Newspapers / The Chapel Hill Weekly … / Sept. 29, 1963, edition 1 / Page 11
Part of The Chapel Hill Weekly (Chapel Hill, N.C.) / About this page
This page has errors
The date, title, or page description is wrong
This page has harmful content
This page contains sensitive or offensive material
Sunday, September 29, 1968 !u: books w "v httu/ j*||i!SOTl|^Bß9m&BHH^fl^^^^^^^Hß|H^BHHßSfc aM h&. 9B| |r -JB KPvB WfUmF' I > • ‘IBB-- I j/HiV*!-, \^^HRs r ■K I J ■ «-d '”,, - • |jj| M& •- Lee Grosscup .. .. Author of ‘Fourth and One’ Thrown For Loss % As A Writer , Too FOURTH AND ONE. By Lee Grosscup. Harper & Row. 310 Pages. $3.95. By 808 QUINCY As a behind-the-scenes look at professional football, “Fourth and One,” by Lee Grosscup, is, at its price, slightly cheaper than a grandstand seat in the NFL. Usually sports books are writ ten by heroes or about them. Lee Grosscup was a potential hero for years, but he didn’t make the grade. The book is packed with football names and jargon, but the amazing aspect is that it real ly amounts to a Grosscup diary of frustration. Lee never was bom for the bench. He relates how he spent most of his time there, but one gets the feeling Lee nev er could agree with the coaches who ignored him. The most dam aging part of his argument is the cold statistics of his efforts. Mr. Grosscup, a great college player at Utah, tended to goof in his post-graduate work. There is locker room talk and Grimacing Puritan Returns (So What) THE RETURN OF THE SNOW-WHITE PURITAN. By John Paolotti. Harper & Row. 200 Pages. $3.95. Some contemporary fiction ex cels because it tells a good story, and tells it well. Some, because it is truly literate. A few good novels accomplish a satisfac tory blend of both. That John Paolotti has at tempted to do more than spin a simple yarn around his Snow- White Puritan is obvious. There can be no other explanation for the Don Quixote Sancho Pan za relationship of his two cen tral characters. The reader is painfully re minded, page after page, that the Puritan is a puritan, sadly lacking in perception of his sur roundings. and that the guide he has obtained for his myster ious journey is all that stands be tween him and the slings and arrows. It is not enough that we learn this simply by watching the players go through their pac es or, at the very most, by in sist gained gradually through eavesdropping on their conversa tions. “Sancho" must explain it to us, and at every opportunity. He is the narrator, and narrate he docs. If his Puritan grimaces, we are treated to a three-page treatise on why he grimaced, why he thinks he grimaced, and how he would not have grimac ed had be but Sancho’s poetic realistic view of the universe. So much for symbolism and messages. EVERYTHING IN BOOKS THE BOOK EXOHANOE « "The Soath’s largest mi warnt complete Bosk Stors" AT FIVE POINTS DURHAM, N. CL definitions that will appeal to some in the audience. For in stance, a banana is not a fruit which monkeys carry to lunch. A banana, in pro football, is a quick slant-out pass pattern run mostly by the tight end or the slot back. Grosscup, the quarterback, seems to be obsessed by the beer drinking of the pros. He men tions beer so often in his book diary that one expects the pub lisher to be Budweiser and Schlitz rather than Harper and Row. Among the greats of the game that Grosscup cuts slightly are Norm Van Brocklin of the Vik ings, whom he describes as a combination between the Frank enstein monster and the atom bomb, and Allie Sherman, head coach of the New York Giants. I happened to bump into Pea jiead Walker, the former Wake Forest coach and now a scout with the Giants, and mentioned that Grosscup had some nasty things to say about some of his New York clan. “Hell,” Pea head growled, “Grosscup couldn’t even make the Mets.” The Puritan returns to Italy. His errand is a mystery. Sancho is immediately beset by a series of forebodings: tragedy is im minent; his Puritan’s very being is endangered by the innocence of his nature. The pair wanders at random, the Puritan being drawn inextricably to his doom while the guide bounces from one bed to the next, spouting philosophy as he removes his socks. Closer and closer they come. To what? To the Puri tan’s first realistic encounter with himself and his world? To a situation where he cannot avoid a choice between his per ception of the world and his friendship with Sancho, or be tween his integrity and his life? No, gentle reader, they come to a wild-eyed comic operetta finale (to participate in which Sancho must extricate himself from still another bed) barely worthy of a B-grade 1930 horror movie, complete with spooky castles, witches and demented, drooling homicidal maniacs. Even a windmill would have been better than that.