Further Mention
Dartmouth scholars and critics fare well in the September 15 New York Times Magazine and New York Times Book Review: Brock Brower '53 and the late poet and Professor of French Ramon Guthrie in the magazine and in the book review Prof. Gregory Rabassa '44 of Queens College, Prof. J.D. O'Hara'53 of the University of Connecticut, and Lawrence E. Harvey, Professor of Romance Language and Literatures at Dartmouth.
Brock's article "Under Ford's helmet: A Congressional mind brought to bear on the White House" refers to Lyndon B. Johnson's insult in the late 1960s that there were nothing wrong with Gerry Ford "except he played football too long without his helmet." The best way to handle the L.B.J, insult was "to top it with a bigger laugh." Accordingly, "At the Washington newsmen's annual Gridiron dinner, the toughest audience in town, Ford walked up to the rostrum, did his best to pull the flaps down over his ears, and yukked, 'On the Gridiron, I always wear my helmet'." As Vice President at this year's Gridiron, Ford again brought down the house. After renouncing all higher political ambitious, he moved yearningly into his one regret. "Sometimes, though, when it's late and I'm tired and hungry - on that long drive to Alexandria - as I go past 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, I do seem to hear a little voice saying: 'If you lived here, you'd be home now'." Brower attempts to assess the quality of Ford's sense of humor and comments on his innate decency, ability to win friends, and need for strong guidance on policy, shown by his precipitant pardon to Richard Nixon.
A two-word title "Translator Supreme," five columns of praise, and a picture assess Rabassa as literary acrobat and inventor. Sara Blackburn, a short-story writer and critic, praises him not so much for the sheer abundance of his offerings from the recent flowering of Latin American fiction to English-speaking readers, but more for the closeness in sense and atmosphere for the original Spanish. He must create North American equivalents for local Argentine slang, make up New Yorkese versions of Colombian street talk, and find proper English weight for Cuban-based erotica. For his start in the literary world, Rabassa gives credit to the late professor and poet, Ramon Guthrie, who at Dartmouth taught him "how to read." The thousands of pages of translations would lead one to believe that Rabassa hd no other work. In his "regular" occupation at Queens and the Graduate School, CUNY, he advises Puerto Rican students about translation projects and conducts a workshop in which students translate from Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French, and Russian. His favorite course is entitled "Devils, Monsters, and Madmen," which includes readings from the Book of Revelations, Beowulf, King Lear, Milton, Dostoevsky, Kafka, and various manifestations of Frankenstein and Dracula, and John Gardner's Grendel.
Editor of Twentieth Century Interpretationsof Maloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable, O'Hara is author of the Times Book Review article "Small Works, Large in Meaning: FirstLove and Other Shorts" (87 pages, Grove Press, Paper $1.95) by Samuel Beckett, who has been described as one of the world's foremost unread authors. If some condemn him as impenetrable, others laud him to the Celtic heavens as a lucid night guide in existentialism. Unwilling to pigeonhole him as too avant-garde, O'Hara is willing to admit that Beckett lacks the easy cleverness of Neil Simon and defends Beckett as no "old sourpuss foisting his dissatisfaction upon an otherwise charming world." Indeed, O'Hara praises him for his "dazzling virtuosity with words and voices" and asserts that Becket is determined "to flagellate and mortify that virtuosity."
In the same issue of the NYTBR, Rubin Rabinovitz, Associate Professor of English, University of Colorado in Boulder, in "Books About Beckett" gives high praise to Professor Harvey and describes his Princeton University Press Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic ($l2.50) as one of the longest and most useful. "In addtion to analyses of the poetry and criticism Harvey gives interesting details about Beckett's life; texts of the poems (many of them never published in this country); good discussions of Beckett's early fiction; and summaries of other early works which are out of print or unpublished. Harvey's explanations are convincing and his scholarship impressive."
On the front and second pages of the September 29 New York Times Book Review appears the leading and lengthy offering written by the former Instructor in History, Dartmouth College, (1953-54) David Brion Davis '50, now Farnum Professor of History, Yale University He describes Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World theSlaves Made (823 pages, Pantheon Books, $17.50) by Eugene D. Genovese as a Marxist study of American slavery, with a curious Christian content. Davis remarks that no question in the United States since the 1950's has occasioned more lively controversy or sweeping interpretation. Many black historians and a few white historians agree that "the conflicts generated by slavery produced the only major class struggle and ideological rift in American history." Some readers may be startled to hear that the slaves did not suffer so much from physical abuse as from the owners' kindness and paternalism which resulted in the danger to the slaves of total dependency and loss of self respect.
In Davis's opinion, Roll, Jordan, Roll has a thesis so complicated with such an incredible range of topics that the theme cannot be summarized without some distortion even in a lengthy review. Davis is author of The Problemof Slavery in the Age of Revolution 1770-1821 to be published in January.
