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Sunday, November, 24, 1968 BOOKS Kaare Rodahl and Eskimo Boy Eskimos Survive Despite Our Help THE LAST OF THE FEW. By Kaare RodahL Harper & Row. 204 Pages , with IS pages of Photographs. $4-95. By PATRICIA McMAHON The cream of non-fiction for any year is always that rarity, the book written by an author with a sense of humor, one who can lard his knowledge with an unforced chuckle or two. As a case in point, “Last of the Few by Kaare Rodahl, a Norwegian-born medical re search specialist, could well be the season’s favorite. The Last of the Few are Alas ka’s Eskimos, those who cling f to the remnants of a culture and away of life that civilization has all but destroyed before realiz ing it had something to teach modern technology about survi val in the Arctic. The white man has endured the Arctic’s rigors, but rarely has he been more than a visi tor. Can he adapt to intense cold? To find out, Dr.. Rodahl set out at the behest of the U. Si Government to study the Eski mo’s adaptability. For nearly two years Rodahl and his wife traveled the remote areas of Alaska to gather data on Eski mo diet and living conditions, and to make innumerable medi cal tests on the usually willing Eskimos. t To do this it took the Rodahls, two Air Force medical techni cians and an appalling load of delicate scientific apparatus, all of which had to be gotten to villages accessible only by dog sled or airplane. The moving of a mountain of medical appara The Problems Os A Warless World If disarmament ever can be achieved, what will be the prob lems and opportunities of a war less World? Twelve of the leading states men, historians, philosophers and thinkers of our tune examine different aspects of this question in a new book, “A Warless World,” edited by Dr. Arthur Larson, director of the World Rule of Law Center in the Duke University law School. U Thant, Secretary-General of the United Nations, wrote the foreword in which he states that "Responsible people. ... have come increasingly to envisage a CURRENT BEST SELLERS Fldka 1. The Group • . . . McCarthy 2. The Shoes of the Fish erman . . . West 3. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service . . . Fleming Non-Action 1. J. F. K.: The Man and the Myth . . - Lasky ’2. The American Way of Death . . . Mitford 3. Rascal ... North WILLS BOW STORE Stop Meaiay. Tin nUr Friday nights U1 0 , tus by means normally reserved 1(0* freshly killed cartoou is al most a story in itself. Happily Dr. Rodahl had a cur iosity about his subjects as peo ple that equals that of the Eskimo's most noted chroni cler, anthropologist Peter Freu chen. The curiosity led him and his wife to enter into village life with enthusiasm; some times he broke the routine of research by going along on Eskimo hunting trips. These more often than not proved specta cular, if not in catch at least as a demonstration of the aver age Eskimo’s incredible stami na. He himself must have had a good measure of stamina, since none of the rigors of the life abated his curiosity. He spent a month on Pribilof Island during the sealing season attempting to track down a malady known as “sealer's fin ger.” He found only one case of the disease but learned much about seals. In each new location he and his wife endured living conditions that “primitive” and “bizarre” only hint at with Nordic good humor. As a physician he treat ed and witnessed the small and large tragedies of a people who still have no medial heritage. He emerged from his two years' sojourn with his love of the far north reinforced and his ad miration of the Eskimo and his remarkable qualities firmly fix ed. The stay also convinced him that western civilization, far from being an alliance for prog ress, has been more devastating to the Eskimo than the worst furies of Arctic climate. warless world —a world which has voluntarily divested itself of weapons of mass destruction— as being not only a necessary, but even a realistic goal.” Other contributors include his torian Arnold Toynbee, anthropo logist Margaret Mead, Jules Moch, former Permanent Repre sentative of France on the UN’s Disarmament Commission; James J. Wadsworth, former U. S. Ambassador to the UN and disarmament negotiator; U. S. Sen. Hubert H. Humphrey <D- Minn.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s Subcommittee on Disarmament; and Dr. Larson himself, a form er director of the U. S. Informa tion Agency. Dr. Larson also includes an appendix in' which several of Russia’s leading thinkers give their view of a world without arms. Among the aspects of a war less world which the contribu tors explore are these: economic implications of disarmament, in ternal change, the population ex plosion, psychological problems of humans without a war to fight, spiritual effects, and in ternational relationships. Praising the content of the book, U Thant says of the con tributors,, “They deal not with a Utopian concept but with a practical goal.” U. Thant also voices the hope that "Similar exercises will be undertaken by more and more individuals and organizations the world over, so that out of a con tinuing study of this problem a consensus might emerge point ing the way to a future without fear.” The publisher is the McGraw- Hill Book Co., Inc., of New York, London and Toronto EVERYTHING IN NOOKS ** m<Wtt puma£ w.c. Sophistication & Relativism 10 American Critics Speak THE CREATIVE PRES ENT: NOTES ON CONTEM PORARY AMERICAN FIC TION. Edited by Nona Bala kian ap/d Charles Simmons. Doubleday. 