DOCUMENT RESUME

ED 298 533 CS 211 512

AUTHOR Taylor, Caroline, Ed.TITLE American Literature.INSTITUTION National Endowment for the Humanities (NFAH),

Washington, D.C.PUB DATE Sep 88NOTE 50p.

PUB TYPE Collected Works Serials (022)JOURNAL CIT Humanities; v9 n5 Sep-Oct 1988

EDRS PRICE MF01/PCO2 Plus Postage.DESCRIPTORS Interviews; )(Literary Criticism; )(Literary History;

Novels; Short Stories; Twentieth Century Literature;)(United States Literature

IDENTIFIERS Bellow (Saul); Brooks (Cleanth); Dickinson (Emily);Emerson (Ralph Waldo); National Endowment for theHumanities; Twain (Mark); Welty (Eudora); Whitman(Walt); Wilson (Edmund)

ABSTRACT

Published bimonthly by the National Endowment for theHumanities, this edition of "Humanities" focuses on issues inAmerican literature. Articles and their authors consist of: (1)"Conversations about Literature" (an interview with Cleanth Brooksand Wi/lie Morris about writing and writers in America); (2) "TheSpine o. Literature" (an interview with Eudora Welty and Cleantho,ooks); (3) "The Look of American Literary Seriousness" (Stephen J.Do)adio); (4) "Making an American Culture (S. A. Spitz); (5)"Fathoming Mark Twain" (Joanna Biggar); (6) "The Fig Tree's Lessons"Uristen Hall); (7) "Stringing Lariats" (Caroline Taylor); (E)"Bellow's New World Babylon" (Ellen Pifer); (9) "The Rise of AmericanLiterature Studies" (James Turner); (10) "America: A Reading" (EllenMarsh); and (11) "Letters from London" (Joseph H. Brown). (MM)

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Cleanth Brooks, Gray Professor Emeritus ofRhetoric at Yale University, and Willie Mor-ris, former editor of Harper's magazine, dis-cuss literature in America. (Photo by WilliamFerris, University of Mississippi Archives)

HumanitiesA bimonthly review published by theNational Endowment for the Humanities

Chairman: Lynne V. CheneyDirector of Publicationsand Public Affairs:Marguerite Hoxie SullivanAssistant Director for Publicationsand Editor. Caroline TaylorAssistant Editor: James TurnerProduction Editor: Scott SanbornProduction Assistant: Susan QuerryCirculation Manager. Joy EvansEditorial Board:John Agresto, Marjorie Berlincourt,Harold Cannon, Richard Ekman,Donald Gibson, Guinevere Griest,Jerry MartinDesign: Hausmann/Krohn, Inc

The opinions and conclusions expressed inHumanities are those of the authors and do notnecessarily reflect Endowment policy. Materialappearing in this publication, except for thatalready copyrighted, may be freely repro-duced. Please notify the editor in advance sothat appropriate credit can be given. TheChairman of the Endowment has den-mimedthat the publication of this periodical is Neces-sary in the transaction of the public businessrequired by law of this agency. Use of fundsfor printing this periodical has been approvedby the director of the Office of Managementand Budget through September 1988. Sendrequests for subscriptions and other commu-nications to the editor, Humanities, NationalEndowment for the Humanities, 1100 Penn-sylvania Avenue, N.W., Washington, D C20506. Telephone 202,786-0435. Annual sub-scription rate: 59. (USPS 521.090) ISSN0018-7526.

Editor's Note

Working with Words

The phrase "testing new modes of reality" has become a buzzword for theeighties. According to novelist and critic Raymond Federman, the self-reflexive, nonnarrative style of literature today confronts "the unreality ofreality. . . . By rendering language irrational, and even unreadable, the newfiction writers have also neutralized the fiasco of reality and the impostureof history." While rendering language irrational, they also do what writershave always done: carefully work with words that most accurately reflecttheir vision. But what if those words baffle and even alienate the reader?What do writers of this type of fiction hope to accomplish? What indeed hashappened to literature in the postmodern era?

In search of answer to these and other questions. Humanities invitedCleanth Brooks, father of the New Criticism, and Willie Morris, writer andformer editor of Harper's, to talk about writers, editors, critics, writing, andpublishing in America. Their "Conversations About Literature," condensedfor publication in this issue, took place in Oxford, Mississippi, on June 29.The following day, we journeyed to Jackson for a brief visit with EudoraWelty. Portions of Brooks and Welty's conversation about the state of thestory in today's fiction are featured in "The Spine of Literature." Humanitiesis especially grateful to William Ferris, director of the Jniversity of Mis-sissippi's Center for the Study of Southern Culture, for his assistance in ar-ranging, tape recording, and photographing these conversations aboutAmerican literature.

Early attempts by some of America's major writers to test new modes ofreality are explored by Stephen J. Donadio in "The Look of American Liter-ary Seriousness." He finds in the works of Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson,and Melville a declaration of literary independence from the approved liter-ary structures of the past. The architectural structures of the present arewhat concern Saul Bellow. In "Bellow's New World Babylon," Ellen Pifer re-veals the novelisk's vision of the urban metropolis as a temple for America'sworship of material expansion, rather than spiritual ascendancy.

No foray into American literature would be complete without some ac-knowledgment of the works of Mark Twain. "Fathoming Mark Twain," byJoanna Biggar, relates work in progress on two editions of the works andpapers of America's favorite writer. Joseph Brown describes the first com-prehensive collection of the correspondence of Jack London in "Letters fromLondon," and James Turner's essay on "The Rise of American LiteratureStudies" recounts the forging of an academic discipline to study America'sliterature.

The outlook for the post-postmodern era in American literature may de-pend more on the number of people who read fiction and poetry than onthe writers' attachment to or distance from the literary legacy of the past.But as long as there are readers, there will be writers working with words."A year or so of one writer's life has gone into the writing of a novel," Eu-dora Welty once said. "Does this not suggest that . . . words have beenfound for which there may be no other words?"

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Caroline Taylor

Contents

American Literature

Conversations About Literature. Cleanth Brooks and WillieMorris talk about writing and writers in America.

10 The Spine of Literature. Eudora Welty and Cleanth Brooksexamine the state of the story in contemporary literature.

The Look of American Literary Seriousness by Stephen J.12 Donadio. A declaration of literary independence by America'smajor writers.

15Making an Ameri: Culture by S.A. Spitz. A comprehensivestudy documents Edmund Wilson's contribution to Americanletters.

18 Fathoming Mark Twain by Joanna Biggar. Two editions of theworks and papers of Mark Twain shed light on America'sfavorite writer.

22

24

27

30

The Fig Tree's Lessons by Kristen Hall. Adapting KatherineAnne Porter's short story for children's television.

Stringing Lariats by Caroline Taylor. Writers of the purple sagefrom 1510 to 1984.

Bellow's New World Babylon by Ellen Pifer. The significance ofplace in the novels of Saul Bellow.

The Rise of American Literature Studies by Ja:-.-,.!s Turner.Forging an academic discipline to study the literature ofAmerica.

America: A Reading by Ellen Marsh. Tucson tackles the major33 themes of American literature.

36Letters from London by Joseph H. Brown. The first full-scalecollection of the correspondence of Jack London.

The Humanities GuideSupport for the Humanities at Two-Year Institutions by JudithJeffrey Howard, 39/ Recent NEH Grants by Discipline, 42/ NEHNotes and News, 45/ Deadlines, 46

CONVERSATIONS

Ed note: The temperature reached 105 de-grees in Oxford, Mississippi, on June29, 1988. On a cloudless afternoon in astate as drought stricken as manythroughout the country, Humanities in-vited Cleanth Brooks, Gray ProfessorEmeritus of Rhetoric at Yale and a formerJefferson Lecturer in the qumanities, todiscuss American literature with WillieMorris, writer in residence at the Uni-versity of Mississippi and former editorof Harper's magazine. Brooks and Mor-ris held a wide-ranging conversationlasting more than two hours, at the homeof William Ferris, director of the univer-sity's Center for the Study of SouthernCulture. Only Cleo the cat welcomed theadditional heat radiating from lights setup by the center's film crew.

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Cleo the cat shares the spotlight with Cleanth Brooks and Willie Morris. Asked if these is a dis-tinctively American novel, Brooks replied, "We're still defining 'American."

Humanities: It has been said that con-temporary literature has consciouslydrifted away from narrative, fromstorytelling. Is this true?

Brooks: I think to some extent it istrue. Certainly there is such a thingas "the New Yorker" story, which of-fers a fairly minimal plot for mostreaders. There's nothing wrong withthat; you don't have to hit the readerover the head with a sledge hammerto make a point. If there's a pointthere, it can be done subtly. If thelite of the character is changed insome way or his perception of theworld has changed, that's enough.

On the other hand, sometimesyou work it down a little too finely,and there's not enough story to keepthe reader interested. My own per-sonal conviction is that somewherethere should be some hint or morethan a hint of a real narrative: Some-thing is happening; somebody isdoing or saying something of conse-quence to himself or to others.

Morris: I agree. I believe in thebeauty and efficacy of language, and Ibelieve very strongly in narrative, inplots, but written in a beautiful andmeaningful and feeling language. InYazoo City, I grew up on nineteenth-

century Russian novelists. Theywere such masters of the story.

Humanities: For those who havedrifted away from the story, howmany authors are we talking about?

Brooks: I'm much impressed by anarticle that Walker Percy published afew years back in which he com-mented on how few serious writerswe have and how few serious read-ers. As he figured it, 2 percent of theAmerican public probably reads se-rious fiction or reads it seriously, andthat means in our population around100,000 people. So we're talkingabout just a fraction of the popula-tion, the vast number of whom can'tread at all or don't read or prefer notto read. Those who do read seem toprefer the machine-made novel orstory: lots of plot, lots of sex, lots ofmoney, lots of excitement. Of thatsmall group of serious writers, Ithink a great many have been tempt-ed to refine the story down moreand more to nuance and intimation.

ABOUT LITERATURESome brilliant handlers of languagehave got away with it and justifiedwhat they're doing.

Morris: Take a writer like JohnCheeverin my opinion one of thegreat masters of the short story inAmerican literaturewhose work isso rich with nuance and humanbeings. I see a strain in contempo-rary American literature with young-er writers who write very well butwho seem to me to be only inter-ested in the words themselves, al-most as if the words themselves areenough for literature. I take issuewith some of these writers who feelthat the word is everything; I dis-agree with this modern strain in lit-erature, where it's just the sentenceand the shock valuea stunningscene bereft of the old verities anduniversal truths, the human heart inconflict with itself, which is at thecore of great literature, American orotherwise.

Humanities: Is this turn away fromnarrative unprecedented in liter-ature, or has it occurred before?

Brooks: One has to remember howcomparatively new the novel and theshort story are. By general agree-ment, the English novel was born inthe eighteenth century; the shortstory came even later. The earliestnovels and stories spent a great dealof time introducing the speaker, thewriter, the person whose story isbeing told. Think how much time SirWalter Scott spends getting one ofhis novels goinginordinate, mostof us feel. I would say this relativelyplotless story is a fairly recent devel-opment, and we could almost set thetime: when James Joyce wrote Dub-liners. On the surface, many of hisstories appear to have no plot. Actu-ally they do, but if Joyce's example togenerations of young American writers pushed them in a certain direc-tion, it doesn't mean that some ofthem didn't take the ball and carry itentirely too far, to extremes that Idon't think even Dubliners ever went.

Humanities: Could you discusssome of the differences betweenmodernist and postmodern fiction?

Brooks: I have wrestled with thoseterms, and I hear them mentionedagain and again. Placed in somekind of chronological context, whatwe've come to call "modern" runsthrough the twenties, thirties, andforties. People took off from that andpushed certain things further. Butthe terms are too vague for me, andI don't think I could use them prof-itably. On the whole, the achieve-ments of the modern writers weremagnificent. Present successes havenot measured up to that achieve-ment. There has been son kind offalling off.

Morris: What in your opinion,Cleanth, was the flowering of Amer-ican fiction? The twenties? Thethirties?

Brooks: I would come down surelyto the forties when some of Faulk-ner's greatest work was published,and we had people already doingtheir early work then, people likeEudora Welty and Robert Penn War-ren. But I think there's a differencebetween that achievement and post-modernity. I don't think postmodemityhas come up to what modernityachieved. The very terms are clumsy.Postmodern. What is postmodern?

Humanities: Let's attempt to definepostmodern, although I feel as un-comfortable as you do. I think it'slike defining postmodern architec-

6

cure. If we could sry that it is fictioncharacterized by a nonnarrative ap-proach that seems to be moving to-ward inquiring about a disordereduniverse or implying that chaos can-not be managed, rather than tryingto impose order on chaos, what doyou think writers of this type of fic-tion are saying to the reader?

Brooks: Is it the writer who is goingto bring order out of disorder andgive you a novel or poem in whichthere is a beginning, a middle, andan endthings that make sense? Ishe actually imposing order on a radi-cally disordered universe? Or is hefinding an order that we hadn'tnoticed was there? I think what is atthe bottom of postmodemity is real-ly a philosophy of life or history thatsees the universe as disordered: thatthere are no absolute values, there isno God, there is no supreme order.

Morris: If there is a God, Cleanth,he's a Methodist.

Brooks: Well, that's what would besaid by a postmodernist, right? Peo-ple who think that would probablyalso think that a person who is turn-ing out a coherent poem or shortstory is falsifying realityis not real-ly dealing with reality. He is impos-ing an illusion of order on a worldthat really isn't ordered and there-fore is not telling the truth. I'm in-clined to say that this world which,God knows, seems disorderedenough, does have an order but thatbecause of the way in which we usu-ally live, we see it as forming no pat-tern, as having no order.

