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The Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought

Contents

Articles

William Carlos Williams: The Leech-Gatherer of Paterson

The Meaning of Life in Aldous Huxley

The American Novel in the Sixties

Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience in Lord of the Flies and The Inheritors

Henry James and the Power of Eros: What Maisie Knew

Gide and Henry James: Suffering, Death, and Responsibility

Verse

Sound and Movement of the Forest: Summer

The Lady Ch'ên Shu and Child

Drought

Miss Rowena

Older River

A Sentence for Thoreau

Father and Son and Holy Ghost

Basutos

Patterns of Difference

Moon Change

Jay

Stopping after a Haul

Abstract

in this issue. . .

DURING TIMES of incessant change any practice or custom that maintains itself for as long as six years may fairly claim to be a hallowed tradition. Just such a tradition THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY is building for itself with this sixth Summer Literary Number. Not that we ever wholly close our pages to a good study of literature at other seasons of the year, and not that our literary number involves any really basic difference from the other three quarterly issues. The emphasis, the approach, may vary somewhat, but all four issues are alike concerned with the quality of life in our own times. Superficially the contents of the present number, ranging in subject from Henry James and Andre Gide through Aldous Huxley and William Carlos Williams and William Golding down to the leading American novelists of the present decade, may seem to vary widely and to have little in common other than their contemporaneity. Closer inspection reveals that one and all are probing the quality of this contemporary life.

THE COMMON THEME is explicitly stated in the opening sentences of our opening article, "William Carlos Williams: The Leech-Gatherer of Paterson." Author THOMAS W. LOMBARDI says that Williams, like Wordsworth's ancient leech-gatherer, "fixedly did look upon the muddy water" of his own Passaic River in search of a cure for the ills of our present life and that he found this cure once more in the willingness of one man to endure, to remain in place, to deal with evils rather than to flee them. Assistant Professor Lombardi teaches English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and would seem to have an abiding interest 'in the work of that unlikely leech-gatherer, George Gordon Lord Byron. A recent article, "Byron's Letters,” appeared in the January 1967 Bulletin of the New York Public Library; an article entitled "Byron's Hebrew Melodies" is forthcoming in the Keats-Shelley Journal; and his critical edition of Byron's lyrics will be published in London this year. An article on Samuel Beckett in the Spring 1968 Chelsea Review and the present study of Williams' Paterson suggest promising new interests.

ALTHOUGH his work is pervaded by anxiety for the destiny of man, Aldous Huxley retained, or perhaps achieved, a desperate hope that man might still prevail over his technology and restore a sense of meaning and significance to his life. The cynical pessimism of Brave New World, the despairing nihilism of Ape and Essence, yield to the more hopeful vision of his final utopia, Island. This change of attitude may be partially accounted for by a greater interest in and respect for the spirituality and mysticism of Indian thought. Appropriately this study of the parallels between Huxley's ideas and Indian philosophy comes to us from India. Both of our authors are associated with the University of Rajasthan at Jaipur. G. S. P. MISRA received his M.A. in ancient history and archaeology at the University of Gorakhpur in 1962 and his Ph. D. at the University of Rajasthan in 1966. His publications, largely concerned with Buddhist philosophy and religion, have appeared in such Indian journals as Quest, Indian Antiquary, Journal of the Gujarat Research Society, and others. A paper entitled "Logical and Scientific Method in Early Buddhism" will shortly appear in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland. At present he is teaching in the Department of History and Indian Culture at the University of Rajasthan. NORA SATIN received her M.A. in English at the University of Rajasthan in 1965 and is now working toward a doctorate, with a study of India in modern English fiction, particularly in the writing of Kipling, Forster, and Huxley.

IF TIIE BASIC PROBLEM of the American novel in the sixties is one of diversity, of finding a link among such diverse writers as Nabokov, Cheever, Bellow, Mailer, Michener, and others, it might be supposed that no common theme existed. Yet a reader of our study of the current American novel soon finds himself on uncomfortably familiar ground with references to a "growing spirit of despair and resignation,” to a time of "anxiety, alienation, sexual frustration," to the "human psyche, abused and bewildered," to a "solipsistic and anarchical reaction against the world." It is the dismaying world that we have already explored with Aldous Huxley and William Carlos Williams. Our young author, MICHAEL R. FRENCH, took his B. A. in creative writing at Stanford University as recently as 1966. He now has the M. S. in journalism from Northwestern University, has won several prizes for his fiction, including first prize in the 1966 national Alpha Delta Phi contest, has published in the Stanford Workshop and Daily, and is currently writing his own novel for the sixties.

SOCIOLOGISTS might question the propriety of selecting little boys to enact the fall of man on the ground that preadolescent boys could not fall from a grace to which they had never risen, but the astonishing appeal of Golding's Lord of the Flies to high school and college youth would suggest some special meaning for late adolescence at least, and critics in general have found in the novel either a Wordsworthian or a Freudian loss of childhood innocence. Taking a different tack, SANFORD STERNLICHT juxtaposes Lord of the Flies with Golding's later work The Inheritors and comes to a different interpretation. Professor Sternlicht made his first contribution to the QUARTERLY as a poet, most recently in the October 1965 issue. Since that time he has been Leverhulme Visiting Fellow in the University of York, England (1965-66), has brought out a new book of poetry, Love in Pompeii, and has had several articles published or scheduled for publication in such journals as College English, Minnesota Review, Studies in Language and Literature, and others. He teaches English at State University College, Oswego, New York.