— BTW AUXILIARY MEETING The general meeting of the Women’s Auxilitary of Memorial Hospital will be held Wednesday, Oct. 2, at 10 a.m. in the auditori um of Gravely Sanatorium. Dr. Robert Ross, Head of the De partment of Obstetrics and Gy necology at the hospital, will be guest speaker. John Knowles: I’m Pleased * Writer-In-Residence Arrives By W. H. SCARBOROUGH John Knowles and the Univer sity of North Carolina have beat introduced. They appear to like one another very much. Mr. Knowles writes novels. The Uni versity of North Carolina some times teaches students to write. The two are going to collaborate in the better teaching of more students. Formally Mr. Knowles is the University’s Writer-in-residence; informally both he and the Uni versity are curious as to what this means. The University has never had a writer-in-residence before and Mr. Knowles has nev er resided as a writer in quite this fashion. They are easing into the arrangement with cau tion, but without suspicion. Nevertheless, he is very pleas ed to be here. It is, to him, “a chance to catch my breath.” For some years and especially during the past three years he has traveled a great deal—the Orient, the Mediterranean, the Levant, Jordan. More importantly he has published two fine novels which have won him a handsome liter ary prize and a reputation as •one of our more promising young novelists. He had just finished a third book last Tuesday. The experi ence had not noticeably elated him, but quite obviously he was warmed prospect of bund ling it off to his publisher. He has already started another nov el, without ado, without fanfare, and his starting bears out one of the fond hopes of the students who set fire to the idea of having a writer-in-residence in the first place: that a will pursue his own craft while teaching and encouraging other, younger writers. The students have by now also been heartened by Mr. Knowles’s heartfelt concurrence in their idea that Chapel Hijl needs to be prodded, that its students will benefit from intimate association with someone engaged in the pro duction of serious letters. “Achievement occurs in ground that’s been prepared for it, don’t you think?” he began. "That’s the value of this sort of thing. A University that wants a tradi tion of good writing has to do The Best Darkroom Man In Lexington YATES PAUL, HIS GRAND FLIGHTS, HIS TOOTINGS. By James Baker Hall. World Publishing Company. 281 Pag es. $4.50. By JANET WINECOFF The title, you must admit, is somewhat out of the ordinary intriguing, suggestive, not entire ly self-revealing. It turns out to be a rigorously accurate de scription of contents, and the ex act nature of the grand flights and tootings becomes clear in due time. Yates Paul is a frail, blond little boy with huge buck teeth, no mother, and a well-developed psyche. He is brilliant in some ways, sensitive, original, with a great deal of maturity, a vocabu lary unbelievably large for his years and tastes, and flights of fantasy appropriately fantastic. At thirteen he is the best dark room technician in Lexington, Kentucky, and aspires to the eventual practice of photography as an art. Yates’ father, Lee Allen Paul, is a commercial photographer, not especially successful. He is less of a success as a person, Pooh Remains, Untarnished, Carrollians Will Crow THE POOH PERPLEX. By Frederick C. Crews, with orig inal “Winnie-the-Pooh’’ il lustrations by E. H. Shepard. Dutton. 150 Pages. $2.95. THE ANNOTATED ALICE. Introduction and annotations by Martin Gardner, with orig inal “Alice's Adventures in Wonderland’’ illustrations by John Tennicl. Forum Books. 345 Pages. $2.25. By J. A. C. DUNN Everybody knows about Winnie the-Pooh. Winnie Is the Bear of Very Little Brain who has been since 1926 the benevolently bumb ling star of Christopher Robin’s Forest, which is inhabited with stuffed animals. But who is Winnie-the-Pooh? Is Pooh a vehicle for subliminal au thor-reader communication? Is he a bourgeois anti-revolution ary? Arc the ’’hums’’ of Pooh ( "The more it snows, tiddly-pom. Use colder my toes, tiddly pom . . a great analogic body to Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass”? Is Pooh tragically fix ated at the narcissistic stage of development? Is he a leading figure in a veiled allegory of the fall and redemption of man? Or is be an ironical commentary on THE CHAPEL HILL WEEKLY something such as this. Os course the University has been encour aging young writers all along, t)ut this is another step in the process. Good writing is conta gious. It tends to come out in places where it’s already taken root." How would he pursue his role here? "By ear. This is real im provisation. TYiis is going to be a ‘happening.’ I hope 1 can sup ply a certain kind of feeling for the profession of writing that will encourage others.” Mr. Knowles has had experi ence with the effect a practicing writer can have on a student. While he was attending Yale, Thornton Wilder was living out side New Haven. "I used to take my stories to him, and he used to tell me what was wrong with them, or right with them. What he really did was to clarify me to myself. All writing is passed on from one writer to another. I never heard of a writer who is not derivative, and if you can derive directly, it’s just that much more valuable to you.” Certainly the formal structure of the job will permit John Knowles a liberal amount of time to help student writers di rectly, to make his presence and influence felt upon student non writers, and to some extent to teach. He will teach one course in creative writing within the Department of English and con duct a seminar for more ad vanced students. Simultaneously he will be practicing his own craft in circumstances and sur roundings that appeal to him. To a great extent he was speak of himself when he said, "If there’s one thing the writer has to have it’s impetus. One will need it more than anything else. You can help the writer focus, but without impetus he will do nothing. Sometimes people dis cover their impetus in another writer. William Inge for in stance says that his impetus came from the plays of Tennes see Williams. They gave him a way of looking at his own ex perience.” John Knowles seems to himself always to have been a writer. "I can’t do anything else. I nev er made a nickel any other way.” Most of his experiences often childish, cowardly, weak, a slave to his repressed desires which find perverted expression through the camera’s eye. Lee Allen has spent many evenings and a large part of the family budget over a period of years photographing nudes, and Yates eventually blunders into the nega tive files in the darkroom. The darkroom is a symbol on several levels. It has something to do with the concealing of sex ual impulses, not only in its role as guardian of Lee Allen's secret, but as the scene of the extra curricular activities of past dark room technicians. For Yates, the darkroom is an escape from many things—the empty house in which he lives, the traumas of adolescence, the necessity of fac ing the world at large, and of recognizing his own limitations. On a more abstract level, it is the .mystery of life and meaning, of which Yates is just becoming aware, and the abyss which yawns should he ever cease his “tootings.” Which have the fol lowing explanation (and it is with reluctance that I forego the notation of resemblances to ex istentialist symbols and resist the the vacuity of the middle class? Or is he the central figure in an attempt to halt time at the wisdom of childhood? Perhaps Winnie-the-Pooh is merely unfor tunate in not being a character in “Sons and Lovers,” "Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” or "Women in Love.” Perhaps Pooh needs Freudian analysis. Who knows? The reader cer tainly does not after finishing Professor Crews’ brilliant raking of modem criticism and academ ic thought over satirical coals. The form of the book is odd, for a professor of English at the University of California (or any university). But, like the Gat ling gun, which was also thought odd at first, twelve satirical critiques are a more than suf ficiently effective net for slaying whole schools of thought with hardly a fish missed. Despite its vastly popular sub ject matter (37 years after his cre ation, Pooh is still an incredibly prolific money-maker for Dutton, selling continually like anti-freeze the morning after the first hard frost), "The Pooh Perplex” is a fairly specialized book. You have to be able to tolerate literary criticism, to begin with. This is made easier by the fact that Professor Crews is wildly funny. JOHN KNOWLES have in some form found their way onto paper. He is a native of West Virginia, but this long ago ceased to show, he extended Exeter, the Ameri can Eton, and followed that with four years of Yale University. At 37, he has already traveled more and used his travel to bet ter literary advantage than any one except a modem foreign correspondent. For a time he was a sort of correspondent and one of the editors of Holiday Magazine. * In 1960, he discovered the novel as a literary expression, cut most of his ties with Holiday, and a year later had completed "A Separate Peace,” which won him the first William Faulkner Award for the best first novel during the year. As he related it, “One day I had a feeling about some trees I had seen in New Hampshire. That’s all I had. A year later 1 had finished it. That’s the way novels ought to be written. They should grow organically out of emotion and not be plotted in tellectually.” He is now firmly committed to the novel. It suits his tempera ment best. "It’s just the