Editorial Board has often been accompanied by a valedictory notice of a departing member, but happily that is not our present case. Although Associate Editor THEODORE M. SPERRY turned emeritus professor this past May, he had already told us he would like to continue his work with the journal, and we were delighted to be able to count on his prompt, trenchant, often witty, and always helpful commentaries on the manuscripts that pour across our desk. Indeed we noticed at the retirement banquet that Professor Sperry declined the gift chair bestowed upon retirees, because he had no intention of sitting down. He plans to remain curator of the herbarium which he developed during his years at the college and which has been appropriately named The Theodore M. Sperry Herbarium. In addition to his work on the QUARTERLY, of which he has been an honored associate editor since its founding fifteen years ago, he expects to continue research in plant geography and ornithology and to contribute articles on these subjects to the learned journals.

IF HE were not so busy looking into the future, Dr. Sperry might look back on a full and valuable past. Just fifty years ago he graduated from an Indianapolis high school (where we remember his telling us he had four years of Greek), went on to take his B. S. in botany and chemistry at Butler University of Indianapolis, then to the University of Illinois for his M. S. in plant physiology and his Ph. D. in plant ecology. He has also had post-doctoral work at the University of Wisconsin and a short course at the University of North Carolina. In a long and varied career he has worked as a laboratory assistant (through high school and college), with the U.S. Forest Service in southern Illinois, and with the National Park Service on the University of Wisconsin Arboretum at Madison. During World War II he was commissioned a weather officer with the Air Force, serving both here and in England. In 1946 he joined the faculty of our college, becoming full professor of botany and ecology in 1957. During 1951-52 he took a year's leave of absence to serve as consultant in ecology for the Belgian government, surveying savannas for the agricultural service (INEAC) in the northeastern part of the Belgian Congo in central Africa. The hottest days of his tropical service, he once told us, were the day he left Pittsburg, Kansas, and the day he got back.

FOR the editor any continued musing about our friend Sperry takes us back to our first sight of the remarkable home created by his imagination and that of his gifted wife, Dr. Gladys Galliger. The property goes hy the name of Paradox, although the house proper, according to hazy memory, has a more poetical name, like Lyrose. But the gem of a house is surpassed by its setting, some half-acre or so of native trees and grasses-we're vague about dimensions, but the illusion is one of boundlessness, in the heart of a busy, modem little city. Our introduction came on an autumn midnight, when we followed our hosts to a study at the rear of the house and looked through invisible glass on a seemingly moonlit landscape of trees and brush and waterhole. But where? at what? We could have been in the heart of Africa. At Treetops House! Except that the little creatures rustling through the brush were natives of southeast Kansas coaxed back to live again in an islet of primitive wilderness surrounded by a bustling city. At other times and seasons we have followed friend Sperry down and around the trails and have seen the nets where he catches and bands and photographs birds and does other marvels. But memory keeps returning to that first spellbound midnight, the shimmering magic of it, those many years ago.

TO TURN NOW to the business of these introductory pages, we celebrate our sixteenth anniversary with a potpourri of almost everything, which is our favorite kind of cooking. We do avoid Watergate, and we have nothing on any current war, although we bow to the spirit of the times and open with an article on Samuel Johnson’s troubled reflections and contradictions on the general subject of war. We tum next to an interesting new theory about poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti's work, followed by an analysis of Charles Dickens’ American Notes, a discussion of Chekhov on the American stage, a nostalgic recollection of the Big Bands of 1935 and afterwards, and for our last article, an essay-review of Howard N. Meyer’s The Amendment That Refused to Die. A sufficiently varied offering, we should think.

OUR Johnson expert, LIONEL BASNEY, took his B. A. at Houghton College, New York, and his M. A. and Ph. D. at the University of Rochester. He is now an associate professor of English at Houghton College, and in our opinion a very young man, still in his twenties, to have so impressive a record of achievement behind him. He is the founding co-editor of Ktaadn Poetry Press, publisher of poetry magazine Ktaadn and Ktaadn Molehill Pamphlets, and is bibliographer of Christianity and Literature. He has published a number of articles and reviews, several of which deal with Dr. Johnson, and has tried his hand at poetry, having about fifteen poems in such journals as Ktaadn, Descant, and Encore.

WE HAVE had much correspondence with CHARLES R. METZGER, our Ferlinghetti author, because his subject interested us very much and yet seemed so difficult to present in the clearest, most effective way. Happily all problems have been solved. We are impressed to learn how much this study means to Professor Metzger, who tells us he spent more time on it, ten years, than on any of his books: Emerson and Greenough, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1954; Thoreau and Whitman, University of Washington Press, 1961 (reprinted by Archon, 1963); and with Richard Fu-Sen Yang, Fifty Sons from the Yuan: Poetry of Thirteenth Century China, 1967, one of the Unesco series of translations. He has also published sixteen articles, two of which have appeared in earlier issues of our QUARTERLY. Dr. Metzger is professor of English at the University of Southern California.

