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The Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought

Contents

Articles

For Jobs and Freedom: Three Views of the Washington March

I. A Sociologist's Appraisal

II. "It wasn't that we didn't care."

III. We Were Not Alone

Pinter's The Caretaker: The Lower Depths Descended

The Artist as Academician

The Bitterness of Battle: Ambrose Bierce's War Fiction

Verse

The Lottery

On the Death of a Day-Old Child

Squaw Winter

When

The Great-Coat

Still Life

The Broken Drum

I Have Become Like an Old Dog

For a Song Resumed

Cat in the Attic Window

Abstract

in this issue. . .

A JOURNAL of contemporary thought cannot and ought not become a journal of current events; editorial and production problems alone prevent this. There are occasions, however, when events are of such transcendent importance and impact that they require immediate attention--even by academics who tend to prefer a measure of detachment if only for the development or emergence of perspective. One such event was the "Jobs and Freedom" march in Washington, D. C., last August 28. Thanks primarily to television coverage, it had a tremendous and immediate impact on all Americans who cared to look and listen. Planning for this issue of THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY was well along by midsummer, but it became clear by early September that what had seemed important in July had suffered at least temporary eclipse. Painfully aware of the fundamental truth of Edmund Burke's pronouncement that "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing," we revised our initial plans. Then the brutal, senseless tragedy of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy struck the nation and the world.

WASHINGTON has seen many marches in its long history-inaugural parades, grand reviews, funeral processions, the ragged veterans of Coxey's Army and the Bonus Expeditionary Force-but there has been nothing quite comparable to that great demonstration of August 28, 1963. After some thought, we invited reports on that march from a number of men and women with particular points of view and powers of observation. The results of these invitations are the three reports here published. For a balanced, objective judgment of the occasion and its probable results, we turned to JAMES W. VANDER ZANDEN of Ohio State University, and he was quick to give us his cooperation. A recognized authority on "ethnic problems in the U. S., Professor Vander Zanden has published in THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY on two earlier occasions. His American Minority Relations came out last April and has been widely adopted as a textbook. Random House will shortly publish another Vander Zanden book: Race Patterns in Transition: The Segregation Crisis in the South.

WE WANTED a closer view of the march, and so we turned to our old friends from graduate days at the University of Colorado: ALSTON JERRETT and EMMY HAMMOND SHAKESHAFT. As a matter of hard truth, it was the other way round: we asked Emmy to write her impressions, knowing that Jerry was up to his ears in graduate economic theory at Boulder. The final result was a composite work, fundamentally Emmy's but with important contributions from Jerry. He is a Kansan who began his academic career at Yale and, after a year of European combat in the closing rounds of WW II, moved West (although no firm supporter of the Turner thesis) to Colorado whence he returned to the East and a distinguished eight years in the Public health Service, Department of Health, Education and Welfare. In Washington he met Miss Hammond, a New Yorker with a Reed College, Oregon, background. Bronxsville and Topeka are now merged in Boulder. Their composition brings the reader from the academic detachment of Columbus, Ohio, to a bird's eye view of Washington on August 28.

FORTUNATELY, we had other friends in Washington on that day, and they were in the middle of things. HOMER & ELIZABETH BROWN were members of our academic family for two years; their interview of Thomas Hart Benton appeared in our summer issue. This fall Homer began doctoral work at the Johns Hopkins University where he is a junior instructor in English literature. Betty serves the Hopkins Medical Institute as a public relations assistant. Fortunately again, they moved to Baltimore during the summer, and on August 28 went to Washington as parts of the march, accompanied by our colleague Walter Shear. To our urgent requests for a report on what it was like, Homer responded, with assistance from Betty, and his pages take the reader into the very center of the event. One poignant note-this excerpt from his covering letter of November 25, 1963: "Today as we tried to touch this up and get it into the mail, another march was taking place in Washington--a totally different one in almost every aspect but perhaps one--both marked our failure to live by reason and law. What changes now come neither of us can predict and the sort of world your January issue will awake to is beyond my powers of imagination."

LAST APRIL FLORENCE JEANNE GOODMAN dispatched a manuscript to us, a discussion growing directly out of her exploration of the Theater of the Absurd which appeared in last January's issue. We suspect that some of the critics of that article may be considerably happier with this analysis of Harold Pinter's The Caretaker. Mrs. Goodman is associate professor of English at Pierce College near Los Angeles.