285 pages. f 4.95. By JAMES W. GARDNER “We live in an age of critic ism,” we have said sometimes with shadings of apology and regret in our voices as if we meant our observation to be more a complaint. Looking be fore and after our own literary period, we imagine times when all the best talents were or wiU be making great new literature rather than dissecting, system atizing, or just being damned clever in general about the work of others. Our observation that we live in an age particularly given to criticism certainly is accurate; our regret perhaps is uninformed. We need only look back a hundred years to the pe riod between Coleridge’s unread criticism at the turn of the 19th century and Arnold’s unbelieved criticism which began appearing in the late 1850’s, to see the re sults of a time when criticism was thin and shoddy. We can’t know what would have happened to the older Tennyson or the younger Browning if some gen uinely perceptive critical thought had been directed to their works, but we may imagine that their own best suspicions about their own qualities and defects would have been confirmed rather than inhibited. In America a hundred years ego popular criticism ran to biographical eulogy or damn ation and pious moralistic judg ment levelling. Poe and some other writers were seriously concerned about critical theory, but this side of their work was largely ignored. I suppose only people taking graduate courses in the period are likely to read popular mid-nineteenth century criticism in the Victorian equi valents of our better literary quarterlies today, but the effort would make any reader grateful for the difference exhibited by even a popular collection such as The Creative Present. One will not find the adjec tives "good” and “true” and "Beautiful” very often employ ed by the ten critics whose as says on seventeen contemporary American writers appear in this anthology. If one looks back to shallower times in criticism when these terms boomed or dripped from every paragraph of popular critical essays, then he can feel a little happier about the guarded sophistication and relativism that inhibit their use today. Os course in these essays there is cant and jargon whose colors will bleach out in time, but there is a lot of good sense too that will survive along with the literary works themselves to reveal not only how we felt but how we thought about how we felt in our “creative present.” We are rediscovering on the popular level now that criticism in its finest sense is a genuine art itself. Its subject matter is the creative expression of a man or a period, its form the defin able categories of artistic ex perience the critic chooses to apply or discover in the work of art. That it is a secondary art and derives its being from something else that existed before it is true. But these conditions are true of every other art except the lyric whoop which itself, aft er all, depends on a voice to whoop it. The kind of criticism found in these ten essays is not, I think, the finest speculative and creative sort; but we cannot be anything but happy that we live in a time when a popular publisher like Dothleday will think it profitable to market ten essays of “reader-criticism” criticism directed to the explica tion and productive analysis of a work or a writer—and will find it very easy to gather up sev eral competent intelligences at work on contemporary writers and no really dull or silly ones. There is not space here to dis cuss each of these essays, and I would not be qualified to say very much that is helpful about some of them. Here, simply enough, is what the reader will find in this collection in terms of subject matter and critic. Harvey Breit of The New York Times Book Review and a poet and playwright discusses “James Baldwin and Two Footnotes.” (The first of the footnotes is on Ralph Ellison and the second on a third Negro novelist, Willard Motley.) Robert Gorham Davis of the English Department at Columbia treats two disparate novelists in his essay The Amer ican Individualist Tradition: Bel low and Styrcn.” In what seems THE CHAPEL HILL WEEKLY to me the most rewarding item in the collection Alan Pryce- Jones, for twelve years editor of The (London) Times Literary Supplement reviews the long span of Nabokov's career in “The Fabulist’s Worlds: Vladi mir Nabokov.” David L. Steven son of Hunter College writes of “James Jones ahd Jack Kerou ac: Novelists of Disjunction.” John Chamberlain of the King Feature Syndicate takes on and doesn’t quite succeed in the task of saying something genuinely perceptive about “Die Novels of Mary McCarthy.” Diana Trill ing, the D. H. Lawrence