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The Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought

Contents

ARTICLES

Camus on Capital Punishment

The Now Thoreau: Caveat Emptor

Gulliver and the Lestrygonians: A Heterodox View of the Social Relevance of Literature

The Winds of War and Wouk's Wish for for [sic.] the World

The Concept of Barbarism in Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus

The Bleak Landscape of Robert Frost

POEMS

Flights

Bluets

The Hat

The Maker's Name

A Mexican Primer

Bus Station: 2 A. M.

Next Morning

The Song of Wine

The Dream of a Citizen Soldier on the Eve of His Execution

The Pleasures of Mourning

Abstract

A COMMON THEME unites the six articles of this summer literary issue, and that is, in the words of one of our six authors, the "social relevance of literature." Surely nothing could be more relevant, more agonizingly immediate, than the question of capital punishment now moving into fresh confrontation with the Supreme Court. Possibly few or none of the several hundred prisoners waiting on the Death Rows of their respective state penitentiaries have ever heard of the Algerian-born French writer Albert Camus who wrote so often, so trenchantly, of this final barbarism. And that is by no means an idle reflection, for the population of Death Row is not recruited from the class of the privileged, the well-nourished, the well-read. PATRICK HENRY, author of this study on Albert Camus on capital punishment, is a professor in the department of foreign languages of Willamette University, Salem, Oregon. We regret that he has so little to say about himself, but his article speaks for him.

CHARLES CLERC, writing about the curiously popular play The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail, is more nearly concerned with a case of false relevance—the transmogrification of a multifaceted, contradictory, richly human individual like Thoreau into a simplistic, under-thirties hero of the here and now generation. A Ph. D. from the University of Iowa, Charles Clerc is now a professor of English at the University of the Pacific, Stockton, California. He is co-editor of a successful anthology, Seven Contemporary Short Novels (Scott, Foresman) and has had a full-length play The Pillar produced by Delta College in 1973. His articles and stories have appeared in Modern Fiction Studies, English Journal, Western Humanities Review, Satire Newsletter, and elsewhere.

CLERGYMAN, social worker, college professor, lecturer in fields as diverse as rock music, the feminist movement, and the Homeric gods, JOHN J. L. MOOD has done and written so much that we can only choose bewilderedly a few items here and there. He received his Ph. D. at Drew University, has taught at Illinois Wesleyan and Ball State University, and is now at San Diego. His poems have appeared in Village Voice and Illinois Quarterly, and he has published scholarly articles on Tennessee Williams, Samuel Beckett, poetry and poetic language, in such journals as BSU, Forum, PMLA, Studies in Short Fiction, Western Humanities Review, and elsewhere. His book Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties was published this year by W. W. Norton.

OF deliberate choice RICHARD BOLTON picks something considerably less than a literary masterpiece, Herman Wouk's The Winds of War, to study both a phenomenon of popular culture and the "shaping of a generation's perception of itself and its era.'' A former Anny Reserve officer, Dr. Bolton is particularly interested in the impact of the military upon modem culture and society. His study "Garrison Fiction and Its Sense of Place" appeared in Illinois Quarterly. With a B. A. in political science from Stanford, an M. A. in American Studies from Los Angeles State, and a Ph. D. in the same field from Washington State, he has taught American Studies at California State University-Los Angeles. He now serves as lead teacher for gifted students at Glendora (California) High School.

ROBERTA F. SARFATT BORKAT has written a study of Robert Frost's "bleak landscape" which in tone and substance slips uneasily into the general uneasiness characteristic of our age-and of this issue of the QUARTERLY. A graduate of Cornell University summa cum laude, a member of Phi Beta Kappa from her junior year, she took her Ph. D. in literature from the University of California, San Diego. She is currently an assistant professor of English at San Diego State University. Her article "The Cage of Custom" appeared in the spring 1974 issue of The University of Dayton Review, and she is co-author of a book, I Hate English But . . ., published by the San Diego University Press.

WE ASSUME that modesty prevented our sixth author, LIANA DE BONA NIXEN, from responding _to our request for additional biographical data. At the moment we know only that she has the Ph. D. in comparative literature and is a professor (assistant or associate) in the English department of the University of Redlands, California. Or perhaps there seemed time enough to answer our request, since originally we could not promise publication earlier than next January. The last-minute failure of a promised contribution gave us the desired opportunity to place Dr. Nixen's study of Thomas Mann's treatment of a thoroughly modern barbarism in its proper context in this issue.

THE POEMS IN this issue are the work of: BRUCE CUTLER, who heads the poetry program at Wichita State; DAVE ETTER, who recently completed his work as manuscript editor for the good new anthology Heartland II: Poets of the Midwest (Northern Illinois University Press); DAVID ALLAN EVANS, who edits Oakwood in Brookings, S. D.; ROBERT HOLLAND, who lives in Decatur, Ga.; JONATHAN KATZ, who needs to live in Topeka; TOMAS O'LEARY, who lives in his skin; and DAVE SMITH, who can't get enough of Nevada, Missouri.

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