Words- rorth and Coleridge statedas their principles that they weregoing to reveal something rich andstrange in what appeared to be justan ordinary, humdrum world. Thatwas Wordsworth's job. Coleridge

was to take the fantastic and strangeand show that, yes, it had circum-stantialitywas real: It is real, it issolid, it has the qualities of reality. Agreat deal of the modern theory thatthe world and the universe have noorder holds that any attempt to givea reader a coherent or ordered art issomething artificial, is a kind of lie.One should not tell lies, and artistsleast of all should not tell lies. Anartist should tell the truth; I think hecan tell the truth and yet find order,for I think that order is there.

Morris: But as Mark Twain once re-marked, "Sometimes you have to lieto tell the truth."

Brooks Quite true, and sometimesas Shakespeare put it, by indirec-tion, find direction out, or as EmilyDickinson said, "Tell the truth, buttell it slant." The kind of truth theartist tells can't be told directly, theway a scientist would tell it.

Morris: As I progress in life, I real-ly see no order; I see the world reallyin chaos; I don't see any rationalityto it. All I see is that life is experi-enced, nothing more than experi-enced. Let's take Faulkner. When hewas writing The Sound and the Fury,he wasn't thinking that the world iscrazy, the world is insane and full ofsuffering and disorder. Wasn't Mr.Faulkner just putting words on pa-per? Of course, he htld to have asense of order to write his magnifi-cent novel. One of his Virginia stu-dents said r5nce, "Mr. Faulkner, Iread The bound and the Fury threetimes, and I can't understand it.What should I do?" And Faulkner, inihat wonderful little high tenor of hissaid, "Read it four times." Was a

man like Faulkner trying to imposeorder on a chaotic universe, or washe just putting words on paper?

Brooks: I think that, whatever hethought about the universe, he es-sentially in his deepest heart felt thatlife meant something. Anyway, hemade his novels mean something.You don't emerge from his novelssaying, "Well, I might as well juststart in the middle and skip the be-ginning or skip the end." The noveladds up to something.

One of the things that I find lessand less argued for in some of thenewer theories is that there is no de-terminate meaning. We're held to becaught in the prison of language, wecan't get out of it, we can't get to re-ality, words have nothing in relationto reality. Language is just a won-derful game of cards, all the mean-ings of which are arbitrary. But as forliterature having any analogy or mir-roring in any way the nature of real-ity, this is not true, so the newertheorists seem to say. If Faulkner hadreally believed that, I can't believe hewould have given us any literature atall because I don't see him as a manwho thought it was worthwhile giv-ing you a coherent novel about aworld that he really thought had nocoherence in it.

Morris: I couldn't agree with youmore, and, of course, we're sittinghere in his home town. What didFaulkner do for a living' He toldeverybody else he was a gentlemanfarmer, and he did have a farm.Didn't make any living on it, butthat typewriter constantly peckingaway. What he must have donewhen he was writing his greatworks, he just had a feeling for thegreat complexity and suffering ofhuman beings. One of my briefsagainst some of the postmodernwriters, the younger ones, is thatthey do not care for this passing oftime. They care for words and theeffect of words. That in itself, I be-lieve, is part of literature, but not re-ally literature itself.

Brooks: In other words, if you emp-ty the words of any relation to real-ity, what is left of them? They're justthe little shiny, bca Itiful things inthemselves that make their own fun-ny little abstract patterns but havenothing to do with the way peoplebehave and live.

Humanities: Some of these newerwriters are really the first generationto be reared in creative writing pro-grams, even at the graduate level.Before then, writing was an amateurundertaking, not studied formally inschools like art or music. How hasthis affected current fiction?

Brooks: It has done some good,mostly by just giving writers achance to get together and talk andread some books together, but itdoes little good at all except to pro-vide this human communion. Itwould do harm if it gave the illusionto anybody that there are tricks ordevices or methods you can learnthat will guarantee art or set you onthe road to being a good writer. Myguess is that every writer has alwayshad his model.;. Faulkner, who wasself-educated, certainly had readhimself and knew what to read, thegreat Russians, Joyce, and the rest.

Morris: One of the most deplorablephrases in the American language iswhen people ask, "Do you teach cre-ative writing?" I hink writing by itsvery nature is creative. I tried toteach writing for two years at OleMiss, and I don't think writing canbe taught. I did fall in love with oneof my studentsa pretty blondefrom the Delta, which helped at thetimebut you cannot teach writing.The only thing you can do is to passalong to young people who careabout writing the advice to readgood books, but I don't think youcan help a young person to write.

Brooks: Red Warren did teach cre-ative writingand I agree with you

The critic ought toshow that literatureis not only abeautiful thing buta valuable thingthat teaches ushow to live in ourworld and how tounderstand our-selves in relation toour world.

about the phrase being horribleatYale. He told me, "Look, I can'tteach people how to write. I think Ican, up to a point, teach people howto read. So in my classes we takegood examples and we talk aboutthem, and I encourage the studentsto think about writing and get thingsdown and then later on we graduatefrom talking about Joyce or Haw-thorne or Flaubert to taking to pieceswhat they're doing: What wentwrong here; what went right there."

For my own part, a great deal ofthe theories advanced by the Frenchwriters, including the new Marxism,new historicism, and deconstruc-tionism, have colored their view ofthe nature of words, whether theyhave anything to do with reality andwhether the universe has any orderin it.

F

In our latest edition of Understand-ing Fiction (Prentice Hall, 1979), weput in some of the newest writing,what I think one would callpostmodern. We gave four stories toexpose the student to what is goingon. One was by Julio Cortazar called"The Continuity of Parks." It tells ofa man reclining in his country housein a park, seated in a green velvetchair quite relaxed and reading anovel. The novel has to do with apair of lovers who are preparing tocommit robbery and murder. As hereads in this quiet setting, the char-acters that he is reading about cometo life beside his chair. It's a trick, butit's brilliantly done.

Morris: But does it work?Brooks: It didn't work for me, but

we put it in the book because wewanted to expose it to the studentswithout saying whether it wouldwork or not. The point we weremaking was this: Obvicusly this is awriter who's testing different modesof reality. What is the difference be-tween reality and fiction? In this,ase, he made the fiction melt intoreality, and one can't tell one fromthe other at the end.

Humanities: How have changes inpublishingthe rise of conglomer-atesand in book marketingchainbookstores, high-volume sales, pro-motional tours by authorsaffectedthe writing of serious fiction?

Brooks: I don't know a single serious writer who doesn't lament thestate of publishing because the bigconglomerates are taking over thepublishing houses. Then they tellthe publisher, "We're not going tocensor the books; we're going to letyou keep your staff." But they're notreally interested in literature; they'reinterested in the bottom line.

Morris: It's marketing.Brooks: Marketing. A man once

told me, "One review killed mybook." I read the book, and thoughit's not the greatest of novels, it's a

modem document, on the relation ofman to art and nature.

The poet, hearing the nightingale,longs to join the nightingale in theworld of nature, almost to the pointof willing to give up his conscious-ness itself and to die into this worldthat is, like all nature, immortal. Sea-sons change, plants grow and die,but the life of nature goes on for-ever. The bird is immortal not be-cause Keats, the young medical stu-dent, thought inat it had literallylived for thousands of years andmight live thousands more, but be-cause the nightingale didn't knowthat it would ever die. No animalknows that it's going to die. It's onlyhuman beings, when they get to befour or five years old, who begin torealize, I too will die. Human beingsare born under the sentence ofdeath; the animal kingdom is not.Anyway it's a beautiful meditationand a very deep one, a meditationwhich sounds the depths of what itmeans to be a man. The world ofnature is wonderfully attractive tothe artist, and yet, he can't join thatworld in its harmonious immortality,for to do that means giving up thehuman consciousness in death and,once dead, he will cease to hear thenightingale's song.

In other words, I see this poem asan intellectual thing and somethingthat makes a profound comment onhuman life.

This is the sort of reading that, itseems to me, criticism ought to pro-mote. The critic ought also, asPound put it, to keep aown vermin,sweep trash out of the halls of therepublic of letters, induct people intothe mysteries if he can, show thatliterature is not only a beautifulthing but a valuable thing that teach-es us how to live in our world andhow to understand ourselves in rela-tion to our world. That seems to mea very high and valuable thing. Idon't think, however, that it can besubstituted for religion. If you don'thave religion, you'll just have to do

without it; but the role that literaturedoes have is a valuable one, and thetestimony of the ages is that it ispriceless. But it's valuable not mere-ly to print on linen rag paper andput in a fine Morocco binding. To"get the good of it," you have toparticipate in it. You have to make ityour own. That's what I think therole of the critic ought to be. Lectureover.

Morris: The role of the editor andwriter is important but vanishing. Ibelieve in a close relationship be-tween the editor and writer. Liter-atureand I'm so glad, Cleanth, thatyou and I pronounce the word thesame wayliterateurwill endure.It's no accident that writers andpoets suffer. It's in the nature of theobsession, and writing is an obses-sion. Do you think William Faulknerwrote because he enjoyed it? Hewrote because he had to write.

Brooks: E'.actly. The writer, thepoet, the dramatist, the fiction writ-er, is primary. The worst thing a crit-ic can do is to say, "I am primary; Iam just as good as the writer." Heought to be happy to be a kind ofhandmaiden or manservant to theMuses. The worst indictment that Iknow against some of the moderntheorists is the bold-faced audacity oftheir sayingand I'm quoting fromthemthat the critic is just as impor-tant as the poet because what thepoet meant by the poem or what heput into the poem is indeterminate.Everybody makes up his own mean-ing. The critic, therefore, in makinghis meaning, is just as important asthe poet. That is a howling absur-dity. I'm perfectly willing to fetchand carry for the Muses. I thinkthat's an exalted occupation. i.c

Eudora Welty in 1976 and, above right, with Cleanth Brooksin 1983. Asked about the influence on her writing of herearly work as a photographer for the WPA in Mississippi,Welty replied, "I wasn't helped in my writing by what I tooka photograph of, but the same appreciation of what was outthere that made me put it in my story made me photographsomething."

The SpineA Conversation Between Eudora Weity and Cleanth Brooks

Ed note: It rained in Oxford,, Mississip-pi, the morning of June 30, 1988, butfurther south, Jackson baked under a re-lentless sun. The hot topic for most con-versation was possible crop damage andbarges stuck on the Mississippi, whichhad reached its lowest level in years. Thesubject for Eudora W:..!,y and CleanthBrooks was the state of narrative in con-temporary American literature. The fol-lowing conversation for Humanitiestook place in the airconditioned comfortof the Mississippi Department of Ar-chives and History in Jackson.

Humanities: What are your thoughtsabout the state of narrative in con-temporary literature?

Welty: I'm not truly a student ofthings as they happen. I read forpleasure, and I mostly like to readfor narrative content. I don't seehow narrative can ever be truly lostbecause it is inherent in any story,no matter how distantly somethingmay be based on it. It's a sort ofspine connecting what happen withwhat happens next and why it happened, and all the quest cins that gowith ithuman character, whatmade people do things, what hap-pened to people as a result ofsomething.

Brooks: Surely it is true that thenarrative element is always there,even if muted, even if implied. But ifyou push past it, you're really get-ting into things that lyric poetry andmeditative poetry can do better. Itseems to me that some of our fictionwriters, trying to depend so muchon subtlety and nuance and changeof atmosphere, are really giving us akind of tepid, prose poetry thatdoesn't take advantage of the formalelements of poetry and loses some ofthe values of narrative poetry.

Welty: I couldn't agree with you

more. I don't see the value of tryingto make a change for the sake ofchange. If something drives you todo it, something that is a very strongconviction, then you should follow itand see where it goes, but it's still amatter of communication.

Brooks: Have you ever taken a cre-ative writing class?

Welty: No, I haven't. It wasn't thatI spurned them; I never heard ofthem. But nothing good was everwritten out of anything but the indi-vidual., personal self with a greatpassionate desire and conviction be-hind it. I think you can pick up andlearn the trimmings with the intelli-gent help that comes through a writ-ing class. If you've got what it takesto begin with, you can be helped bycriticism of method, etc., that steersyou accurately toward what youwere going toward, but it's no sub-stitute for talent.

Brooks: The editor, if he's really agood editor, can help the writer, andI suppose the person in the so-calledcreative writing class can performthe same function.

Welty: What you need is an objec-tive, intelligent point of viewsomeone who is sympathetic to whatyou're trying to do. What you needis the time and the opportunity andthe space around you to work some-thing out for yourself. You can getplenty of help from creative writingclasses, the right kind of editors,and, heaven knows, from reading.That tells you more than anything inthe world.

Brooks: Walker Percy in a recent es-say ("How To Be An American Nov-elist in Spite of Being Southern andCatholic") warned the young south-ern writer not to try to imitate thegreat figures of the southern pastwho have done their job and cameout of a certain context and won

of Literaturetheir victory. We're all proud ofthem, but they had a different situa-tion to face. He is asking in this arti-cle that the young southern writersface up to a world that has a greatdeal of disorder"an amalgam ofeconomic prosperity and spiritualdislocation," he puts it. In effect,he's suggesting that they face up to adifferent situation. It seems to me,Eudora, that in The Optimist'sDaughter, you were doing exactlythat, long before Walker Percy madeany of these comments. You werefacing the fact of the young southerngirl, who's got a job in Chicago, whosees the old world change in manyrespects, who's going back to a jobin Chicago, who's got to find out herpast, relate herself to it, accept cer-tain things in another way. Wouldyou agree that this is exactly what theyoung woman in the novel is doing?