scholar, writes of “The Radical Moralism of Norman Mailer.” Another Englishman Jones, this one Adun R. Jones of Hull University and now visiting at Rochester, dis cusses “The World of Love: The Fiction of Eudora Welty.” “Generations of the Fifties: Malamud, Gold, and Updike” is the title of the well-known con tributing editor of Die Satur day Review, Granville Hicks. J. D. Salinger is treated by Donald Barr# formerly English profes sor at Colombia and now an as sociate director for the National Science Foundation, in an excel lent contribution to the canon entitled “Ah; BsdUy: Salinger.” The tenth study in the collection is by the University of Califor nia's extremely productive Eng 1i s h Department chairman, Mark Schorer, and treats ”Mc- Cuilers and Capote: Basic Pat terns.” None of these critics is as yet, at least, generally thought of as -fl Jr sSj B - ' ill HL jj >.• .. a ~ —j BOOK COUNTERS —Getting copies of the new “Chapel Hill Cookbook” ready for distribution are, from left, Mrs. Fred Vinson, Mrs. Layton Mc- Curdy, and Mrs. Thad Monroe, all members of the Junior Service Lea gue. The Cookbook, which was pub lished by the League, is now on sale Debunking G. Washington MORNING OF A HERO. By Burke Boyce. Harper and Row. HO Pages. $4-95, By JOAN BISS ELL In keeping with the “let's humanize - tire - heroes” trend Burke Boyce has written of George Washington during his late teens and early twenties. For once, Washington is not seen in uniform, exhorting his starv ed, ragged men at Valley Forge. Instead, the seventeen-year-old surveyor, in the employ of Lord Fairfax, is seen in frontier cloth ing at the Yellow Tavern. He orders whiskey, which he pays for with a coonskin. His “change” amounts to 158 rab bit skins with which Washing ton orders free drinks for every body. His generosity is matched by his independence. When the other drinkers complain cbout the surveying of the land on which they have farms and when they state that they will not pay rant to Lord Fairfax, Washing ton bluntly says that he doesn't care what they do or don’t do; they can take up their griev ances with Fairfax; he. Wash ington, is only in the surveying for the money. Returning to the surveyors’ camp, George—he has now become “George” to the reader—is told by Will Fair fax that Indians in the vicinity are holding tribal dances. It is at this point, unfortunate ly, that Mr. Boyce bows to the dramatic effect. The two young men attend the dance. George wants to examine a scalp that k hanging from an Indian a major creative or innovative figure in the history of criticism, but almost all of them are thor ough, thoughtful, established essayists. Granville Hicks is the oldest and has probably played a clearer hand in the history of American criticism in earlier de cades of this century. He writes . about three of the younger novel ists discussed in the -.collection. Mark Schorer, who must be the name of an ingenious literary machine on the West Coast turn ing out major studies, biograph ies and introductions by the week, is next best widely known. (Who’s Who is about the only important piece of literature that doesn’t exist in at least one edition introduced by Mark Schorer.) Schorer’s essay on Carson McCullers and Truman Capote is typical in its compe tence and clarity. The only real ly wasteful choice in the collec tion to my mind is John Cham berlain’s half-"nice”, half-snip ing critique of Mary McCarthy who will not hotter to be nice if she bothers at all about Mr. Chamberlain. I think most read ers would rather have had an essay by Mary McCarthy than about her, and if this were not available would have enjoyed a little more risky discussion of very recent writers of great ac complishment and promise, say Reynolds Price in the Southeast and some of the raunchier ex perimentalists on the West Coast who keep daring the Post Office Department to take the Ever green Review out of the mails. Naturally, no selection of only at the Country Store, Huggins Hard ware, Ledbetter-Pickard, the Carolina Inn and Mann’s Drug Store at East gate. The cookbooks are $2. They may also be obtained by writing the Junior Service League,. Box 374, Chapel Hill, with an additional 35 cents charge to cover mailing. brave's waist. The brave shows strong signs of wanting to add George's scalp to his belt. After both have drawn their hunting ■knives end glared defiance at one another, George suddenly offers his knife, hilt first, to the brave. The Indian accepts the offer to exchange kni.ves. Thus, George gets a chance to see the French markings on the blade and to wonder What Delawares are do ing with French knives in the Shenandoah Valley. The reader has now seen a courageous, intelligent George Washington. To give us a well rounded view of the young man, Mr Boyce depicts him in love no less than four times. One af fair of the heart concerns the eternal triangle: Will Fairfax, his wife, Sally, and, of course, George. Despite the fact that Will is young, handsome, cul tured and rich, Salty finds George attractive. Perhaps his bout with smallpox, the disease that left