The Midwest Quarterly; Vol. 7 No. 4

Authors

Paul McCarthy
John Fraser
James W. Tuttleton
Abigail Ann Hamblen
Walter Shear
L. W. Michaelson
Tracy Thompson
Charles L. Squier
E. F. Weisslitz
Emilie Glen
Sam Bradley
James Binney
Margaret B. Purcell
Nils Peterson
Jesse Forbeck
Stuart Friebert
John Taylor

Contents

Articles

Symbolic Elements in White Jacket

The Turn of the Screw Again

Leisure, Wealth, and Luxury: Edith Wharton's Old New York

Teen-Ager as Novelist: Pamela Moore

Culture Conflict in The Assistant

The Literature of Acedia

Verse

The Value of Poetry

Elizabeth

Landscape (from Tu Fu)

Edourdo's Strings

Met in Journey, Tom Wolfe

Abide, Abide

The Vistitor

Hawaiian Sketch

An Elegy

Don't Push Me Honey

The Aquarium

Fourth of July Weekend

Abstract

in this issue. . .

PRECEDENTS for a summer literary number are easy to find; our last three July issues come instantly to mind, but the tradition is far older than 1963. Summer used to be a leisurely season, replete with long lazy afternoons, lawns sloping gently down to water, frosted pitchers of lemonade, and books-from Hervey Allen to Stefan Zweig, Dreiser, Faulkner, Fielding, Fitzgerald, Hardy, Hawthorne, Hemingway, Howells, Sterne, Trollope, Turgenev, Zola, and a hundred others. Summer reading was an institution; there was time for it and its deepest enjoyment. The institution was a good one, memorable and permanently rewarding, and whether or not a summer literary number is still a practical concept is beside the point. There are still those who find the time to read, and there are still those who have something to say and find the time and the energy to write. One of the primary functions of a scholarly journal is to bring these two together. We have attempted to do this for our readers in these pages. Manuscripts coming to our attention since last fall have made possible this collection of essays treating a little-read novel by Herman Melville, Henry James's best-known work, Edith Wharton's old-fashioned social commentaries, the remarkably antipodal novels of Pamela Moore, a contemporary work by Bernard Malamud, and finally a sharp and disturbing comment on the kind of world in which men buy more junk than books.

EVERYBODY has at least heard of Moby Dick, but few general readers venture further into the corpus of Melville's extensive works. PAUL McCARTHY, associate professor of English at the University of Alabama, belongs to that elite corps of scholars who, in the last thirty or forty years, have rediscovered the lesser novels of this greatest American novelist. His doctoral dissertation (University of Texas, 1962), three articles treating The Confidence Man, Moby Dick, and Billy Budd in The Emerson Society Quarterly and Discourse, and a study in progress of the philosophical significance of the "side-kick" in Melville's novels (supported by three University of Alabama research grants), attest to his interest. Born in Des Moines, Professor McCarthy received his A. B. and M. F. A. degrees from the University of Iowa; before going to Tuscaloosa in 1962 he taught at Iowa State University, and the Universities of Idaho, North Dakota, and Texas.

EVERYBODY who has ever heard of Henry James has heard of The Turn of the Screw, and almost everybody in American literature has at least thought of writing an article on some facet of it. Quite aware of this tiresome fact (as his title suggests), JOHN FRASER, associate professor of English at Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, is convinced that there is still room for more critical examination. His manuscript convinced the editors of THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY of the soundness of his position; since no summer reading list can be complete without something of Henry James, we were quick to accept his lucid essay. A graduate of Oxford and the University of Minnesota, Professor Fraser is spending this summer at Seillons-Source-d'Argens (Var) in France. His articles have appeared or will appear in The Dalhousie Review, ELH, the new Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (on twentieth-century American and English poetics), The Melbourne Critical Review, Nineteenth Century Fiction, A Review of English Literature, The Western Humanities Review, The Western Review (under Ray B. West), and Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature.

AFFLUENCE is not entirely new under the American sun, and Edith Wharton had much to say about it during her long ( 1862-1937) life. From 1825, when George Clinton's "Big Ditch" made New York the port of the Atlantic seaboard, that metropolis has been the financial and mercantile center of the American world. Mrs. Wharton's native heath was Manhattan Island, and it was only natural that our first "most impressive woman novelist" should have written about what she knew best and first-hand. Last November JAMES W. TUTTLETON, assistant professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, sent us his manuscript exploring her "ambivalent attitude toward wealth," and we were quick to recognize the quality of his findings. While his doctoral dissertation (University of North Carolina, 1963) examined "Edith Wharton and the Novel of Manners," his articles have reached as widely various a selection of writers as Crane, Cooper, Conrad Aiken, Fitzgerald, and Henry James. His work has appeared in The American Imago, English Language Notes, Midcontinent American Studies Journal, Modern Fiction Studies, The Personalist, Speculum, and Studies in Short Fiction. He is now editing Voyages and Discoveries of the Companions of Columbus for the collected critical edition of The Writings of Washington Irving under the general editorship of Henry A. Pochmann.

ACADEMIC employment has never been the sine qua non for publication in this journal; last summer's literary number, for example, contained an article on Faulkner's "Pillar of Endurance" by a Newton, Massachusetts, housewife with the entirely credible name of ABIGAIL ANN HAMBLEN. Actually, she was born in Pennsylvania and holds degrees from Coe College in Iowa and the University of Nebraska somewhere north of here. Her articles in American literature have been published widely; The Georgia Review included her "Henry James and the Freedom Fighters of the Seventies" in its spring issue this year. James, in her estimation, is the foremost American writer, but her article here published is the very antithesis of Jamesian in subject matter: Pamela Moore will probably never win inclusion in anybody's anthology of American letters, but she had something to say during her short life. Mrs. Hamblen thinks Miss Moore deserves attention not only for the curious record she left but as a symptom of the malaise characteristic of our times.