Welty: Yes, it applies. Of course, Idid it all through perso,Ial applica-tion because that's Liz only way Iwrite. I think all of writing shouldreflect the real world, which is al-ways changing. Life is fluid and 1

the move, and a story has got tocatch it at a certain point to showwhat's going on.

Brooks: That wonderful passage to-ward the end when Laurel is gettingready to go back to Chicago andty7.,:k to her job, leaving the brides-maids, leaving the father buried, is abeautiful account of a young womanwho is not putting her past behindher at all. She's accepting it. On theother hand, she has no intention orliving in that past; she's going tolive, do her job somewhere else, bt'tshe doesn't have to choose.

Welty: She doesn't have to choose.They can coexist.

Brook I can't answer for WalkerPercy, but I would think that thiswould illustrate very well his sug-

gestion that the young southernwriter coming along should lookaround, face the facts, look at theurgent issues, shape that into hisstory.

Welty: You've got to do that. I keepforgetting how old I am, but I hadsome students ask me, "Miss Welty,you always write stories about oldentimes!" I replied, "Well, the storiesyou are talking about I wrote back inthe forties or something. I was writ-ing when those things were happen-ing; I wasn't writing about the mys-terious, hidden past." It is importantto understand reality but not to ob-literate what's gone before in the in-terest of saying that nothing is realbut the present.

Brooks: So much of our society istrying to forget the past or obliteratethe past. Students are not beingtaught about the past.

Welty: They really do not know it.When this museum mounted thefirst ever exhibition on the civilrights movement in Jackson, it hadmarvelous posters, photographs, ev-erything. School childrenblack andwhitewere invited to come. Noneof them had ever heard of civilrights. They didn't know there hadever been a time when there weren'tany. They never heard of MedgarEvers. It was amazing. They passedthrough this as if it were a glass wall.-t's part of not knowing what's hap-pened or caring.

Brooks: So it's -eally a false dichoto-my, if any of as allow ourselves toaccept it, the false opinion that holdsthat a writer has to disown the pastin order to accept the present, or ac-cept the past and live in it and dis-own the present.

Welty: One of the problems inmodem short stories that I r,:ad isthe inability to get out of the presenttense, out of the first person. To me,

12

the is a symptom of what we'vebee i talking about.

Books: The whole pressure ofmodern literature is toward the lyric,the I, the subjective person. The epicdealt with the national hero. In thedrama, the characters speak forthemselves in a situation. But ifyou're very obsessed with yourself,it's all lyric. It's what I feel, it's what Iwant to confess, it's what I think.Obviou. ;ly there is great lyric poetry,but if you try to turn drama, epic,realism, everything into the lyricnot what reality is but what 1 makeof reality--that get's awfully boring.

Welty: It sure does, and it's a trap.If you can t get out of yourself, howwill you ec er learn about life? Howcan you accept the fact that otherpeople are .;eeing the same thinga.ld that they may have a few ideastoo and that you might relate to oneanother? It would be a trap never toget out of yoiir o- ,n self, your ownbody, your own preconceptions.

Brooks: Wot.ld you say, Eudora,that one of the things we're likely toget, particularly in southern fiction,will be brilliant accounts of socialmannersthe way people behave,the way they talcwhich can reflectthe quality of the whole society? Ifthe whole of the South were justblotted outbang!and I were com-missioned to reconstruct the societyin the way it behaved and acted, Icould do soor stmlebody betterqualifiedfor the lower South fromthe novels of Walk ?r Percy and Eu-dora Welty, and foi the upper Southfrom the stories of 'eter Taylor. It'sall there, and I think that's a valuableservice and very mt. ch fun to read.

Welty: Thank you, sir. That's whatwe've had to depend r -1 in all pastliteratureto reflect lie as it was andto stand as a record c f the societythat existed. 401

TheLook of Racing Thoughts by Jasper Johns, 1983. Encaustic and collage on canvas. Like the words of

Dickinson, Emerson, or Whitman, this painting merges the familar with the strange.

American Literary SeriousnessBY STEPHEN 1. DONADIO

AS A GENERAL RULE, worksthat have defined American lit-

erary ambition at its most far-reach-ing seem driven by impatience. Thatimpatience manifests itself in charac-teristically uneven textures, prolifer-ating intentions, and ragged, unset-tled boundaries. Consider the visualappearance of a poem by EmilyDickinson, especially a poem inmanuscript, or the endlessly ex-panding self-definition of Walt Whit-man's Leaves of Grass. Works of thissort suggest an intense resistence tothe traditional claims of literaryform. They reveal an abiding wish .

transcei ti that form, to embody anexperience so comprehensive that itexceec's the spiritual and emotionallimits associated with any estab-lished literary formthat is, anyform with a history. For a historyimplies an inheritance, and an inher-itan,:e inevitably qualifies theuniqueness of one's experience.

Stephen 1. Donadio is professor andchairman of the Department of AmericanLiterature and Civilization at Middle-bury College and director of the co3ege's

13 Literary Studies Program.

Much American writing reflects awish to enact at full intensity an ex-perience that cannot be identified asHerary in the literary terms that wealready know. This striving for a vi-sion of experience at its most unme-diated, intimate, and elemental isfigured, for example, in the charac-teristic shapes of Dickinson's poems,which almost invariably end byreaching outside their frames into anunarticulated space. These poemsare completed elsewhere; they ap-pear to be passing through the realmof our present experience on theirway to somewhere else.

Like the writings of Ralph WaldoEmerson, Dickinson's words are in-tended not so much to be heard asto be overheard; they are like thediscontinuous utterances of a medi-um performing in the presence of anaudience. As in Jasper John's recentpainting Racing Thoughts (1983), weare moved from the identifiable andthe famiiiar to associations, anxi-eties, and questions that we cannotframe in words. The image as awhole defines itself not as a resolu-tion of mental wandering but as theoccasion for it.

In works of this kind, form no lon-ger serves primarily to contain some-thing; its funct; n has become al-most entirely c Jcativ e. The formalelements exist chiefly to evoke anorder of experience that can never bedisclosed complete:y within the con-fines of present circumstances andthat, therefore, can never be fullyrepresented within the limits of theindividual artistic work. Seen in thislight, Emerson's writings (likeJohns's painting) make visible theruined structures of our present un-derstanding. They function like ar-chitectural ruins through which, atunexpected points, the open spaceof uncomprehended actual experi-ence is visible.

The taste for aesthetic gaps anddiscontinuities has often been associ-uted with the ascendance of modern-ism, and in this respect many read-ers in this century have come toregard Henry James, whose exigentcommitment to formal closure andcompleted structure is reitera',edceaselessly in his critical pronounce-ments, as definitive of premodernistsensibility. Contemplating the vir-tually borderless experience afforded

by Emerson, James found himselfhard presses' to acconnt for that au-thor's evident success, his demon-strated impact, in the absence of anyrecognizable concern with the artic-ulation of a distinct literary form.

Acknowledging Emerson's abilityto speak "to the soul in a voice of di-rection and authority," James ob-served that Emerson must accord-ingly be judged "a striking exceptionto the general rule that writings livein the last resort by their form; thatthey owe a large part of their fortuneto the art with which they have beencomposed. It is hardly too much, ortoo little, to say of Emerson's writ-ings in general that they were notcomposed at all."

To James, it seemed evident thatEmerson "had never really masteredthe art of compositionof continu-ous expression. . . . Of course, theway he spoke was the way that wason the whole most convenient tohim; but he differs from most menof letters of the same degree of creditin failing to strike us as havingachieved a style."

No shape, no style: In literaryterms, so far as James was con-cerned, Emerson's works couldhardly be said to exist. And theAmerican novelist v% is certainlyright in concluding that Emerson'swritings cannot be regarded as dis-crete, fully articulated literary objectswith a specifiable content in any or-dinary sense. Instead, these worksare devised as no:hing more or lessthan a means of transport, a way ofdelivering the reader into a spiritualstate far removed from the actual cir-cumstances in which he begins bylocating himself.

It is just this invitation to forget-fulness, this temptation to lose ourplace in time and worldly circum-stances, that Herman Melville foundso profoundly seductive and that hewas ultimately compelled to reject.Referring obliquely but unmistaka-bly to the effects of Emersonian rhet-oric, Melville pondered the state ofmind of the daydreaming young phi-losopher high up on the masthead:

. . . lulled into such an opium-like list-lessness of vacant, unconscious reverieis this absent-minded youth by theblending cadences of waves withthoughts, that at last he :uses his identi-ty; takes the mystic ocean at his feet forthe visible image of that deep, blue, bot-tomless soul, pervading niankind and

nature; and every strange, half-seen,gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him. . . seems to him the embodiment ofthose elusive thoughts that only peoplethe soul by continually flitting throughit. . . There is no life in thee, now, ex-cept that rocking life imparted by a gen-tly rolling ship; by her, borrowed fromthe sea; by the sea, from the inscrutabletides of God. But while this sleep, thisdream is on ye, move your foot or handan inch; slip your hold at all; and youridentity comes back in horror. . . Andperhaps, at mid-day, in the fairestweather, with one half-throttled shriekyou drop through that transparent airinto the summer sea, no more to rise forever. Heed it well, ye Pantheists!

iz-2.

?..,

lIns portrait of Walt Whitman appears in the1855 edition of Leaves of Grass.

Melville's account of the evocativepower of Emerson's writing leads usback to an awareness of the spiritualambition at the heart of the Emer-sonian project: the attempt at a gen-eral transfiguration of the common-place, which necessitated, to beginwith, an abandonment of familiar lit-erary shapes. One of the most ob-vious reasons for the characteristicformal inconclusiveness of Emer-son's work is its refusal to be boundby any single generic definition. Thisrefusal may almost be said to definea tradition of comparable Americanliterary ventures that would includeHenry David Thoreau's Walden,Melville's Moby-Dick, and (in slightlydifferent but related ways) MarkTwain's Adventures of Huckleberry

y

Finn and F. Scott Fitzgerald's TheGreat Gatsby. Underlying the pre-meditated violation of standards oftaste and de "rum that figure in theself-definition of such works is aconviction that adherence to pre-established dictates regarding appro-priate subject matter, language, atti-tude, and tone would be a sign ofimaginative servility.

Seen in these terms, generic defi-nitions and distinctions come to beregarded as the literary equivalent ofclass distinctions in the social order.Such distinctions imply a hierarchyin which works of the highest liter-ary ambition immediately declarethemselves by virtue of their genre,rhetoric, sense of style, and taste.For both Melville and Twain (as weknow from the aptly named "RoyalNonesuch"), expectations regardingthe proper appearance of high liter-ary art reveal themselves most viv-idly in the self-conscious and con-spicuous adoration of Shakespearethe representation of Shakespeare asembodying the ultimate literarystandard toward which Americanauthors are doomed to strive in vain.

Seeking a way of estimating hisown achievement as an author,Melville ventured the judgment thathis American contemporaries weremisguided in identifying ultimate lit-erary seriousness and philosophicaldepth with the formal and rhetoricalappearance of Shakespeare's work."The great mistake," he asserted,"seems to be that even with thoseAmericans who look forward to thecoming of a great literary geniusamcng us, they somehow fancy hewill come in the costume of QueenElizabeth's daybe a writer of dra-mas founded upon old English his-tory or the tales of Boccaccio. Where-as, great geniuses are parts of thetimes; and possess a correspondentcoloring."

For Melville, the belief in"Shakespeare's unapproachability"was decidedly not the sort of beliefappropriate "for an American, . . .

who is bound to carry republicanprogressiveness into Literature, aswell as into Life." As the tone ofsuch pronouncements serves to indi-cate, the violation of decorum maybe understood as constituting a dec-laration of literary independence. Assuch, it is not only an assertion offreedom from restrictions seen aslimiting imaginative expression in

the past, but also a gesture of renun-ciation signifying moral seriousness.Effectively reenacting the foundinggesture of the nation, the Americanauthor imagines himself as having amoral ao well as an aesthetic obliga-tion to reject the models of a past as-sociated with intolerance and in-justice. In light of such pervasiveattitude., we might well suspect thatAmerican literary works of magni-tude would not be very much in-clined to establish their authoritythrough traditional means. If theymake compelling claims on our at-tention, it is not on the basis of anauthority borrowed from acknowl-edged masters or approved literarystructures.

As for the deceptively unprepos-sessing appearance of many Ameri-can workswhich sometimes, as inthe case of Twain, pass themselvesoff as juvenile adventures, just assome of Emerson's writing assumesthe disguise of the commencementspeechthere would apear to besome religious basis for blurring theline between the exalted and themundane, between the profoundand the inconsequential.

One way to grasp this apparentfailure to discriminate one kind of lit-erary experience from another mightbe to consider it in relation to the no-tion of Christian ironythe ironyproduced by the recognition that theSon of God, the most exalted of fig-ures, chose to manifest himself inhi:tory in the humblest humanfoi at Thus, eternal glory in the nextworld conceals itself as suffering anddebasement in this.