VARIOUS discussions of the role of the artist and the problems he encounters in different situations have appeared in our pages in the past several years. When our colleague, DONALD ATWELL ZOLL, assistant professor of political science here, presented a paper before our faculty seminar on liberal education in October, the editors present at once knew a good thing when they heard it. Once more we are indebted to our associate editor, Theodore Melrose Sperry, moderator of that important faculty activity. And once more we are indebted to Professor Zoll who, whether as political theorist, poet, or stimulating conversationalist, has yet to let us down. His Reason and Rebellion, An Informal History of Political Ideas, published last April, continues to win adoption on more and more college campuses.

WHEN ERIC SOLOMON, associate professor of English at Ohio State University, sent us the manuscript of his discussion of the war stories of Ambrose Bierce, we were immediately favorable to early publication for several good reasons: rereading In the Midst of Life in connection with teaching Civil War history at Vanderbilt in the summer of 1962, the editor had then renewed an acquaintance of a quarter of a century with "the devil's lexicographer,'' and this experience was fresh in his mind; more important, his colleagues in American literature were quick to point to a dearth of recent discussion of Bierce and his curious literary career. Moreover, we are now engaged in a great Civil War Centennial, and Bierce had much to say about that "strange, sad war." Professor Solomon has edited The Faded Banners: An Anthology of Nineteenth-Century Civil War Fiction, and has published articles on Stephen Crane, Mark Twain, Rudyard Kipling, Emily Bronte, and Scott Fitzgerald in such journals as Modern Fiction Studies, College English, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Harvard granted him the doctor of philosophy degree in 1958. By a curious coincidence, he is on leave this academic year to complete a book on the fiction of Stephen Crane, spending the year in Baltimore where he has come "to know and admire" Homer Brown.

OUR NINE POETS whose ten poems appear in this issue include five who should be rather well known to our readers and four who are new to our pages but hardly unknown novices. JOHN CLARKE who teaches English at Green Mountain College in Poultney, Vermont, has his A. B. from Kenyon College and his M. A. from Stanford University where he had a Woodrow Wilson fellowship. He has. been published in The New Mexico Quarterly, and last summer he participated in the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference. . . . JOHN JUDSON teaches at Coburn Classical Institute in Waterville, Maine; a graduate of Colby College, he has done graduate work at both the State University of Iowa and the University of Maine. Prior to teaching, he worked as electronic technician, house painter, and semi-professional baseball player. His work has appeared in Coastlines, Chicago Choice, The Literary Review, and The New York Times. He is one of the editorial triumvirate of the new international literary annual, Northeast, first issue of which appeared last July. . . . WILLIAM B. SALLAR is another Easterner; he has been teaching English in New York City high schools for twenty years but only recently began to publish poems and essays. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Vineyard Gazette, Caravan, and The Villager. . . . ROBERT WARD, by contrast, is a Midwesterner with a Missouri-Illinois-Iowa-Ohio background. Born a Buckeye, he quit high school during World War II to work as a "hairy ape" fireman on an old coal-burning ship. He used up his CI bill for degrees from Akron and Ohio State. He has just completed his Ph.D. at the University of Missouri and now teaches American and modern literature at the State College of Iowa, Cedar Falls. He has had several poems published in Midlands.

DONALD ATWELL ZOLL wrote "The Lottery" toward the end of October, and it seemed to us to fit rather poignantly the death of President Kennedy in November. . . . STUART FRIEBERT of Oberlin College first appeared in our summer issue; indeed, "Odenwald" was his first published poem. We are pleased to report that this encouraged him to continue to write poetry with the happy result that other journals have followed our lead in accepting his work, including The National Observer and The Arizona Quarterly. . . . By now EMILIE GLEN needs no editorial introduction to our readers, but we pause to note and applaud her inclusion in a special issue of Midwest published last spring and dedicated to "American Women Poets Today." . . . MENKE KATZ of Brooklyn continues his excellent work as editor of Bitterroot which began its second volume this fall. Included in that issue, incidentally, were poems by Emilie Glen and TRACY THOMPSON. That worthy continues to deserve his title of America's most prolific poet by sending us frequent contributions from Japan where he has been teaching since last spring.

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