LOSS OF INNOCENCE, as its title suggests, is the theme of What Maisie Knew, Henry James' study of a small girl tossed back and forth between brutal or psychopathic parents, then between the latter's somewhat kinder new spouses, until abandoned at last to the inadequate care of an ignorant though well-meaning ''governess." In no other work, according to ABIGAIL ANN HAMBLEN, does James show more forcefully the amoral power and destructiveness of unqualified raw sex. Mrs. Hamblen is another former contributor, her study of Faulkner appearing in our July 1965 issue and a study of Pamela Moore in the July 1966 issue. Most recently her work has appeared in Trace, the Mark Twain Journal, The University Review, and Forum. She has also published a study of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman.

EXAMINING the treatment of sickness, death, and responsibility by Andre Gide and Henry James, ROBERT ABEL comes to the surprising though persuasive conclusion that Gide is the romantic and James the modem man. His argument is too closely and carefully reasoned for summary treatment here; it invites thoughtful reading. Mr. Abel took his M. A. degree at Kansas State College and was until recently an instructor in our English Department. He now lives in Cincinnati, where he is engaged in writing and research.

THE TEN AUTHORS of our usual dozen poems divide rather neatly into five old contributors and five new. In number of poems the newcomers have a slight advantage, but in warmth of welcome the QUARTERLY makes no difference. As to seniority, MENKE KATZ is by some years our oldest contributor, with poems as early as October 1962 and as late as last October. Resident of Brooklyn, genial editor of Bitterroot, author of many volumes of verse in Yiddish and English, he has been honored with translation into Japanese and Greek and will shortly appear in an African tongue and in a Hindu dialect, not to forget earlier translation into Italian, Czech, Hebrew, and French. A happy diaspora, we assure him, and are his debtors for a copy of his Twelve Poems translated into Japanese (fourth edition). May our poets continue to travel to the ends of the earth. . . . Second in order of seniority, MARGARET BARBRICK PURCELL also strikes the Oriental note with a poem about the famous woman painter Ch'ên Shu. In a letter just received she writes of girlhood memories of Bermuda--Shakespeare's “still-vex'd Bermoothes"--which she was planning to revisit, when unhappily the newspapers reported that they were "vex' d" once more. Several of her poems appeared in earlier issues of the journal, beginning with October 1964. . . . It is a second appearance for NANCY PRICE (Mrs. H. J. Thompson), who writes that she is still teaching English at the University of Northern Iowa, still working on her doctorate at the State University of Iowa, and still publishing poetry -- most recently in Atlantic Monthly, Nation, McCalls, The Ladies Home Journal, and others. WESLEY WALTON appears for the second time, and he also sends us a sheaf of translations of his poems into the Japanese literary magazine Hyo Heki. He is working on a doctorate at Johns Hopkins University, where he has just been granted an Arts and Science Fellowship for the coming year. . . . Rounding out our first group is that very recent "old" contributor, SONYA DORMAN, whose work appeared in our April issue.

COMING to our new poets, COLETTE INEZ has contributed poems to Prairie Schooner, Nation, Antioch Review, and a number of the "littles." Born in Belgium shortly before World War II, she escaped from bomb shelters to rural Long Island at the outbreak of war. Recently she has been teaching English in the Poverty Program to a "lovely class of Cuban, Chinese and Puerto Rican ladies." . . . IRENE DAYTON (Mrs. Benjamin B.) of Rochester, New York, began publishing poetry at thirteen and has continued publishing it in poetry journals and literary magazines over the United States, Europe, Australia, and Japan. She has received numerous awards and distinctions, has traveled widely, and speaks with pride of a physicist-husband and two sons. . . . Our third newcomer, IVAN DOIG, has only recently begun to write poetry after several years of editorial work and free-lance journalism. He has a B. S. and an M. S. in journalism from Northwestern University and is now working on a doctorate in American history at the University of Washington. . . . ALASTAIR MACDONALD, British by birth, holds the M.A. from Aberdeen, the B. Litt. from Oxford (Christ Church), and the Ph.D. from the University of Manchester. He is an associate professor in the English Department of Memorial University, St. John's, Newfoundland, Canada. He began writing poetry as recently as 1966 and has had poems published in The University Review, Twentieth Century, Canadian Forum, and a number of other journals. He has also published various scholarly articles and reviews and is now preparing an edition of Thomas Gray's prose for the Oxford Clarendon Press and the volume on Gray for Routledge's "Critical Heritage" series. . . . The (alphabetical) last of our new poets is O. HOWARD WINN, an alumnus of Stanford with an advanced degree from its Creative Writing Center. He is now teaching English at Dutchess Community College of the State University of New York at Poughkeepsie. His poems have appeared in Laurel Review and Quartet.

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