right thing for me. I couldn’t write short stories. Too restrictive.” "A Separate Peace” was fol temptation to analyze in Freudian terms): “In another vision he was para chuting down over the ocean. There was nothing in sight, noth ing but water. All he had with him was a blowtorch, a yard stick, and a whistle with a warb ling pea. He was holding onto the tower with one hand—he was n’t harnessed to the parachute, a three-sided TV tower was he was standing on the tower, on the bottom rung, holding on with one hand and clutching the gear with the other. He figured that since the heavy tower would take him straight to the bottom of the ocean the blowtorch was for cut ting through the side of a sunken ship and the ruler was for mak ing scientific measurements of what he found there; but since that didn’t account for the whistle he was never quite sure what he was up to. Riding the tower down he watched with fascina tion—first over his shoulder, then under his arm —as the water came up steadily closer and clos er. Every now and then he tilted his head back, shut his eyes and took a deep breath, and then Furthermore, you have to be able to tolerate decimation of literary criticism. If you are tender on the subject, “Perplex” will en rage you (it may also puncture you until you leak copiously). Finally, you have to be suscep tible to satire, a form some people find either too demanding or unbearably cute. But if you can pass all these tests, and particularly if you happen to be feeling a bit jaded about academic life in general, Frederick Crews is like a roaring bonfire with roman candles and lots of beer and merry music and pretty girls hopping around. Like Sherman in Georgia, Crews lays absolute waste to critics. Whole villages of attitudes are razed. Valuable critical vocabu lary is smashed irreparably. Helpless intellectual pretenses are mowed down in groups of ten or more. It is a kind of literary blood bath; it is St. Pat rick of the satirists driving the snakes out if litcratureland. And what about Pooh? Pooh stands intact after the barrage, still his irreplacably endearing, bumbling, benevolent, poignant, warming self, a Bear of Very Little Brain. His survival is miraculous—or is it only justice? Martin Gardner is of much the lowed last year by “Morning in Antibes,” which got excellent notices from everyone except Mr. Knowles himself.- “It’s a second novel (not a glowing compliment in his lexi con). Halfway through it I fell under the influence of Jack Ker ouac (“On the Road”), with his theories about automatic writing, and it was a disaster. I tried the experiment of just letting the story go, but . . . if it had been written as ’Separate Peace’ was it would have been a good book.” He did not venture an opinion on his just-finished book, except to say that it was not a novel. It will be entitled “Double Vision —American Thoughts Abroad.” It will concern, in his words, “my experiences in Greece, Leb anon and Jordan, and what I found out about the United States abroad. “Double Vision" started im probably, too. Mr. Knowles had gone to Jordan to write a bio graphy of King Hussein, but when he arrived he discovered that Hussein was two-thirds fin ished with his autobiography. "1 thought, ‘what the hell am I going to do out here in the desert.’ So I began writing this book. When I came back to the U. S. I ran into a friend who was chartering a yacht— this was in Philadelphia—for an expedition to the Greek Islands. I didn't want to go back, but my publisher said 'We need this chapi ter,’ so I went. When I got back, there was another expedition be ing organized to some more Greek islands, and my publisher said again, ‘We need that chap ter,’ not paying for the trips you understand, just recommending. But it worked out. Values in that part of the world are the reverse of what they are here—it throws things into bold relief to live that long in that part of the world.” What Chapel Hill will reveal to Mr. Knowles, of course, re mains for both Mr. Knowles and his readers to see. He does not worry about such things, since they become apparent to him when he writes about them. “I never know what I'm writing— I write to find out what I think.” With any sort of luck he could very easily induce Chapel Hill’s oft-slumbering attention to good writing to follow his lead. looked down again; prepared, he reckoned, to plunk into the ocean. But before it was too late he always decided not to give up so soon: he exhaled, emphatical ly, and scampered up a few rungs. For a while it looked as though that situation, just like the one with the B-24, had its bad logic the tower was only so tall. The whistle, he figured, was to call for help. So with the air he took in against going under, and let out for fear of giving up, he blew the whistle for all