The political and religious chal-lenges to ideas of generic hierarchywork together in the United States toproduce the conception of a high lit-erary art that tends to dismiss itsambitions rather than insisting onthem. The language of works in thistradition strives for the appearanceof unstudied, unrevised expression.In writers like Emerson, Thoreau,and Whitman, the unevenness ofverbal texture, the sudden shifts inplane, produce a sense that one isencountering a fact of nature, an un-predictable natural formation that of-fers a succession of aspects and per-spectives. From the point of view ofliterary style, the result is likely tobe a volatile mix of apparently in-compatible elements. One reviewerof the 1855 Leaves of Grass detected in

00,1(62Z

a 1, ey J/Z (1./a 4(/elfo-on

An early reviewer of the 1855 Leaves ofGrass detected in the language of Whitman'spoems a combination of "Yankee transcenden-talism and New York rt,..9dyism."

it7t$1.11I Of RINIMI4lion,' Pr fond, 1) 4/1130n

1.1. 161 /11111 41 fey-,

"Renunciation," by Emily Dickinson.

the language of that original book animprobable combination Gf "Yankeetranscendentalism and New Yorkrowdyism," and we may notice asimilarly audacious fusion in thewondrous rhetoric of Saul Bellow'sHenderson the Rain King, published acentury later.

In later writers like Twain and

/5

Fitzgerald, the attempt is to createworks that convey a sense of whim-sicality and stylistic effortlessnessworks that communicate their seri-ousness by making light of it. Ven-tures of this kind reveal an aristo-cratic disdain for announcements ofliterary significance; they are aboveinsisting on How Very Importantthey are and seem entirely willing tobe taken for works of no conse-c,uence. In this light, Fitzgerald'sGatsby, although it draws many of itscues from analogous attitudes in Pe-tronius's Satyricon, may be regardedas a rather cheeky reply to EdmundWilson's solemn worry that Fitzger-ald was on the verge of becoming avery popular trashy novelist.

The ambitions that have figured insome of the most enduring works inour literature are ambitions that ulti-mately work against the creation ofrespectable literary objects. By insist-ing on their independence, by refus-ing to keep to the confines estab-lished by contemporary opinion, nomatter how enlightened, such workshave regularly defied prevailing or-thodoxies. For that reason, they haveoften been seen as haphazard intheir execution, in dubious taste, un-sound in their moral judgments, andpolitically incorrect.

Works possessing this degree ofimaginative energy have not beenproduced by authors inclined to as-sume viewpoints certified in ad-vance as appropriate but by peoplewho have gone their own way: han-dymen, recluses, part-time survey-ors, ex-ministers, journalists, doc-tors, combat veterans, insurancemen, night watchmen. To the de-gree that they correspond toGoethe's assessment of the greatestachievements in art, works of thiskind in the American tradition re-main "simply unaccommodating."(One may think of Wright's NativeSon and the writings of NathanaelWest in this regard.) Probing oursense of what constitutes the higherwisdom, bringing to light the un-acknowledged wishes concealedwithin the wishes we express, worksof this magnitude (again in Goethe'sterms) "can, and should, please onlyapproximando." As "aesthetic im-peratives" rather than gestures ofobedience, they are conceived in away that continues to compel deepreflection, not simply a passingshow of approval. ..o%

'p

Makingan AmericanCultureBY S.A. SPITZ

WHEN EDMUND WILSONdied in 1972, a New York Times

editorial writer observed that "ifthere is an American civilization, Ed-mund Wilson has helped us to dis-cover it, and is himself an importantpart of it." The author of more thanthirty books, Wilson exerted consid-

erable influence on Americanculture for some five decades.

The posthumous publica-tion of his journals hasperpetuated his life andpersonality. And wherethe work of most critics alltoo quickly fades aftertheir deaths, "Wilson hasgrown in stature because

of the strength of his prose,the continuing validity of

his judgments about liter-ature, and his ability to speakto a common reader about

ideas, history, and politics,"says Lewis M. Dabney,

editor of theViking Portable

EdmundWilson.

Edmund Wilson attempted to create a new American culture by adapting the OldWorldheritage to New Wcld circumstances. This portrait was made in 1930.

/6

With support from NEIL Dabney,now acting director of the AmericanHeritage Center at the University ofWyoming where he teaches, is en-gaged in a comprehensive study ofWilson's life and work. To recon-struct Wilson's personal world,Dabney has reviewed materials fromthe Wilson archive in the BeineckeLibrary at Yale, including Wilson'scorrespondence with such leadingliterary figures as John Dos Passosand Vladimir Nabokov, and with thewomen in his life. Among thoseDabney interviewed are Wilson'sthird wife, Mary McCarthy; hisdaughter Helen; and a number ofold friends, including historianArthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Russianliterature specialist Helen Muchnic.The biography will be brought out intwo volumes by Farrar, Straus, andGiroux, Wilson's publishers. EdmundWilson to 1940: Make's an AmericanCulture is forthcoming within thenext two years. The Critic- and the Age:Idinund Wilson, 1940 to 1972 willfollow.

Wilson communicated his excite-ment about tat and ideas to a wideaudience, using a v,,riety of literaryforms. The lasting materials dis-cussed in the first volume includehis celebration of r-idernist liter-ature in the twenties, his documen-tation of the dislocations of the De-pression years, To the Einland Station,and the larger critical essays at the

S.A. Spitz is a freelance writer in theWashington, D.C., area.

end of the thirties. This volume willexplore the formative influences ofWilson's life: his family, his schooland college years, and his experiencefrom World War I to the Crash andthe disillusioning Moscow show tri-als. Also covered will be Wilson's ro-mantic liaisons, including his pursuitof poet Edna St. Vincent Mil lay andmarriages to Mary Blair, MargaretCathy, and Mary McCarthy.

The second vol..tine will cover theremainder of Wilson's life, which be-came more settled through his mar-riage to Elena Thornton. Wilson'simportant writing covered in thisvolume will be his autobiographicalwriting of the forties and fifties, hisreviews and essays first published inthe New Yorker, and Patriotic Gore(1962), an exploration of the charac-ters and perspectives of Civil War-eraAmericans through their writings,which earned him Robert Lowell'ssobriquet "our American Plutarch."

Wilson inherited a puritan ethic ofhard work, probity, and service tosociety. With ancestral roots in theAmerican colonial period, he wasthe only son of a successful andprincipled trial attorney. His fatherwas subject to periodic depressions,and his mother was deaf, isolatingthe boy in his home, Dabney says, ina way that led him to seek fellowshipwith literature and ideas. He en-joyed the privileges of his class: se-curity from material want; a trip toEurope at age thirteen, during whichhe recorded his observations in ajournal that he published in old age;and a classical education at the HillSchool and Princeton.

At Princeton, he read everythingfrom Homer, Plato, and Dante to thelatest English novels, while practic-ing for his future trade as a writerand critic. Influenced by his readingof Voltaire and Flaubert, the Frenchcritics Hippolyte Taine and ErnestRenan, and the historian JulesMicheletas well as by his Frenchprofessor Christian GaussWilsonformed a consciousness of himself asa historical critic and arbiter of taste.He became friends with F. ScottFitzgerald, for whom he would laterserve as a catalyst, admonishing andencouraging his friend through con-versations and correspondence. Hisexperience before World War I, Dab-

/7 Mary McCarthy in the 1940s.

ney says, prepared him to appreciateand promote the great literature ofthe twenties, from Proust and Joyceto Hemingway and Dos Passos.

Wilson's privileged isolation frommuch of American society wasabruptly broken by American entryinto World War I. He participatednot as an officer, as did others of hisbackground, but rather as a privatein the hospital corps, an experiencethat laid the basis for his Marxistsympathies in the Depression. In1922, at the moment when the mod-ernist movement was emerging after}he war, Wilson launched his careerby reviewing Ulysses and The WasteLand. As a spokesman for his gener-ation of Americans, he could me-diate between European models andthe determination of the Americannovelists and poets of his generationto "make an American culture," ashe put it. "Wilson believed that thechallenge for Americans was toadapt the heritage of the Old Worldand create a culture out of our nativematerials and circumstances," saysDabney. That idea of a company ofbrilliant, lively Americans, strivingfor excellence in cultural azcomplish-ment, he notes, has continued to at-tract people to the era of the twenties.

As an editor at Vanity Fair andthen the New Republic, Wilson spentthis decade writing about culturalevents, from the music of Stravinskyto the magic of Houdini. In 1931, hesolidified his growing reputationwith Axel's Castle, an influential dis-cussion of Proust, Joyce, Eliot,Yeats, Valery, and Stein, whom hecollectively dubbed Symbolists be-cause of their shared values andtechniques. In this book Wilson af-firmed the artist as hero, pointing tothe Symbolists' "new flexibility andfreedom" of literary expression,even as he deplored their social dis-engagement, both in style and intheme. Imaginative brilliance couldnot substitute for participation in lifeand society, he insisted.

His own participation took theform of vivid reports on the collapseof American society in the thirtiescollected in The American Earthquake,a book which demonstrates thatwriting done from a radical, evenrevolutionary point of view can belasting. Wilson's work of the thirties

had much in common with that ofhis friend Dos Passos, who was atfirst further to the left than he andbecame more conservative after-wards. To the Finland Station, writtenfrom 1934 to 1940, reflects the odys-sey of the literary left in this era."Completed after the Moscow tri-als," explains Dabney, "the book'sheroic portraits of Marx and his rev-olutionary followers reach the non-Marxist conclusion that doctrineand the 'realization' of revolutionarydoctrine in Stalin's Russiaare ulti-mately less significant than the indi-vidual's acts as an essential force inculture and history. This characteris-tically American, Emersonian ideainformed the portraiture of Wilson'slater years, which became an affir-mation of the man of letters as hero."

Through the turbulelt decades ofthe twenties and thirties, as hestrove to create order in his work,Wilson lived a physically and emo-tionally strenuous life of parties,drink, love affairs, and unhappymarriages. It was a life in the tradi-tion of the Romantic artist ratherthan of the eighteenth-century En-lightenment, which he struggled toadvance in his work. He had a briefbreakdown in 1929 when he was inhis mid-thirties. And the Wilson-McCarthy relationship from 1938 to1945 was full of tension and drama.They were attracted to each other in-tellectually, with Wilson encouragingMcCarthy to develop her writing tal-ent, but their love could not survivetheir bitter quarreling. Wilson remaineda bohemian, without money and afixed residence until the success ofMemoirs of Hecate County and hismarriage to Elena Thornton in 1946.

"Wilson proved that one could beintensely engaged in life, as both ajournalist and an activist, while ap-plying standards derived from theold idea that art outlasts the peoplewho produce it," Dabney says. Heassumed the role of literary jour-nalist as it had been exercised ineighteenth- and nineteenth-centuryBritain and France and practiced itvery much in terms of America inthe twenties and thirties. 'Wilsonwas a representative American char-acter," Dabney adds. "He workedvery hard, applied the Protestantethic to the tasks of the artist, and

IS

""11131.

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John Dos Passos, ca. 1935.

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showed that you do not have to besuperficial to address the generalpublic about important issues. Nordo you have to use the specializeddiction of coteries."

"Wilson's great service," saysDabney, "was to write about seriousartistic values and the fate of con-temporary culture limpidly andforcefully, without translating theseissues down in order to reach an au-dience. He saw literature as the cen-tral consciousness of society andsought to reinforce this traditionthrough his work."

Dabney's study is more than a bio-graphy of one man. "I'm trying topresent the intellectual life of Wil-son's times in a biographical way,"Dabney explains. Indirectly, headds, the Wilson biography mayshed light on issues that confront ustoday: "There no longer seems to bea common literary culture that bindseducated Americans in shared as-sumptions. Wilson's own work,however, serves a vital function inconnecting the culture of the post-World War II years to its roots in theAmerican past and the humanistictradition, as well as in the twentiesand thirties. His example may helpus find new ways of forwarding thestandards of people who love booksand ideas."

Wilson lived for and in his ideas,in a constant tension of seeming par-adoxes. "He was a patriot but not achauvinist, an eager critic of hiscountry in the name of what oughtto be," Dabney says. "He adhered tothe standards derived from the oldclassical education without ever con-doning the assumption that a demo-cratic society teas somehow doomedto be second-rate." One of Wilson'sold friends, Dabney recalls, closedan interview about Wilson withthese words: "The last thing that Iwant to say about Edmund is that heloved America and hoped by hiswork to make it better." 0

Through the Fellowships for CollegeTeachers and independent Scholars Pro-gram Of the Division of Fellowships andSeminars, Lewis Dabney received$27,500 in outright funds in 1986 tocomplete "The Life and Work of 1.-,dinundWilson."

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Letter from Samuel LanghorneClemens to Orion and Mary E.amens, 19 and 20 October,1865, stating, ". . . I have had

'call' to literature. . . ."

Clemens had a lifelong fondness for cats. "Mama loves morals andpapa lows cats" runs the epigram he attributed to his eleven-year-old daughter in 1883.

BY JOANNA BIGGAR

F RUDYARD KIPLING, MarkTwain once said, "Between us

we cover all knowledge. He knowsall that can be known, and I know allthe rest." The remark might almostserve as the motto of the Mark TwainProject, supported by NEH. Formedby the 1980 merger of the Universityof Iowa's Works of Mark Twain and theUniversity of California's Mark TwainPapers (begun in 1961-62 at Iowa Cityand Berkeley), its ambition is toknow all that can be known aboutTwainand then know all the rest.

The purpose of the project is topublish a complete scholarly editionof Mark Twain called The Mark TwainPapers and the Works of Mark Twain,projected at seventy volumes. A sec-ondary goal is to issue a reader's edi-tion called the Mark Twain Library(seven of some twenty-five volumeshave so far appeared), reproducedwithout scholarly apparatus fromthe Papers and Works. The Library vol-umes include the original illustra-tions by artists like E.W. Kemble,Frank T. Merrill, John Harley, andDaniel Beard, which were firstandoften lastpublished by Twain him-self. The Library already includesHuckleberry Finn, Connecticut Yankee',and Tom Sawyer.