From your history courses you may recall that after the Balkan Wars (1912-13), portions of Macedonia were ceded to Greece, that after World War I the greatest part of Macedonia was ceded to Yugoslavia, and that Macedonian did not emerge as a literary language until after World War II. Owing to wars and occupations, the language was banned or otherwise inhibited for use by creative writers until recently when Yugoslavia has been encouraging regional expressionisms in the arts. Now a Dartmouth '54 man, Milne Holton, Associate Professor of English at the University of Maryland and a 1970 Fulbright Professor of American Literature at the University of Skopje in Macedonia, is introducing to American audiences 20 short stories originally written in Macedonian. To this book of 224 pages entitled The Big Horse and Other Stories of ModemMacedonia, which he has edited, he has written an introduction suggesting how in hardly more than 25 years a vital literature has emerged with a sense of freedom and awareness. The University of Missouri Press has published it at $9.50.
Lieut. Col. John C. Pratt '54, whose book The Laotian Fragments was reviewed in DARTMOUTH ALUMNI MAGAZINE, October issue, has edited a critical edition of Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Viking-1973). Following his retirement last month from teaching at the Air Force Academy, he is spending six months in Portugal as a Fulbright lecturer. After that assignment he will chair the Department of English at Colorado State University.
The pianist, composer, and conductor Werner Janssen '21, far from being retired, is in the news again. He has written the score for the musical Forever Saturday, played recently at Southampton College and about to go on tour for five months before hitting Broadway. As one who has often looked back with nostalgia on his Dartmouth undergraduate productions, Oh,Doctor! with Gene Markey 18 and Heave Ho! with Tom Groves '18, Janssen is well fitted to create mellifluous and melancholy music with the bitter-sweet nostalgia of high school when boys and girls could almost be convinced that Saturday would never come. The new Janssen musical, different in timbre and tone from his New Year's Eve in New York, AmericanKaleidoscope in subway and speakeasy, and Louisiana Suite steeped in New Orleans local color, treats with light irony the romantic haze veiling the actualities.
With 18 other scholars John White '61 attempts to answer such questions as 1. What is consciousness? 2. What is the relation of mind to body/brain? 3. What are the limits of human awareness? 4. Is there a consciousness in plants? 5.What are the possibilities of extra-terrestrial life being more highly evolved than man? In the book he edits, Frontiers of Consciousness: TheMeeting Ground Between Inner and OuterReality (366 pages, $8.95, Julian Press, Inc.), answers in 22 articles are spelled out by psychologists, psychiatrists, physicists, parapsychologists, philosophers, and behavioral scientists. To most of these articles White writes introductory words to orient non-professional readers needing definitions, guidance, support, and consolation. He is also author of two of the articles.
The aftermath of an neighboring airplane crash increased his concern with sudden disasters. For 10 years a practicing funeral director and a licensed embalmer in New York and New Hampshire, Vanderlyn R. Pine '59 has been closely involved with fatal accidents, grief, dying, and death. With a Ph.D. from New York University, now Assistant Professor of Sociology at the State University of New York at New Paltz, he has edited Responding toDisaster, (published by Bulfin, Milwaukee, 190 pages, softbound, $5)., written the introduction, "The Social Context of Disaster," and three essays about emergency preparedness. Eleven other authorities treat legal and medical aspects of major airplane accidents, mine fires, and flash floods, comment on the role of the FBI and Federal Government assistance, and outline procedures for funeral directors in aftermaths. Pine is senior editor of a forthcoming book Acute Grief and the Funeral.
Carroll F. Daley '27 lives on the Burgess Place, Plymouth, Massachusetts, in a house built in 1769, the year Dartmouth College was founded, and on his old barn roof is a reproduction of the Baker Library weathervane. About early Plymouth he has written a book striving for insights about space, people, and time, a sort of chronicle, disorganized because so many odd facts, geneological in flavor, seem to defy orderly classification. Often Kamesit, however, diverts with pictures with a wide range of appeals: an 1880 ice house on a pond, hitching posts, woodcuts of a homestead and milkweed, 1712-13 regional maps, and a series of water colors of the Bott Pond Place showing a crooked road, a horse and buggy, a grandmother by an open fireplace fire, attics with treasure trunks a barn with pigs and horses, pond boats and children's swings. Kamesit is the Indian name for the region centering about Great South Pond, and Daley quotes an Italian traveller who described Indians as being taller and better built than whites, eyes black and alert, profile sharp hair long and black, a bearing "sweet and gentle."
Daley relishes Old Plymouth tidbits and profundities. The purpose of marriage was procreation. The eight or nine children per couple, often augmented by children from other families, could be counted on for economic benefits, mutual love, security in old age, and barriers against loneliness. The high holiday was not Christmas but Thanksgiving with nothing "bought" on the table except sugar, salt, tea. and white flour for pie crusts. On farms, griddled johnnycakes made from the meal of white flint corn were served three times a day.
This softbound book is produced by Pilgrim Publishers, Kingston, Mass.
Milne Holton '54, Associate Professor of English at the University of Maryland, is the author of Cylinder of Vision, a critical study of Stephen Crane, and editor of a series of Macedonian short stories, discussed earlier in this column. His essay of 30 pages appears in a New Perspectives book, Private Dealings:Modern American Writers in Search ofIntegrity, the title of which harks back to Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth."