he— and it—was worth. No miracles happened—no help appeared in the void of sky or on the vast empty ocean. But as he got up toward the top of the tower, close to the parachute, he found that his whistling, his own wind through the warbling whistle, held the chute up. If he stayed with it, if he kept on tooting, he could at least hold his own; and who knew, as he grew older and his lungs got stronger maybe he could toot the whole rig up and up—for wherever that would get him.” In the later stages of the nov (Continued on Page 8-B) same ilk as Frederick Crews, though perhaps without Profes sor Crews’ carnivorous tenden cies. Mr. Gardner is a writer (he writes a monthly column on recreational mathematics, if you can believe it) and a Carrollian, which is much the same as a die-hard philatelist or a sports car buff who hears the snarl of motors in his sleep. Fortunate ly, Carrollianism has not blind ed Mr. Gardner. He is enam oured of Lewis Carroll, but not to the point of being a white washer. This makes his annotations of “Alice's Adventures in Wonder land” and “Through the Looking Glass" a deeply refreshing ex perience for anybody who likes odd bits of little-known and al most useless background infor mation. Mr. Gardner is evident ly a scholar with a notably sharp mind and an equally sharp eye— what you would expect’ of a mathematician. But unlike most mathematicians, Mr. Gardner can write engagingly. Thus he would seem to be a natural for a detailed study of Lewis Car roll, another mathematician who could write. Mr. Gardner pulls no punches, either. In fact, he gets quite acid at times, a trait which gives In Search Os Faith Among The Rubble GOD IN MAN’S WORLD. By Helmut Thielicke. Harper & Row. 223 Pages. $3.95. By GEORGE WALKER BUCKNER Much of the significance of this book arises from the cir cumstances of its origin in war time Germany. The author, a scholarly professor and more re cently head of the University of Hamburg, had been dismissed from his University post and for bidden to publish articles or books (a Nazi technique, he says, for saving paper). In 1941 he was ordered not to speak and was interned in a small city. This treatment resulted from his criticisms of Nazi policies. Lat er, however, friends got him per mission to give one evening lec ture a week in the cathedral church at Stuttgart. \ Anyone who saw Stuttgart in 1945 will recall the almost com plete devastation of that city. Homes, churches, schools and factories had collapsed into rub ble or burned into ashes. One wondered how any life could have survived and how as suming survival anything ap proaching normal living could have gone on in the city. Yet, it was in just this seting that Professor Thielicke gave his weekly lectures, some of which are now presented in this book. Until the great church was destroyed by fire, the lectures attracted regularly some three thousand hearers. They were an astonishingly miscellaneous audi ence “workers and business men, students and professors, soldiers and generals, Nazi func tionaries (naturally in civilian clothes!) . . . and sometimes whole classes from the schools.’’ When the cathedral church was destroyed, the lectures were transferred to one auditorium after another as each of these was in turn obliterated. News papers feared to carry large ad vertisements but did run in smell type such notices as “Thursday, 8 p.m. T.” The peo ple understood and came to lis ten. Thielicke decided early in his series that his lectures should counteract in some way the sub human philosophy on which the Nazis had built their system. Knowing that they had given new pagan interpretations to life, birth, death, history, ethics and eternity, he decided to talk about the basic teachings oi the Chris tian religion. He knew that his younger hearers in particular were ignorant or confused con cerning these. And so he spoke on such themes as man in the cosmos his origin, nature and destiny. The audacity of much of what Thielicke says is evident only on the background of the time. For example, we recall that Nietzsche was a patron saint of the Nazis, though lew of them had really read him and these were highly selective in their use pf his writings. Yet on the first page of his first lecture the author lifts up Nietzsche’s contempt for the arrogance of a man who thinks he has a special roledn the cosmos “in ‘feel ing that he is a human being’ in nature and the world.” He quick ly throws out Nietzsche's idea of man as “a small eccentric spe cies of animal that has its time." He belittles Nietzsche himself as in revolt against the intellect and a “kind of vent that sought to relase the pas sion and instinct which had nev er been subdued by pure in tellect.” His own affirmation is that man is a very special part of a cosmos of divine origin, that despite many limitations some of his annotations the same deliciously heady feeling of su periority you get from sitting down out of earshot of the world and talking nasty about other people. But decorous nastiness is not Mr. Gardner’s strong point. His details are. Mr!