The significance of this project forscholars and general ieaders alike,says Robert ri. Hirst, general editorof the Mark Twain Project, lies inTwain's standing as one of the mostwidely read and profoundly charac-teristic American writers, both hereand abroad. This edition provides,often for the first time, a readilyavailable, accurate, and well-anno-tated source for everything thatTwain ever wrote, includ;og some

Joanna Biggar is a freelance writer in theWashington, D.C., area.

Mark Twain

10,000 letters, nearly 30 books andPamphlets, and more than 4,000separate pieces of journalism.

The first obligation for a compre-hensive edition is to find the docu-ments that survive. The second is toestablish from those documents asaccurate a text as possible. Neitherobligation is simple to discharge,Hirst points out. The search for let-ters, for example, culminated in theproject's Union Catalog of Clemens Let-ters (1986) and, earlier this year, MarkTwain's Letters, Volume 1: 1853-1866,the first of an estimated twenty suchvolumes. But even these comprehen-sive books, says Hirst, have resultedin the belated discovery of more let-ters than they catalogue or print.

Estatili:,hing an accurate text is amatter so various and complex that itgets to the core of Mark Twain schol-arship and to one of the reasons, inHirst's view, for the merger of Worksand Papers, which, after fifteen yearsof ambivalence, finally embraced acentralized and unified approach toediting all of Twain.

When the Works of Mark Twain andthe Mark Twain Papers began almostthirty years ago, the projects' found-ers made assumptions that havesince been overturned, Hirst ex-plains. For example, editors of theWorks assumed, on the basis of thepublished record, that Twain habitu-ally treated first publication as the ul-timate state. They learned, however,that he did revise his earlier workaf.er first publication, often morethan once.

The founders of the Works also as-sumed that some fifteen academiceditors, with little relief from teach-ing and committee responsibilities,could complete an edition in fiveyears by working from their homecolleges and universities, making anoccasional pilgrimage to Berkeley,

and relying on some editorial guide-lines and the Iowa Center for TextualStudies to carry out the "technical"aspects of editing, such as collation.

tlys Hirst, this plan greatly un-derestimated the number, value, andcomplexity of surviving texts andoriginal documents.

At Berkeley, where the Papers werebegun under similar assumptions,editorial logistics differed in two cru-cial, if unintentional, ways, accord-ing to Hirst. First, the large archiveof Twain's papers at Berkeley wasgradually being supplemented by asecondary archive of photocopiesdrawn from institutions and collec-tors around the world. And second,graduate students (Hirst as.tongihem) were being hired by FrederickAnderson, series editor of the Papers,to assist the academic editors in whatwas then thought of as the routinedrudgery of the editorial process.Both the archive and these graduatestudents, Hirst says, proved morevaluable than anyone then foresaw.

Through the drudgery of tran-scription, dating, collation, and factchecking, these young professionalsconsistently turned the routine edi-torial process into one of genuinediscovery. By 1972 they had as-sumed responsibility for most of theeditorial labor on the Papers and forestablishing the texts of the Works.At that point both editions were sup-ported by NEH through the Centerfor Editions of American Authors.But the basic editorial approach ofthe two projects remained funda-mentally different. "The Berkeleyeditors discovered that establishingthe texts required intensive literaryand historical research, both in thefiles at Berkeley and elsewhere,"says Hirst. "Their effort to answersuch editorial questions as when andhow texts were changed turned up

ttIn 1907 Clemens received the honorary doctorate of lettersdegree from Oxford Univers:1y. He subsequently seized everyoccasion for wearing his academic regalia.

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vital and unsuspected documenta-tion ;.bout the texts' composition."

Hundreds of new documents werediscovered during this process.These documents, of interest to theWorks editors, also provided essen-tial annotation for the letters, the au-tobiography, and other documentsintended for the Paper: Hit-M em-phasizes that the trail of lost evi-dence could hardly have been dis-covered without continuous accessto Mark Twain's correspondence,and to many other documents in thePapers long known but not under-stood until their function in Twain'spublications was identified. In addi-tion, a basic disagreement existedbetween Iowa and Berkeley abouthow, and even whether, to applymodern copy-text theory to Twain.

With the death in 1979 of FrederickAnderson, by then series editor forboth the Works and the Papers, Hirstreturned to Berkeley from a teachingposition at UCLA to head the incip-ient merger. There he has presidedover a group of Twain loyalists, manyof them from the original core of grad-uate students, while also enlisting theparticipation of those academic editorswho had not lost hope in seeing theedition eventually completed.

The Berkeley group eventuallycompleted the search for letters andstill continues to find other docu-ments. The group has invented neweditorial methods and strategies tocope with Mark Twain's literarymanuscripts and, most recently, hisletters, says Hirst. It began the MarkTwain Library in 1982, at least in partto meet the needs of general readers,even as the Papers and Works ad-dressed itself more thoroughly thanbefore to the needs of scholars.

In Letters, Volume 1, where Clem-ens' vigorous narrative style inti-mates the later voice of Mark Twain,readers have the most direct accesspossible to the man behind the leg-end. These letters, which Clemenswrote between the ages of seventeenand thirty-one, trace his life fromHannibal, Missouri, to New Yorkand Philadelphia, where he workedbriefly as a printer; then to theMississippi River, where he became

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Clemens's secretary Isabel Lyon took this photograph in 1907 with Dorothy Quick, one of thesurrogate granddaughters he referred to as his "angelfish."

a pilot; and then to Nevada Territoryand California, where, failing to"strike it rich" as a miner, he didso as a journalist calling himself"Mark Twain."

Twain eventually immortalizedsome of his early life in Roughing It.But Letters, Volume 1, with its notes,photographs, maps, genealogy, fac-similes of original letters, and com-prehensive transcriptions (1 rith evendeleted words deciphered) is morerevealing. The facts in this volume,assembled for the first time, providea more reliable and more compre-hensive basis for understandingwhat Twain did with those factswhen he retold them in Roughing Itand Life on the Mississippi.

For example, in chapter 41 ofRoughing It,Twain tells the story ofhow he was a "millionaire" for sev-eral days when he and his partnerowned in, but soon lost, the "blindlead" in the Wild West mine. "Itreads like a wild fancy skfich," hewrote, "but the evidence of manywitnesses, and likewise that of the

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official records of Esmeralda District,is easily obtainable in proof that it isa true history."

In 1972, eight years before theBerkeley-Iowa merger, Roughing It

had become the first volume pub-lished in the Works. Its editors, find-ing no evidence in Clemens' lettersor in various histories and records ofEsmeralda County to substantiatethe story of the blind lead in theWild West mine, then dismissedMark Twain's assertion as little morethan literary wish-fulfillment.

But in 1988, the editors of Letters,Volume 1, "find for the defendant."By drawing on just those "varioushistories and records" to whichTwain referred the reader more than100 years ago, they not only con-firmed Twain's story but establishedthat he told part of it in his letters,long before he wrote Roughing It.

Another example: in a letter to hisbrother and sister-in-law on October19-20, 1865, Twain gave an accountof what modern psychology mightcall an "identity cnsis."

I never had but two powerful ambi-tions in my life. One was to be a pilot, &tne other a preacher of the gospel. I ac-complished the one & failed in the other,because I could not supply myself withthe necessary stock in tradei e. re-ligion. I have given it up forever. I neverhad a "call" in that direction, anyhow, &my aspirations were the very ecstacy ofpresumption. But I have had a "call" toliterature, of a low order i.e. humor-ous. It is nothing to be proud of, but it ismy strongest suit. . . .

Clemens concluded the letter with apassing allusion to suicide: "If I donot get out of debt m three months,pistols or poison for oneexit me.[There's a text for a sermon on Self-MurderProceed.1"

Was this a genuine personal crisis,or was Clemens merely posturing?The editors answer that question byincluding in the notes some Clemensmarginalia in which, forty-four yearslater in 1909, he recalls this period:"I put a pistol to my head but wasn'tman enough to pull the trigger.Many times I have been sorry I didnot succeed, but I was neverashamed of having tried."

This connection between two dis-tant documents would not have beenpossible, Hirst stresses, had the edi-tors been obliged to concentrate onediting exclusively either the Papersor the Works, or had they not hadcontinuous access to and intimate fa-miliarity with as complete as possi-ble an archive of both. And yet, saysHirst, it is through just such insightsand clarifications that our commonunderstanding of Mark Twain, ourability to read and understand whathe wrote, are certain to be perma-nently changed by The Mark TwainPapers and the Works of Mark Twain. 49,

In 1986 Robert Hirst received $200,000in outright funds and $350,000 inmatching funds for "The Mark TwainProject" from the Editions category ofthe Division of Research Programs.

One of E.W. Ken& le'sfirst-edition illustrationsfor Adventures ofHuckleberry. Finn.

MARK TWAIN PROJECT PUBLICATIONS:

The Mark Twain Papers

Letters to His Publishers, 1867-1894,Hamlin Hill, ed., 1967.

Satires & Burlesques, Franklin R.Rogers, ed., 1967.

Which Was the Dream? and Other Sym-Mic Writings of the Later Years, JohnS. Tuckey, ed., 1967.

Hannibal, Huck & Tom, Walter Blair,ed., 1969.

Mysterious Stranpr Manuscripts, Wil-liam M. Gibson, ed., 1969.

Correspondence with Henry HuttlestonRogers, 1893-1909, Lewis Leary, ed.,1969.

Fables of Man, John S. Tuckey, Ken-neth M. Sanderson, and Bernard L.Stein, eds., 1972.

Notebooks & Journals, Volume I(1855-1873), Frederick Anderson,Michael 3. Frank, Kenneth M. Sand-erson, eds., 1975.

Notebooks & Journals, Volume II(1877-1883), Frederick Anderson,Lin Salamo, Bernard L. Stein, eds.,1975.

Notebooks & Journals, Volume Ill(1883-1891), Robert Pack Browning,Michael B. Frank, Lin Salamo, eds.,1979.

Letters, Volume 1: 1853-1866, EdgarMarquess Branch, Michael B. Frank,Kenneth M. Sanderson, eds., 1988.

The Works of Mark Twain

Roughing It, Franklin R. Rogers, PaulBaender, eds., 1972.

What Is Man? and Other PhilosophicalWritings. Paul Baender, ed., 1973.

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur'sCourt, Bernard L. Stein, ed., 1979.

Early Tales & Sketches, Volume 1(1851-1864), Edgar MarquessBranch, Robert H. Hirst, HarrietElinor Smith, eds., 1979.

The Prince and the Pauper, VictorFischer, Lin Salamo, eds., 1979.

The Adventures of Toni Sawyer; TomSawyer Abroad; Toni Sawyer, Detective,John C Gerber, Paul Baender, TerryFirkins, eds., 1980.

Early Tales & Sketches, Volume 2(1864- 1865), Edgar MarquessBranch, Robert H. Hirst, HarrietElinor Smith, eds., 1981.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, WalterBlair, Victor Fisch& Dahlia Armon,Harriet Elinor Smith, eds., 1988.

The Mark Twain Library

No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger, JohnS. Tuckey, William M. Gibson, eds.,1982.

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, JohnC. Gerber, Paul Baender, eds., 1982.Tom Sawyer Abroad/Tom Sawyer, De-tective, John C. Gerber, TerryFirkins, eds., 1982.

The Prince and the Pave', VictorFischer, Michael B. Frank, eds.,1983.

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur'sCourt, Bernard L. Stein, ed., 1983.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, WalterBlair, Victor Fischer, eds., 1985.

Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer among tin'Indians, and Other Unfinished Stories,Dahlia Armon, Walter Blair, PaulBaender, William M. Gibson, andFranklin R. Rogers, eds., 1988.

Other Mark Twain Project Publications

The Devil's Race-Track: Mark Twain'sGreat Dark Writings/The Best front"Which was the Dream?" and "Fables ofMan," John S. Tuckey, ed., 1980.Union Catalog of Clemens Letters, PaulMach lis, ed., 1986.

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TheFig Tree'sLessons

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BY KRISTEN HALL

When the little chickens all ran to theirmother under Miranda's f ; tree, one lit-tle chicken did not move. tie was spreadout on his side with his eyes shut andhis mouth open. He was yellow fur inspots and pinfeathers in spots, and therest of him was naked and sunburned."Lazy," said Miranda, poking him withher toe. Then she saw that he was dead.

WITH THESE WORDS from hershort story "The Fig Tree,"

written in 1929, Katherine Anne Por-ter plunges her readers into the con-sciousness of a sensitive little girltroubled by her awareness ofdeathan awareness intensified bythe failure of her father and grand-mother to come to terms with hermother's death. Yet beneath the storyline of a young child's confusion andfear about death lies an even deeperlevel of thematic complexity: thechild's intimations of the fading tra-ditions of the old South.

With support from Nal, PatriciaPerini and Calvin Skaggs copro-duced a one-hour dramatization (APorter's story for the 1987 seasonpremiere of Wondenvorks, a children'stelevision series, aired nationally onPBS. Perini, senior vice president of

Kristen Hall is on the staff of .,re NCHOffice of Publications and Public Affairs.

,r.

Katherine Anne Porter's "The Fig Tree" was first published in agroup of stories, The Old Order, about an extended family. Thechild Miranda is the protagonist in many of these stories.

programmin., for Dallas public sta-tion KERA-TV, was the project direc-tor; Skaggs, president of LumiereProductions, Inc. in New York, di-rected the filming of the story.