his face scarred, or his relatively poor position in the Tidewater area, make him pa thetically attractive to Sally. Boyce never makes the reason quite clear, yet he keeps insist ing that Washington was not a ladies’ man. George supposedly proposed to several, but loved tally Sally. Influenced by the wish of his late half-brother. L awrence Washington, George applied to Governor Dinwiddie for the posi tion of adjutant to the colony, the post held by Lawrence. Se curing the position, George be gan his strange military career: ha was to be called an assassin seventeen novelists and short story writers will please every one. The editors have offered e feasible . defense of their choices in two brief and thought ful introductions. Readers with speciaT interests in any one of the seventeen writers discussed here will find these essays in all but two in stances new comments. Diana Trilling’s article on Norman Mailer appeared in Encounter last year and Alan Pryce-Jones “The Fabulist's Worlds: Vladi mir Nabokov” was first publish ed in the April, 1963 issue of Harper’s magazine under the simpler title “The Art of Nabo kov.” The editors have provided a brief biography of each of the novelists discussed here and a not always complete biblio graphy of their works. (Nabo kov’s “Three Russian Poets” is not cited nor Updike’s poetry.) The appendix also includes very brief descriptions of the critics. There seem to be no really bad blunders in this collection which has its roots rather firm ly in The New York Times Book Review for which both Miss Balakian and Mr. Simmons work. There is no attempt here to give first publication to a deeply significant review nor to pro vide a spectrum of types of cur rent critical approaches, a tour de force the editors might easily have brought off along with presenting handsomely what in their views are the most crea tive new writers of the post- Hemingway and Faulkner pe riod. by the French; he was to suffer a nervous breakdown alter a dis astrous frontier campaign; and he was ultimately to be called a hero in the Virginia House of Burgesses. Mr. Burke seems to advocate debunking Washington’s life, and he is especially successful when writing of Washington’s mother. He portrays her as anything but the stereotype of a hero’s moth er. She is petulant, domineer ing, and disparaging.' A posses sive woman, she attempts to keep her son with her at Ferry Farm. Had she succeeded, he would have had virtually noth ing, literally and figuratively. “Morning of a Hero” may ap peal to some readers who appre ciate fictionalized biography, the sugar-coated pill of history. Ma ture readers, however, will find the romances childish and the frontier campaigns repetitious. The last 325 pages just do not live up to the promise of those first fifteen pages. Finishes Course Army Pvt. Cecil U. Davis, whose wife, Anna, lives on Route 3, Chapel Hill, completed an eight-week radio relay and car rier operation course at The Southeastern Signal School, Fort Gordon, Ga., this month. During the course. Pvt. Davis received instruction in the opera tion and maintenance of field ra dio relay and carrier equipment. The 24-ycar-old soldier entered the Army last June and com pleted basic combat training at Fort Gordon. A Grisly Chapter In Man ’s History HEROD’S CHILDREN. By Ilsc Aichinger, translated from the German by Cornelia Schaeffer. ( Originally pub lished in German under the title DIE GROESSERE HOFFNUNG by Fischer Bu ell crc i, 1060). Atheneum 238 Pages. $4-50. By JANET WINECOFF “Herod’s children” are a miscellaneous group of Jewish children in Vienna during the second World War, joined to gether by common peril. This is certain, but few other things in the novel are equally definite. The number of the children in the group is vague but it is con stantly and ominously reduced). There is a semi-anonymity as no last names are ever used, while nicknames and the names of allegorical roles from the , children's plays—War, Pelace, the World, Mary, Joseph—are used more or less interchange ably with the first names—Ruth, Herbert, Ellen, George, etc. tending to increase the vague ness about the number and iden tity of children involved. There are few or no distinguishing personality traits; only Ellen can be said to be more than an out line. There is little doubt ttjat this indefiniteness is consistent with the author’s artistic aims; it may well be a deliberately cal culated effect. Lacking the con crete individuality to bring them to life as human beings, these figures lend themselves to alle gory. They exist more as sym bols than as children, precluding consideration of the novel in such terms as character devel opment, psychological analysis, or even gjpt. These children are basically undifferentiated: they are all the same child, and at the same time, they are all Jew ish children. On another plane exisit more vague and shadowy shapes, the Jewish adults ;the mother, the aunt, the lady next door all somehow preoccupied with their own terror and alienated from the children’s world. They have in common the fact that all of them