PROVING that scope is important if not essential to exploring and teaching American Literature, WALTER SHEAR, associate professor of English in this College, first contributed an analysis of Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography to this journal some four years ago (“Franklin's Self Portrait," October, 1962) and now presents our readers with a probing discussion of a challenging novel by the contemporary writer, Bernard Malamud. A native of Wisconsin with his doctor of philosophy degree from Madison, Professor Shear has been our colleague for six years; he specializes in the American novel and this fall will head the Freshman Communications program. His interest in the novel made him a logical choice to review Robert Schneider's book, Five Novelists of the Progressive Era, in this issue.

RECAPITULATING in a sense the basic theme running through the writers and works discussed in our first five articles is "The Literature of Acedia," by L. W. MICHAELSON who has taught English at Colorado State University, Fort Collins, for the past five or six years, the while producing critical essays and satirical verse at a feverish pace. What room is there for the free individual in an increasingly materialistic, mechanistic, pluralistic society? What rewards, indeed what chances, are there for men and women who want more from life than mere physical security, in either the man-of-war-world of Melville or the mindless monotony of non-directional futility exhibited in Pamela Moore's adolescent novels of adolescence? Mike Michaelson was "bitten by a turgid scholarly article" at an early age, served a long apprenticeship to writing as "a rather hysterical newsman," and is now embroiled in a last-ditch struggle for his Ph.D. at the University of Denver. His last appearance in THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY was in the fall of 1962. Four of his poems are being anthologized by J. R. LeMaster of Defiance College in Poets of the Midwest, scheduled for September appearance by Young Publications, Appalachia, Virginia. The LeMaster volume will also include poems of more than a dozen other writers whose work we have published from time to time.

FAMILIARITY, reputed to bring contempt, can bring appreciation, acceptance, even attachment. This trite statement becomes even more obvious when one examines the list of poets whose work appears in the following pages. Of the eleven, only one is a newcomer: JOHN A. TAYLOR, a native Missourian with his bachelor of arts from the University of Missouri, and his master's and Ph.D. from the State University of Iowa, where he wrote poetry for both his thesis and dissertation. He is currently on the faculty of the State University College in Buffalo, New York; earlier he taught at the University of New Hampshire and at Rice University in Texas. His poetry has appeared in The Colorado Quarterly, December, The Kenyon Review, The Massachusetts Review, Perspective and The Southwest Review. He has done one book of poems (Verb Press, 1966) and is at work on a play. The other ten require little introduction to readers of THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY.

JAMES BINNEY is professor of English at West Chester State College, Pennsylvania, whose articles, stories, and poems have appeared in many publications; this is his fourth time in this journal. . . . SAM BRADLEY of Honey Brook, Pennsylvania, is an outstanding Quaker poet "concerned not only with form and technique but also with thought-and with those in America who have a conscience." He is the author of Men-In Good Measure (Gold Quill Press, 1965), and his poems have been widely published; we included three in last year's summer literary number. . . . JESSE FORBECK of St. Louis first appeared in our April issue this year; he has a book-length collection of verse ready for publication and recently completed "a long short story" which he may turn into a play. . . . STUART FRIEBERT of Oberlin occupies a special place with us since this was the first journal to publish his poetry; this historic breakthrough occurred in our summer issue of 1963, since when his work has appeared in many periodicals. . . . EMILIE GLEN of New York has been sending us poems for over five years now, and we have been perceptive enough to accept and publish them frequently. . . . NILS PETERSON, associate professor of English at San Jose State College, California, first contributed to THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY in the spring of 1963 when he was a teaching assistant at Rutgers; in the interim he has had poetry in Cape Rock Quarterly, Fiddlehead, The Quire, and The Tower. . . . CHARLES L. SQUIER, assistant professor of English at the University of Colorado, made his first appearance with us in our spring issue this year; co-editor of The Sonnet, an anthology published by Washington Square Press, and assistant editor of Abstracts of English Studies, he would rather write poetry than anthologize or edit. . . . MARGARET BARBRICK PURCELL of Pasadena, California is a playwright whose work has been produced in Los Angeles and Hollywood little theatres; for years she organized. and directed the Playwrights Repertory Company and gave professionaI reviews and interpretative play-readings. Her verse, usually with oriental color and flavor, has appeared in this journal on two earlier occasions, October, 1964, and January, 1965. . . . TRACY THOMPSON, sometimes with oriental color and flavor, sends us no, news from San Francisco but much poetry. . . . E. F. WEISSLITZ of West Boxford, Massachusetts, has poetry forthcoming in The Beloit Poetry Journal, The New Yorker, and The Yale Review; our summer literary number last year included her "Passage."

EDITORIAL honesty requires, and long friendship dictates, acknowledgement of the conscientious, good-natured, and professional collaboration of REBECCA PATTERSON, professor of English and associate. editor responsible for the field of literature, in the selection and preparation of the contents of this issue.

Recommended Citation

McCarthy, Paul; Fraser, John; Tuttleton, James W.; Hamblen, Abigail Ann; Shear, Walter; Michaelson, L. W.; Thompson, Tracy; Squier, Charles L.; Weisslitz, E. F.; Glen, Emilie; Bradley, Sam; Binney, James; Purcell, Margaret B.; Peterson, Nils; Forbeck, Jesse; Friebert, Stuart; and Taylor, John (1966) "The Midwest Quarterly; Vol. 7 No. 4," The Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought: Vol. 7: Iss. 4, Article 1.
Available at: https://digitalcommons.pittstate.edu/mwq/vol7/iss4/1