Because "The Fig Tree" was notwritten expressly for children,Skaggs and Perini consulted withAimee Dorr, an expert in children'stelevision, to make the story accessi-ble to an audience of eight- totwelve-year-old children. To tap thesense of wonder at this age level andto foster questions and discussion ina family setting, Perini found thatprograms based on adult literatureare preferable to those based on lit-erature written exclusively for chil-dren. Children's literature, says Per-ini, often presents a romanticizedvision of the child's world and tendsto offer pat explanations of complexhuman experiences. Film dramatiza-tions increase children's appreciationof great literature, she continues, by"presenting the same feelings foundin popular novels and short stories,except expressed in a more literaryfashion."

The story takes place in centralTexas in the early twentieth century.When Miranda, the young pro-tagonist, finds the dead chick and

buries it in the family's fig grove, shehas still not recovered from the lossof her mother several years earlier,for neither her father nor her grand-mother has given appropriate con-sideration to her grief. Miranda'sgrandmother, attentive only to thecustoms by which dignified peopleshould comport themselves ratherthan to the emotions surroundingthe death of a loved one, had simplyinsisted on a proper burial cere-mony. A product of the old southernorder with its emphasis on keepingup appearances by maintaining out-ward social conventions, the grand-mother is a powerful force for emo-tional repression rather thanemotional liberation.

Miranda heeds her grandmother'sinjunctions about doing things "theright way." But just as she places afinal ceremonial fig on the chick'sgrave, she hears a weep weep"sound emanating, she mistakenlybelieves, from the ground where sheburied the chick. At the .noment Mi-randa concludes that she might haveburied the chick alive, her family,packed and impatient to leave on theannual journey to the family's farmin the country, calls her away. Guilt-stricken, Miranda obeys, abandon-

ing the chick with profound reluc-tance. Somehow, doing things "theright way" ;Ines not bring her peaceof mind.

On the journey, Miranda's fatherand grandmother respond to Miran-da's outburst of tears with annoy-ance. "On a mythic, ritual, and cul-tural level," says Skaggs, "death issomething horrible that the familycannot talk about openly, cannotdeal with." Miranda, however, des-perately needs to break through herfamily's conspiracy of silence, tohave her anxieties about death ad-dressed in a straightforward manner.

At the farm, Miranda is caught be-tween her grandmother and hergreat aunt Eliza, who abhors thegrandmother's tradition-bound ob-servance of formality. By witnessingthe tension between her grand-mother and great aunt, Mirandalearns that the adult world is not de-fined by any single code of conduct.She senses, in fact, that her grand-mother seeks order through memoryand family myth, while her greataunt seeks intellectual adventure inexploration of the natural world.

The story reaches its climax whenMiranda hears the same plaintivecrying that she heard at the grave ofthe chick, and Eliza explains that thehaunting sound is made by treefrogs. Under Eliza's influence, Mi-randa discovers the wonders ofnature, and her anxieties are re-solved with a new-found sense thatthe coming and going of life is one ofnature's inherent rhythms.

"It is a happy ending," saysSkaggs. "Instead of dealing at thelevel of myth and ritual, which thegrandmother represents, Mirandalearns to grasp, understand, andwonder at nature. Children need toknow that it is all right to be afraidor worried about death, especially inthe twentieth century when they aresurrounded by the consciousness ofdeath yet robbed of its reality. Chil-dren are quite conscious of wars andother disasters. They know thatdeath occurs, yet they very seldomsee anybody die in their homes theway nineteenth-century children did."

The translation of Porter's story tofilm was encumbered by the topic it-selfa difficult one for all ages, notonly for children. "This was an ex-ceptional film for the Wonderworksseries," states Perini, "because it pre-sented a deep themedeath--

whereas other programs in the seriesfocused primarily on children reach-ing goals." The resulting film adap-tation presented the salient featuresof "The Fig Tree" with adjustmentsfor comprehension and clarity.

When adapting literature for film,says Skaggs, a director must reworkthe original story into a dramaticscript. For example, in he writtenstory, Porter assumes the omniscientperspective to convey Miranda's con-fusion about death. Film, however,necesLarily requires a different ap-proach. Since a character's inner lifecannot be directly presented on film,Skaggs and script writer StephanieKeys maintained dramatic continuityby incorporating episodes from twoother Miranda stories by Porter"Th0 Journey" and "The Source"an I by interpolating scenes not inthe original story to advance the plotand to delineate Miranda's charactermore fully.

One key interpolated scene,Skaggs points out, is Miranda'sprisonment in a root cellar by herbrother and sister as the childrenplay. Terror wells up in her, as theexperience of being enclosed under-ground reminds her of her "prema-ture" burial of the chick and triggersthe crying sound of the chick in hervivid imagination. Although writerKeys invented this scene for thefilmed version of the story, such dra-

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matic license is necessary to portrayMiranda's inner world in a visuallyconcrete way, Skaggs explains.

The film dramatization of Porter's"The Fig Tree" attempts to avoid thetendency in children's television pro-gramming to simplify profoundhuman experiences. By portrayingthe encounter of a young girl withdeath and loss, the film aims toevoke the questing spirit in childrenand an appreciation of children'ssensibilities by adults, the bond thatunites Miranda and Great Aunt Elizaas they marvel together at the viewseen through Eliza's telescope of"other worlds, a million otherworlds." 49,

In 1987, Patricia Perini of North TexasPublic Broadcasting received $251,763 inOutright funds for "Katherine Anne Por-ter's The Fig Tree" front the HumanitiesProjects in Media Program of the Divi-sion of General Programs.

Theresa Wright (left) portrays Miranda's grandmother,who acts as a powerful force for emotional :-pression inthe story. The story, nth' h takes place in central Texasin the early twentieth century,, was filmed on locationin Waxahachie and Kaufman. Above thr youngheroine of "The Fig Tree," Miranda, is portrayed byKarron Graves. Miranda is torn between hergrandmother's insistence on tradition and formalityand her green- aunt's questioning turn of mind.

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A literary history of the American West fromGarci Rodriguez Ordoliez de Montalvo in 1510to Joan Didion in 1984

BY CAROLINE TAYLOR

k7;

IKE ANY MAGICAL, mythical place, the West has its gods and demi-gods, its legends and songs, its heroes, villains, and ordinary people.

The lanky, laconic lawman with lightning draw and deadly aim keeps com-pany with discoverers and explorers, grim and determined pioneer families,greed-crazed gold miners, gallant soldiers, hard-boiled detectives, desper-ate, dirt-poor farmers, and loners of all types who find in the urban sprawlof a city like Los Angeles a wasteland as featureless and forbidding as thesalt flats of Utah.

Never before have the West's chroniclers been collected into one volume,sorter into genres, resorted into regions, discussed, interpreted, indexed,and listed in chronological order. A Literary History of the American West(Texas Christian University Press, 1987), sponsored by the Western Liter-ature Association, is the first comprehensive attempt to treat the develop-ment of the West as a literary region.

In 1979, with support from NEH, the association and its editor-in-chiefJ. Golden Taylor (1912-1982) undertook to bring together in one volume theoral and written literature of the continent that lay to the west of Plymouthand Jamestownfrom one perspective, the frontier of civilization and fromanother, the land in which further retreat from Anglo invaders ended in amassacre at Wounded Knee.

Organizing the 1,400-page compendium presented a series of challengesto the editors, who planned to include a vast amount of material represent-ing different regions and historical periods and encompassing a wide rangeof genres and literary methodswritten or spokenoften in languagesother than English. The compromises they made are revealed in the vol-ume's three-part arrangement. Part One gives a chronological developmentto 1960 of various genresfolklore, adventure tales, short fiction, novels,poetry, plays. Because so many western writers wrote about one distinctivearea, Part Two is organized by subregions of the West. Part Three coversethnic expressions of native Americans, Hispanics, As:an Americans, andothers, and concludes with a section devoted to recent trends (since 1960) infiction, poetry, drama, and criticism.

What constitutes western literature? In his preface, Max Westbrook pointsout that definitions of western, "in terms of geography, themes, subject mat-ter, or the residence of the authors, have all proved unsatisfactory, and at-tempts to discover a distinctively western style or vision, while rewarding,are not definitive."

Any frontier literature of America that which arises from the meeting ofan expanding Euro American civilization with either the wilderness or withthe Indiansshould be considered in some sense western, says ThomasLyon of Utah State University, who as senior editor of the volume com-pleted the project launched by J. Golden Taylor. "James Fenimore Cooper ismentioned often," he points out, "yet, four of his five Leatherstocking sto-ries take place essentially in New York State. A lot of people consider that tobe western."

Lyon recalls several "arguments" among members of the Western Liter-ature Association in the early stages about whether to define western liter-ature as essentially frontier literature. Some argued that if one did that, the

Caroline Taylor is the editor of Humanities.

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istory of the American West fromguez Ordonez de Montalvo in 1510ion in 1984

INE TAYLOR

Yosemite Valley, California,in an 1866 photograph byCarleton E Watkins

voiome would have to extend as far back as 1610 and include Captain Joh -1Smith and the general history of Virginia as western "In some sense it is,'says Lyon, "but I think it is evident that what we ended with is a compro-mise between geography and the chronological frontier Most of the empha-sis is on the interior, semi-arid, nonurban part of the West although wehave a whole section on the Midwest, which is not semi-arid."

Nevertheless, there are still lisagreements. "Every time the associationmeets," says Lyon, "we discuss exactly what to say the ;anon is made upof." To those who think it should be limited to literature of the period1822-1890the classic West beginning with the fur trappers and mountain

1 men and ending with the official closing of the frontier by the U.S CensusBureau in 1890Lyon warns that such a narrow definition would rule out agreat many twentieth-century writers.

In selecting what to include in the volume, one major decision faced bythe editors was how much discussion to devote to the popular novel or theso-called formula Western. "We did include some," adds Lyon. "There arechapters and references on the popular Westerns of Zane Grey and the lateLouis L'Amour, but our major emphasis was on what most people in west-ern literature studies call 'serious' western litcraturewriting that attemptsto be significant, complex, subtle, nonformulaic."

According to Lyon, most of the editors and contributors to A Literary His-tory of tite American West believe that it is important to keep the idea of re-gional literature alive:

If I could draw a generalization out of these eighty-odd chapters, it would be that ofthe post-frontier, examining, self-conscious attitude of senous western literaturethat is high-quality belletnstic w estern literaturewhich is distinguished by steppingaside from or stepping beyond stereotypes, mythologies, dime novel heroics, and soforth. There is an emphasis on recognizing limits, on recognizing that the expan-siveness and exerc,se of individual will associated with freedom in the era of thefrontier need to be examined. A factor of cultural maturity is reflected in this post-frontier literature, whereas the shoot-cm-up style continues to be an assertion of"freedom from," if you will, perfect indwidual will, and absolute mobility character-istic of the era of expansion. Some ha% e gone so far as to see this recognition of limitsand the consequent development of a non-expansi% e view of the world as a majorcontribution to world literature.

The book reveals a decisix e watershed in western regional literature withthe popular, frontier-bound novel on one side and post-frontier fiction onthe other. Lyon recalls the words of Walter Prescott Webb: "The end of anage is always touched with sadness for those who lived it and those wholove it. That sadness is usually attended with much knowledge, somewisdom, and a sort of jaded sophistication. Neither knowledge nor wisdombrings happiness, more often they bring disillusionment " However, Lyonpoints out, "there are a number of western writers, Wallace Stegner, for ex-ample, who find positive xalue in recognizing limits and taking a nonfron-tier attitude toward the world."

Stegner's career as novelist, sior:telicr educator, editor, conservationist,and "dean of western w riters" is described by Joseph Flora in the section on"The Rocky M untains." A contributor himself, Stegner warns against thetemptation to escape into the Old West, rather than examining it for what itcan illuminate about the New West: 9

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Two images of the mythical and real American West. Above,Buffalo Throwing the Hunter, bronze, by William de InMontagne Cary (1840 - 1922),and below, two Colt single-action army revolvers, gold-plated mut engraved, ca. 1890.with eleven brass -cased cartridges.

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In the old days we used to tie a string of lariats from house to barn so as to make itfrom shelter to responsibility and back again. With personal, family, and cultt.ralchores to do, I think we had better rig up such a line between past and present

Stegner's essay on Bernard De Voto recounts the life and work of the nov-elist/historian/critic whose strong ideas and angry opinions defied labelingunder the existing ideologies of the time. In response to a complaint fromEdmund Wilson that he had no "articulated ideas," De Voto set forth hisposition in a Saturday Review editorial in February i937:I early acquired a notion that all gospels were false and all my experience since thenhas confirmed it . . . I distrust absolutes. Rather, I long ago passed from distrust ofthem to opposition. And with them let me include prophecy simplification, gener-alization, abstract logic, and especially the habit of mind which consults theory firstand experience only afterward.

No literary history of the west would be complete without DeVoto's Journalsof Lewis and Clark, which contributor James Maguire of Boise St: to Universitycompared in importance to William Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation as afundamental source of the western tradition in its documentation of the dis-coveries made by the two explorers on their momentous expedition.

In the western experience, exploration is followed inevitably by settle-ment. The experiences of those who !eft civilization behind to put downroots on the vast and lonely prairies are evoked by Willa Cather. John Mur-phy of Brigham Young University describes a writer whose stories grewfrom a personal sense of cultural starvation after moving at age nine fromher home in Winchester, Virginia, to the tiny Nebraska town of Rod Cloud.Her characters' strong attachment to the land is nourished by their own up-rootedness. In My Antonia, Murphy points out, Cather chose to symbolizethe pioneer West through an immigrant girl with an illegitimate baby, as analternative to the usual mountain men, gunfighters, and cowboys.