* Gardner turns up fascinating insights and bits of factual flotsam about the neu rotic Charles Lutwidge Dodgson and his writing, one of the most interesting of which is several pages long, on “Jabberwocky,” probably the best-known nonsense poem in the language: “ ’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe ...” Most of the apparently meaning less words in the poem have genuine origins. “Jabberwocky,” in case you were unaware, has been translated into French and German: “II brilgue: les toves lubricilleux/Se gyre en vrillant dans le guave . . .” and "Es bril lig war. Die Schlichte Tov en/Wirrten und wimmelten in Waben . , ."—a goldmine of cock tail party gimmicks. For savings that are designed for your own special needs be sure and read the Weekly classi fied ads every issue. upon him he is a free moral be ing, and that his destiny is one of dignity in keeping with his nature as a child of God. ’ Much of the first chapters of this book concerns cosmology. The author insists here that biblical teaching is not concern ed with the “how" of creation but with the relationship between man the creature and God the creator. Cosmologies, he says, change with new scientific knowledge. The Christian faith is “independent of any cosmol ogy that happens to be cur rent:” He adds that “the Chris tian faith itself never dictates what the cosmology should be.” The important thing is the faith that man is created in God s im age. This faith is independent of whether man came directly from the dust or "stands at the end of a line of prehuman develop mental stages.” Thielicke’s concept that the cosmological framework of the Bible is expendable gives no com fort to the fundamentalist. At the same time, many non-funda mentalist Christian students will wonder at the facility with which he supports various points of view with quotations from dif ferent books of the Bible. Ip. do ing this he makes no attempt to distinguish among the books as to their background or what the writers were dealing with. It is almost as if Job, the Psalrfts, the Gospels ,and Revelation were all one. To’be sure, the author says in a the lec tures are not theological, though theological conviction lies back of them, and that he is not of fering "proofs." Yet the net im pression of the average reader would indeed be that he often seems to be doing just that. Most thoughtiul readers are likely to agree that the chapters of this book are of uneven merit and interest. Those dealing with miracle and the demonic do not possess the clarity nor carry the conviction found in the chapters on cosmology or those dealing w,th Fate and Providence, Free dom and Bondage in History, or Free Will and Predestination. Here are some quotes rom these chapters: “History has too much sense for us to be able to regard it as a gigantic playground of the forces of blind chance. History has too much nonesense for us to be able to deduce from it a purposeful providence that guides it.” "The man who separates him self from God is always in bond age.” "So faith is never something ‘finished,’ which one 'has' once and for all and could smugly boast of possessing. No, faith is always traveling a definite way, « particular road.” Much of the value of this book derives from this concept of faith as a journey on a road of whose direction one feels assur ed. though he knows not its va ried turnings or its roughness. Another virtue of the book is that, despite expressed certain ties about things which are real ly matters of opinion, the au thor does possess the humility of a good scholar. His role’here is really that of the witness who tells what he has seen rather than that of the lawyer arguing his case. His testimony is that the "I” of man can say "Thou” to God. As a former editor of an in ternational religious magazine and a member of the Central Committee of the World Council of Churches, Dr. Buckner has had many contacts with church es in Germany. CURRENT BEST SELLERS Fiction 1. The Shoes of the Fish erman . . . West 2. Caravans . . . Michener 3. Elizabeth Appleton .. . O’Hara Non-flctioa 1. The Fire Next Time . . . Baldwin 2. My Darling Clementine . . . Fishman 3. I Owe Russia $1,200 . . . Hope WILLS BOOK STORE LakewedShoppteg Center Shop Monday, Thursday Friday nights til f Page 3-B
The Chapel Hill Weekly (Chapel Hill, N.C.)
Standardized title groups preceding, succeeding, and alternate titles together.
Sept. 29, 1963, edition 1
11
Click "Submit" to request a review of this page. NCDHC staff will check .
0 / 75