have in some way failed the* children, though no such overt accusation is made. These figures have even less individ uality than the children, and can be seen as symbolic of all Jew ish adults. The remaining characters are all “guilty” in varying degrees: the consul, the invisible an nouncer, old men, the grave diggers, the Hitlers, youth, guards, policemen, the station master, the informers, the cap tain, the engineer, the robbers. At one extreme there is the Nazi persecution, deportation and ex termination carried out by army and police; there is harassment by the Hitler youth; Ellen’s abandonment by her soldier fa ther; and the collaboration and betrayals of informers. In an other group are those guilty through negligence or not car ing, or by tacit consent, such as the stationmaster, and those who seek to turn the situation to per sonal profit (the robbers, the carriage driver). Finally there are moral cowards, such as the consul, who may cry out within against injustice but externally do nqthing. All of these charac ters appear once, haphazardly, arbitrarily, like figures in a dream, and then vanish into fan tasy or the chaos of war. "Herod’s children” are not only not living, individual chil dren—they are not childlike, ei ther. Their insights into the world around them are devoid of innocence and wonder; in their seeing straight to the true meaning of things, they are as old as the world itself. In the terrifying and illogical world of The Books You Charge Tomorrow Go On Your January Bill! The Intimate Bookshop 119 E. Franklin Sk- Open Till 10 pjn. Nazi persecution, they survive by creating their own world of illusion, making up their own stories to explain what is hap pening to them. Over and over they act out the story of the biblical flight into Egypt, the persecution of the Christ child (with the obvious suggestion that their particular niche in this tale comes with the Slaugh ter of the Innocents). Inter spersed between their perform ances are references to the ac tors who have been “taken away” since the previous act. Time throughout the novel -is unreal, and it is particularly distorted in the make-believe scenes. They escape from the present and the future does not exist. It is frequently difficult and sometimes almost impossible to distinguish the line between what are supposedly objective events and what exists only in the fan tasy of the children, whether as escape from the war or as hal lucination. There is sometimes an even more fantastic quality about “reality” than about the children’s make-believe, a stark nightmarish tone suggesting that the worst nightmares are those that really happen. A large part of the novel is fantasy, make-be lieve, or nightmare reality given a fantasy treatment, so that a verdict on the novel as artistic achievement must be based largely on the author’s skill in the creation of illusion, and in making the fantasy convincing or effective. Perhaps it is not quite fair to judge at all on the basis of translation, for fantasy, depending heavily on associations and the evocative power of words, of objects and of the bizarre, must lose immeasurably when divorced from the original language and culture. Insofar as this translation is concerned, the fantasy occasionally seems too heavy, pedestrian, even when there has apparently been an effort to reproduce the fantasies of a child. In certain ways a heavy touch is not unsuited to this subject—it would probably be shocking to see it treated lightly. Rut a child’s fantasy, even in war, is not earthbound as is too frequently the case with Ellen. The author has done bet ter in bringing out the nightmare qualities or "fantastic nature of reality, particularly as experi enced by the child in war. Some of the chase scenes (pursuit by police or guards) and scenes in the police station are effectively absurd, bizarre, reminiscent of surrealistic paintings. “Herod’s Children’’ shares the basic situation, terrors and final tragic outcome of “The Diary of Anne Frank.” It shows likewise the effects of war and persecu tion on the minds of children, in a consciously artistic and in tentionally poetic fashion. But somehow it is less moving, per haps because of its calculated creativity. While it is some times overloaded with sentimen tality, one sees the thesis behind it, not the pathos and warmth and humanity of Anne Frank. There is no doubt that the author feels very strongly about her subject. Morally and objec tively one must agree with most of what she says (with the reser vation that things—people are seldom quite so black and white as shown). “Herod’s Children” deals with a chapter of history . which most people would rather forget, and is almost guaranteed to make the average reader acutely uncomfortable with its vivid reminder. We should re member in this connection, how ever, that it is when the collec tive conscience is lulled into for getfulness that such atrocities can happen. You will always be pleased with the results that come from using the Weekly’s classified ads. Page 3-B
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