Cowboys figure prominently in the plays of Sam Shepard, who has beencalled "our most interesting and exciting American playwright." In his essayon Shepard, Mark Busby of Texas A&M University writes, "many of Shep-ard's characters wish to reembody the cowboy figure, but the fragmentedworld in which they live offers little possibility of satisfaction. The cowboy isout of place in this world. . . ." In Shepard's plays, that world has a decid-edly modern skew, blending fantasy and reality in a search for somethingsolid to supersede the West's most enduring stereotype.

An early practitioner of the style that has come to be known as magical re-alisma technique often identified with Latin American writers like MarioVargas Llosa, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Carlos Fuenteswas the "inevi-tably misunderstood or belittled" William Saroyan. In his essay on Saroyan,Gerald Haslam describes a writer who never quite came to grips with theearly death of his father an-: who suffered from his adversarial relationshipswith critics. Haslam wri.rs that despitc his early fall from grace with the lit-erary establishment, Coroyan kept his sense of humor. Shortly before hisdeath, he called the Associated Press with one final message: "Everybodyhas got to die, but I have always believed an exception would be made inmy case. Now what?"

Separate chapters are also devoted to such major writers as Mark Twain,Mary Hunter Austin, Frank Norris, Jack London, Robinson Jeffers, JohnSteinbeck, jack Kerouac, J. Frank Dobie, Katherine Anne Porter, WilliamEastlake, Larry McMurtry, Mari Sandoz, and A.I3. Guthrie, Jr.

"We'd lik to think this is going to be a basic reference text," Lyon says."The bibliographies in particular are complete and accurate. We tried toreach outside literature to some degree to history and historiography tomake it a little more accessible. Of course, it is also a handy, one-volumesurvey of important writers that names those who at least some peoplethink are the important writers of the region. At the very least, it's a begin-ning, and people can take off from there and argue who was left out."

According to Lyon, plans for a supplementary issue lie far in the future.The more than four centuries covered by the present volume provide a start-ing point for discission of the tendency, especially in popular Westerns, tosee the Old West as an escape from a new West, one that is settled, defined,and, some think, defiled by pioneers who destroyed the prairies in order totame a wilderness. By exploring the literature of both the old and the newWest, the book strings a lariat between the limitless frontier of the past andthe world that has replaced it. (49,

In 1979 the Western Literature Association was awarded $36,830 through the State,Local, and Regional History category of the Division of Research Programs for prepa-ration of A Literary History of the American West.

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ma,Saul Bellow in 1977 with copies ofHumboldt's Gift.

E VER SINCE JAMES JOYCE ex-plored Dublin city life in Ulysses,

many novelists have given up thetraditional task of relating the indi-vidual's life to the social environ-ment. As successors to the greatmodernist writers, including Beck-ett, Borges, Calvino, and Nabokov,they have withdrawn from the socialarena to ponder the human being inhis linguistic and metaphysical isola-tion. In recent years, postmodernistssuch as Barthelme, Pynchon, Barth,Coover, and Heller, have respondedto the increasingly chaotic and root-less conditions of American life byevoking surreal or absurdist land-scapes rather than the quotidian.

Saul Bellow, awarded the NobelPrize for Literature in 1976, createslandscapes of a different older. In aliterary career spanning nearly half acentury, Bellow has placed the urbanmetropolisprimarily his adoptedcity Chicago, but also New York,and more recently, Bucharest--at theheart of his fiction. The cityscapelooms even when a Bellow hero, likethe protagonist of Herzog, spendsendless hours flat on his back in atiny apartment, reviewing past mis-takes and licking new wounds. Withits jostling traffic, blistering pave-ments, abrasive and abortive humancontacts, the modern metropolisprovides the setting through whichIIerzog's restless mind tirelesslytravels, trying one mental route afteranother as he ponders the meaningof contemporary life.

Ellen Pifer is associate professor of En-glish and comparative literature at theUniversity of Delaware. She is currentlycompleting a book on Bellow's fiction,Saul Bellow Against the Grain.

28

Bellow's NewWorld BabylonBY ELLEN PIFER

Artur Sammler, the elderly pro-tagonist of Mr. Sammler's Planet, isone of Bellow's most energetic pe-destrians. Despite his seventy-plusyears, Sammler covers an enormousamount of territory as he journeys,mostly on foot, through the streetsof New York City. The sidewalkcrowds, in all their eclectic varietyand theatrical display, have a greatdeal to tell Sammler about contem-porary America. And everywhereurban blight speaks to him of moraldisorder and decay:Most outdoor telephones were smashed,crippled. (The booths] were urinals, also.New York was getting worse than Naplesor Salonika. It was like an Asian, an Afri-can town, from this standpoint. The opu-

lent sections of the city were not immune.You opened a jeweled door into degrada-tion, from hypercivilized Byzantine lux-ury straight into the state of nature, thebarbarous world of color erupting frombeneath. It might well be barbarous oneither side of the jeweled door.

Bellow's rendering of the urban en-vironment depicts a specific localebut also evokes a universal condi-tion. In the novelist's view, metro-politan life is the central phenome-non of Western culture in its latetwentieth-century phase. "Here youmight see," as Sammler observes,"the soul of America at grips withhistorical problems, struggling withcertain impossibilities."

At the same time that it exposes

thsroltirm, \ tom 'I vi firrur %mut . Itm iii n .Erastus Salisbury Field's canvas, Historical Monument of the American Republic, ca. 1870s, uses Babel-like towers to commemorate the U.S. centennial. Bellow's Angie March found "not a single Tower of Babel plot-ted in common, but hundreds of thousands of separate beginnings, the length and breadth of America."

the soul of America at a particularmoment in history, the city land-scape, in its Byzantine luxury anddegradation, rehearses anew humanwaywardness and barbarous corrup-tion. In Bellow's rendering, the con-temporary metropolis proves bothtimely and timeless. Engraved bymodern history, the landscape is in-scribed as well with apocalyptic por-tents. "Having failed to create a spir-itual life of its own, investing every-thing in material expansion,"America,the novelist warns, "face[s] disaster."

As early as The Adventures of AngieMarch (1953), Bellow exposes the me-tropolis as both the product ofAmerica's worship of material powerand the testimony of misplacedfaith. Such confusion, he suggests,is at least as old as the biblical archi-tects of Babel, who mistook physicalelevation for spiritual ascendancy.Nowadays the ambitious citybuilders set out to create, in thewords of Augie March, "not a singleTower of Babel plotted in common,but hundreds of thousands of sepa-rate beginnings, the length andbreadth of America." These myriadplans and projections betray, for alltheir innovation, the same old confu-sion. Like the Tower of Babel, theconstructions lead nowhere; andmeanwhile, says Augie, "nothinggenuine is allowed to appear, andnobody knows what's real."

Recalling the long history of hu-mankind's blindness and suffering,Bellow places the modern metropolisin biblical as well as ancient history.Augie March's Chicago recalls notonly Naples or Salonika but ancientBabel or Babylon. The Americancity's imperial size and wealth fosterthe illusion of permanence; yet asBellow envisions it, the mighty me-tropolis is an empire on the verge ofdissolution. "Around was Chicago,"Bellow writes, commencing his evo-cation of the city in Augie March: "Inits repetition it exhausted your imag-ination of details and units, moreunits than the cells of the brain andthe bricks of Babel. The Ezekiel cal-dron of wrath, stoked with bones. Intime the caldron too would melt. Amysterious tremor, dust, vapor, ema-nation of stupendous effort traveledwith the air." Fostered by worldlyambition and the relentless drive formaterial expansion, Chicago re-hearses in amtemporary form theage-old spectacle of human folly.

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Drugstore by Richard Estes, 1970 (oil on canvas). Theurban metropolis, especially Saul Bel-low's adopted city, Chicago, lies at the !wart of his fiction.

I

Like their wayward ancestors, the in-habitants of this New World Babylonhave invested all trust, hope, andfaith in earthly powers. Mistakingmatter for divinity, images for real-ity, they are modern-day idolaters.

Even in these "times of special dis-figurement and worldwide Babylo-nishness," as Bellow puts it, humanbeings persist in their yearning for"ulterior" reality, for ulualate ortranscendent meaning. Even mate-rial power and luxury may be con-strued as proper objects of worshipby mortals in their "Babylonish"confusion. Aware of these possibili-ties, Augie March perceives in oneof Chicago's luxury hotels an idol ofmonumental proportions. Resplen-dent in its godlike scale, "its Jupiter'sheaviness and restless marble de-tail," the idol extends its dominion,"seeking to be more and more."

2

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Here Bellow's language hints at theprocess by which matter, exalted andidolized, begins to usurp human au-thority, becoming "the power itself":

But in this modern power of luxury, withits battalions of service workers and en-gineers, it's the things themselves, theproducts that are distinguished, and theindividual man isn't nearly equal to theirgreat sum. Finally they are what becomesgreatthe multitude of baths with never-failing hot water,, the enormous air-conditioning units and the elaborate ma-chr :y. No opposing greatness is allowed.

Even the utilitarian products of ad-vanced technology recall the biblicalidolswrought by human inge-nuity, shaped by mortal hands, andyet invested by each mortal suppli-cant with illusory divinity. Subjugat-ing himself to idolatry, or false wor-ship, the human being is notennobled but diminished.

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The City from Greenwich Village by John Sloan, 1922 (oil on canvas). Bellow views metro-politan hfo as the central phenomenon of late twentieth-century Western culture.

In The Dean's December, publishedthirty years after Augie March, thenovel's urban setting expands be-yond Chicago to include the Roma-nian capital of Bucharest. In this taleof two cities, Bellow explores the so-cieties of East and West, communismand capitalism, balancing the "cast-iron gloom" of totalitarian bureaucra-cy against the degradation of Amer-ica's inner-city slums. Through hisprotagonist, Albert Corde, the novel-ist draws comparisons betweenBucharest and Chicago that beginwith the December weather: "Nomore sun, that was gone, only lintyclouds and a low cold horizon. . . .

It was like the Chicago winter, whichshrank your f ice and tightened yoursphincters." Like the Chicago winterit continually recalls, December inBucharest heralds more than the endof a year. Both the gloom of Roma-nia's totalitarian regime and Chi-cago's urban blight serve as emblemsof universal deprivation.

A! both ends of the earth, Bellowwarns, the values by which humanbeings have ordered their existenceare being obliterated. Ethical princi-ples, the distinction between goodand evil, have been forsaken. Mech-anistic concepts and data are theonly approved signposts of reality.Machines multiply; the mighty pros-perbut the moral center is crum-bling. To Cord..% contemporary soci-ety is a monstrous superstructurepreceriously erected on a spiritualvoid. And the emblem of that moral

disorder or disarray is, once again,the urban landscape"the slums wecarry around inside us. Every man'sinner inner city." The political andeconomic deprivations endured bythe inhabitants of both Babylons,East and West, are only the outwardmanifestation of a still deeper andmore dangerous deprivation: thesteady erosion of the human beingthat has culminated in his abject in-ner poverty.

Emblematic of this impoverish-ment, Chicago and Bucharest areboth the product and habitation ofwhat Bellow calls "advanced modernconsciousness." Both the capitalisticWest and the communist East sharea sinister belief in the human being's"earthenness." Having forsakencommitment to moral and spiritualideals, advanced modern conscious-ness worships the realm of "sclerot-ic, blind, earthen" matter and con-signs the human being, along withthe rest of phenomena, to "the gen-eral end of everything." Enslaved bytheir idolatry, the inhabitants of con-temporary Babylon are, at both endsof the earth, dying of their devotion."The view we hold of the materialworld," Corde says, "mav put usinto a case as heavy as lead."

The crushing weight of matteritsworship by the scientist, bureaucrat,,and consumerbears down on theconsciousness of Bellow's protago-nists as they struggle to lift the lid,break open the caseto authenticatetheir experience by discovering their

3V

s: 'ritual bond with others and withcreation itself. Although some of Bel-low's heroes are able to realize theirbond amidst the distractions of thecity, his more recent protagonistsfind it difficult in the extreme. LikeBenn Trachtenberg, the central char-acter in Bellow's 1987 novel More Dieof Heartbreak, they must quit the cityand cut loose from the strictures ofcollective life in order to renew theirconnection with creation.

In The Dean's December, AlbertCorde ends up not in Bucharest orChicago but in the icy atmosphere ofthe Mt. Palomar observatory in Cali-fornia. Dreading to discover in the"taste of the cold out there" thepower of astral space to "cancel ev-erything merely human," Corde hasa revelation of a different order. Ca:ing at the starry vastness of "the liv-ing heavens," he does not feel re-duced to insignificance by the in-finite reaches of space. Instead, heperceives that what is out there is alsoattached to what is inside him. Whathuman beings know of this world ismore than can be objectively regis-tered. The eyes perceive, as Cordesays, "only as much as could betaken in through the distortions ofthe atmosphere. Through these distortions, you saw objects, forms, par-tial realities. The rest was to be felt."

Corde's revelation, suffice it to say,takes him beyond the materialistview of reality. So intense is his ex-perience of the union of mind andmatter, spirit and nature, that he isreluctant to descend from theheights of Mt. Palomar. Afterward,when asked if he minded the cold atthe top of the observatory dome,Corde replies, in the novel's closingline, "The cold? Yes. But I almostthink I mind coming down more."That almost is all that stands betweenAlbert Corde's reluctance and hisreadiness to descend to the clam-orous world below.