LOUIE CREW, who urges us to take another look at Charles Dickens as a critic of the United States, is a very busy young associate professor of English at Fort Valley State College, Georgia-so busy, in fact, that he has just turned down a Fulbright lectureship in Turkey for 1974-75. The action, he thinks, is here in our own country. Since earning his doctorate at the University of Alabama in 1971, he has had work accepted by over thirty publishers, including Black Creation, Christian Century, CCC, Gay Sunshine, Harper's, Saturday Review Education, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. Currently he is co-editing a special 1974 issue of College English on the homosexual imagination, and he is editor of the new periodical Notes on Teaching English.

PHILIP BORDINAT, who examines the luck of Anton Chekhov at the hands of various American directors, has an interestingly varied academic background: the B. A. from Hillsdale College, the M. A. from Wayne University, and the Ph. D. from the University of Birmingham, England. He has taught at Dartmouth College, Miami University, and the University of Nigeria, where for two years he was chairman of English. For five years he was dean of liberal arts at Wright State University. Currently, he is a professor of English at West Virginia University, teaching courses in Shakespeare and modem drama. Publications include two books, Readings in Criticism (1961) and Revealer of Secrets: Folk Stories from Nigeria (co-edited with Peter Thomas; published this year); articles on various subjects, including Shakespeare, Ibsen, Chekhov, Lawrence, and African drama; and a teaching manual, The Art and Craft of College Teaching (1966, 1973).

THE ARTICLES submitted to us by PETER A. SODERBERGH have been so varied as to suggest that he could prepare even such an issue as this almost singleheanded. He has written on Upton Sinclair's battle with Hollywood, on Edward Stratemeyer's dominance of the juvenile field from Rover Boys to Tom Swift to Nancy Drew to dozens of other series, and now an article on the Big Bands. At the time we published his first article, four years ago, Dr. Soderbergh was an associate professor at the University of Pittsburg, teaching rather broadly across the departments of secondary education, theatre arts, and foundations of education. Today he is associate dean for academic affairs, Curry Memorial School of Education, the University of Virginia. About his idea that "we knew each other in a previous life and we are working off the leftover karma," the editor has come up with a suggestion. Although we could not have met at the University of Texas, Austin, where we both received our Ph. D. degrees, might not the editor's aural self have been lingering there when Peter Soderbergh removed from Harvard to Texas?

COMING to our last contributor, DUDLEY T. CORNISH, who created this journal and was its editor-in-chief during its first eight years, we are surprised and disconcerted to learn how much we have taken him for granted. We supposed our files had ample background material, but it looks very much as if the first editor stepped down with the July 1967 issue and the present editor stepped up in the October issue with no more than a harassed salute in passing. Here then is the background. Dudley Cornish took his bachelor's degree at the University of Rochester. He then moved as far west as Boulder, Colorado, where he took his M. A. and Ph. D. at the University of Colorado. In 1949 he joined the faculty of Kansas State College to teach history in the department of social sciences. On the creation of a separate history department in 1967 he was made its chairman, and this increase in his professional duties led to his reluctant surrender of the QUARTERLY editorship. Of course he is still on the board and we take every advantage of his ability and his courtesy. He is the author of the first important study of the contribution made by Negro troops to the Civil War, The Sable Arm, Longmans, Green, 1956, reprinted as a paperback in the Norton History Library, 1966; and he compiled the section on the Negro in the Centennial Bibliography of Civil War History, Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University, 1966-67. He has been appointed by the governor to the Kansas American Revolutionary Bicentennial Commission. Currently he is president of the Kansas State Historical Society.

THIS ISSUE’s POETRY SECTION opens with a piece by BERT ALMON, who lives in Edmonton, Canada, where he teaches at the University of Alberta. His book, The Return and Other Poems, appeared in 1968. . . . JIM HEYNEN is in Eugene, Oregon, editing poems for the Northwest Review. He was one of the winners, last spring, of the National Endowment on the Arts creative writing fellowship in poetry. . . . TED KOOSER is beginning to put together a poetry series with his Windflower Press, along with editing The New Salt Creek Reader. He lives in Lincoln. . . . GREG KUZMA'S work appears regularly in Poetry, The New Yorker, and other leading periodicals. He and his family live in Crete, Nebraska. . . . One of JOAN LABOMBARD's poems won first prize in the Borestone Mountain Poetry Awards for 1970. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Poetry, and The Virginia Quarterly Review. . . . JAY MEEK has had work in recent issues of Field, Epoch, and The Iowa Review. He teaches at the Cortland campus of the State University of New York. . . . JAMES RAGAN teaches at Ohio University. His work has appeared in Poetry Northwest, Shenandoah, Northwest Review, among others. . . . RICK SMYTH is a creative writing student at the University of Delaware and a recent winner of an Academy of American Poets first prize in poetry.

THE BRIEF REVIEW in this issue is by Editor REBECCA PATTERSON.

Download

Share

COinS
 
 

To view the content in your browser, please download Adobe Reader or, alternately,
you may Download the file to your hard drive.

NOTE: The latest versions of Adobe Reader do not support viewing PDF files within Firefox on Mac OS and if you are using a modern (Intel) Mac, there is no official plugin for viewing PDF files within the browser window.