One of the fortunate paradoxes ofBellow's novels is that, while supply-ing all the evidence needed to ex-plain and perhaps even to justify,the withdrawal of postmodernistfiction from the maelstrom of latetwentieth-century society, the authorhas held out against retreat. Al-though his own reluctance is audi-ble in Corde's somber qualifier"almost"Saul Bellow, like hisprotagonist, always comes back tothe city.

The Rise of AmericanT N 1891, THE YEAR BEFORE his1 death, Walt Whitman lamentedthe lack of an American readershipresponsive to his message. He wasnot alone in suffering this neglect. Infact, American writers had only be-gun to be appreciated in colleges,and professors interested in Ameri-can literature had little sense of com-munity in the academy.

Today, scholar-professors of Ameri-can literature are the bearers of adistinctive profession with a complextradition, which Kermit Vanderbiltdelineates in American Literature andthe Academy: The Roots, Growth, andMaturity of a Profession (University ofPennsylvania Press, 1986), publishedwith NEH support. From its originsin the 1820s to the appearance of theLiterary History of the United States(Macmillan) in 1948, the formalstudy of American literature hasevolved from the status of Englishliterature's poor relation to respecta-bility as a discipline and primacy inshaping American cultural identity.

Historically, Vanderbilt explains,the professional mission of Americanliterature scholarship and instructionhas been "to create for Americans a

James Turner is assistant editor ofHumanities.

S.

sense of our literary history and,within that growing literary tradi-tion, our awareness of a privat' andnational selfhood." But the profes-sion is less sure of itself today than itwas forty years ago, says Vanderbilt,who teaches American literature inthe Department of English andComparative Literature at SanDiego State University. clot only isAmerican literature generally with-out its own department, he pointsout, but many American literatureprofessors have suffered a crisis ofmorale with the decline of respectfor humanistic learning.

Vanderbilt's book is a response tothe profession's wavering identity.By tracing the background, birth,and maturation of American liter-ature studies, Vanderbilt seeks "torenew appreciation of the commit-ment by earlier generations of schol-ars who waged their own campaignsto build respect for American au-thors and to establish standards ofexcellence in the study and teachingof our literature." Aimed at scholarsof American literature, of literaryhistory, and of higher education, thebook is the first historical account ofthe struggle in the American acade-my to define, study, and teach Amer-ican literature. Vanderbilt has gath-ered photos of pioneering American

literature scholars and informationfrom many previously unpublishedsources, including dissertations andmanuscript collections, to produce abiography of American literaturestudies as an academic profession.

Divided into three parts, the one-volume history portrays the rise andmaturation of American literaturescholarship in its broadest otclinesand incorporates the manifold par-ticulars of people, places, and eventsin what represents a complex strandof American cultural history. BookOne, "Roots," examines the profes-sion's birth in the first quartet of thetwentieth century and looks back atits gestation period in the nineteenthcentury. Book Two, "Growth," cov-ers the profession's adolescent yearsduring the twenties and thirties.And Book Three, "Maturity," dis-cusses the profession's attainment ofmaturity during and immediatelyafter World War II. Salient eventscovered by Vanderbilt are the dawnof nationalistic literary self-con-sciousness in the 1820s, the pre-CivilWar literary-critical battles waged incontemporary journals between"Americanists" and "universalists,"pioneering American literary histo-ries by individual scholars, the ori-gin of university departments, cur-riculum development, textbooks and

3/

.k

Literature L.5tu les 13Y JAMES TURNER

anthologies, graduate study, profes-sional societies and politics, andmonumental literary histories pro-duced by cooperative scholarship.

The first prominent landmark inAmerican literary history was thefour-volume Cambridge History ofAmerican Literature (CHAL) (Putnam),published in three installments from1917 to 1921. "More than any otherevent, the unprecedented publishingof such a large-scale, cooperative his-tory of American literature helpedusher in American literature scholar-ship as a distinctive profession,"Vanderbilt says. "This was the firstdiscussion on a grand scale of the ac-complishments in the field."

The masterminds of the projectwere three adventurous professorsfrom Columbia UniversityCarl VanDoren, William P. Trent, and JohnErskinesoon joined by Stuart P.Sherman of the University of Illinois.These scholarsschooled in the par-adigm that the proper study of man-kind is philology and English (notAmerican) literaturewere moved todefine and explore their mutual in-terest in American liter?ture, Van-derbilt explains. With no precedentfor a cooperative scholarly endeavorand no established theory of Ameri-can literature to serve as a frame-work, their enterprise soon became

unwieldy, as their projected two-vol-ume history ballooned into four vol-umes covering every conceivablegenrefrom early verse, patrioticsongs, hymns, periodicals, and giftbooks, to works by authors com-monly studied today.

"As they identified the sixty-oddcontributors for the various chap-ters," Vanderbilt says, "the editorsfailed to establish a common theoryof literary-historical evolution, aes-thetic evaluation, and literary nation-alism, so that the CHAL materializedhaphazardly, without unity or aclear sense of scope. Importantly,though, they summarized Americanliterature study from its beginningsin the nineteenth century, identify-ing the key scholars and events thatlaid the foundation on which theCHAL could be built."

Vanderbilt points out that thenineteenth-century trailblazers madedistinctive contributions, even astheir critical methodologies weregrounded in aesthetic impressionismrather than historical inquiry andelucidation. Samuel Knapp re-covered colonial writing as an inte-gral component of American liter-ature in his Lectures on AmericanLiterature (Elam Bliss, 1829). RufusGriswold wrote Prose Writers ofAmerica (Carey and Hart, 1847) and

the Duyckinzics (Evert and George)produced the Cyclopaedia of AmericanLiterature (Scribners, 1855), theculminating events in the pre -CivilWar movement for ar indigenous lit-erature. Moses Con Tyler, who ad-vanced the study of American liter-ary history in the classroom atMichigan and Cornell, published AHistory of American Literature,, 1607-1765 (Putnam, 1878) and A LiteraryHistory of the American Revolution(Putnam, 1897), earning unofficialstatus, Vanderbilt comments, as thefounder of the profession. Dart-mouth's Charles F. Richardson pro-duced American Literature, 7607-1885(Putnam, 1887-89), encompassingthe entirety of American literary his-tory, but not altogether successfullyin his "groping' for principles, defi-nitions, and judgments. And BarrettWendell, who published the LiteraryHistory of America (Scribners, 1900), iscredited with introducing the seriousstudy of American literature at Harvard.

None of this scholarship won re-spectability for American literaturein the classics-centered college cur-riculum. Even with the establish-ment of the Modern Language Asso-ciation (MLA) in 1883 to securerecognition for English and othermodern languages, American liter-ature was virtually ignored. In the

00*,40..

1910s and 1920s, battle lines werestill drawn between those w hosought a "usable past" honoringAmerican cultural achievementsthe modernk.4 critics such as VanWyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, LouisUntermeyer, and H.L. Menckenand those who sought the perma-nent and universal as against histor-icism, nationalism, romanticism, andaesthetic impressionismthe anti-modernist New Humanists such asIrving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More.

Not until 1921 did the professionestablish a political voice by formingthe American Literature Group(ALG) within the MLA to defineAmerican literature as an expressionof American historical consciousnessinstead of an offshoot of English lit-erature. By the mid-1920s, tne mostprominent ALG membersJay B.Hubbell, Thomas 0. Mabbott, RobertE. Spitler, Ernest E. Leisy, and FredL. Patteehad become the new pro-fession's political elite whose constit-uency soon numbered in the hun-dreds, as all but a few of the nation'sleading universities added Americanliterature to their curricula.

The intellectual ferment of thepostwar period spurred a rethinkingof the premises of the CHAL andgave rise to a major new collectionof essays, entitled The Reinterpreta-tion of American Literature (HarcourtBrace, 1928)"indispensable read-ing today for every person whowould understand the rise of twen-tieth-century studies in American lit-erature," remarks Vanderbilt. Im-

pelled by Norman Foerster, the bookexplicated Foerster's four shapingfactors in American literaturethepuritan spirit, the pioneer spirit, ro-manticism, and realisma formula-tion that Vanderbilt identifies as "amomentous step in redefining thetradition of American literature."

Other critical developments prolif-erated. The profession establishedits own journal, American Literature,in 1929. Vernon L. Parrington pro-duced his seminal three-volumeMain Currents in American Thought(Harcourt Brace, 1927-30), a cross-disciplinary approach to .6nencanthought that addresses the centralquestions of American literary histo-ry in the context of intellectual histo-ry. And the 1930s saw a potpourri ofliterary outpourings from critics ofassorted persuasions: leftist, resur-gent new humanist, southern agrar-ian, Freudian, and nationalist.

With such scholarly fecundity, al-most inevitably the next stage wasthe making of a cooperative new lit-erary history that could provide anoverarching perspective on Ameri-can literature since the appearanceof the CHAL. After a falling out withthe ALG about whether or not schol-arship was ripe for an ALG-basedcooperative literary history, Spillerof Swarthmore, Willard Thorp ofPrinceton, Thomas H. Johnson ofLawrenceville School, and Henry S.Canby of Yale formed a private non-profit organization. Cognizant of theflaws of the CHAL, they carefully se-lected contributors for the consum-

33

mate Literary History of the UnitedStates (LI IUS), which was six years inthe making Spiller's two-cycle theoryof American literature governed theshape of the LI IUS, following hissense of the cresting of American liter-ary history at the end of two flourish-ing romantic movementsthe mid-nineteenth century and the 1930s.

Each generation should produce aliterary history to redefine the pastin its own terms, Spitler wrote in theLHUS. And after four editions of theLHUS, a new generaticn has done soin the one-volume Columbia 1..iteraryHistory of the United States (ColumbiaUniversity Press, 1988). Vanderbilt'sstory of the making of the CHAL,Parrington's Main Currents, theLHUS and other pioneering literaryhistories provides an introduction tothis recent history.

A definitive study of the scholarsand events that forged an academicdiscipline out of uniquely Americanliterary materials, American Literatureand the Academy may serve bothgraduate students and professors asa key reference source on the historyof professi 'nal studies in Americanliterature.

Through the Pul,:ication Subvention cat-egory of the Division of Research Pro-grams in 1986, the University of Penn-sylvania Press received 54,300 inoutright funds for publication of Ameri-can Literature and the Academy, byKermit Vanderbilt.

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A* READINGAT AN AMERICAN Library Association conference a few years ago, thedeputy director of the Tucson Public Library and her companion

paused to examine a display of Library of America books. The Library ofAmerica, a nonprofit program underwritten by NEH and the Ford Founda-tion, publishes authoritative hardback editions of America's major writers.The librarian and her friend remarked to etch other that it was too bad thatthese wonderful books, embodying the great flowering of American liter-ature, weren't getting more attention from the reading public.

From this chance remark grew "America: A Reading," a successful two-year rogram sponsored by the Tucson Public Library and supported byNEH. Tucson was an ideal location for a serious reading program, says proj-ect director Roily Kent, because the Tucson library system has, over theyears, developed a sizeable following for humanities programs due, in goodpart, to ten years' worth of NEH grants that funded several ongoing human-ities programs. The challenge for the library was to attract a wider audiencethan its already committed booklovers and to attempt to engage the generalreader who might read only one book a year that could be classified as liter-ature. "A lot of people are eager to participate in a program of organizedreadings and discussions using intellectually significant books, but there aremany more who, although they would like some guidance in a course ofreading, do not have the time or inclination to join a book disrussion group,"Kent says. "This is the audience that is importantand difficultto reach."

Before writing a grant application, Kent met with a panel of advisers fromLibrary of America in New York City and received detailed suggestions

from scholars at the University of Arizona. From these talks came the notionof working through seven large themes, each of which was broad enou ,11 toadmit a variety of interpretations. The first was "America: The New Land,"which included readings from William Bradford, Anne Bradstreet, Cabezade Vaca, Benjamin Franklin, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, among others.Other topics followed: "Leaving Home: Journeys and Return"; "Modern Po-etry: Making It New"; "City Lives"; and "Scenes of the Crime," a lighter-weight summertime session that examined the mystery genre. The mostpopular was "In Search of Our Mothers Garden: Women in American Liter-ature," the title of which was adapted from a collection of stories by AliceWalker. The reading programs ended in the spring of 198d with "HonestTruth: The American Quest for Meaning." This final them,' examined theAmerican regard for honesty, which Kent considers an intrinsic element inour national character.

In order to target different audiences, "America: A Reading" offered a va-riety of subordinate topics under the seven general themes. Some sectionsmet weekly for a month and a half; others lasted only two or three weeks.Publicity was important. The library gave out bookmarks advertising eachtopic, displayed colorful flyers and post9rs, and created reading guides for asection of Tucson's arts and culture tabloid.

The reading guides, which contained a suggested list of books on eachtopic and a discussion of the subject and some of the texts, were also, avail-able in libraries, schools, and at the university, and were mailed to individu-

Ellen Marsh is a freelance writer in the Washington, D.C., area.

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als on the library's mailing list. "At first the reading guides were long andquite detai ed, but we found that they were more effective if they were shortenough to read over a cup of coffee," Kent explains. Between the formalpublicity and word of mouth, news of the series began to spread.

The reading guide brochure for the second topic in the series, "LeavingHome: Journeys and Return," describes the theme as follows:

The American continent has been the setting for countless migrations, pilgrimages,questsjourneys from the old place to the new, voyages in America in search ofwealth, self, refuge, liberation. In essential ways, 'Leaving Home' is one of the recur-ring, if not founding, great American themes.

Four groups, each led by a different scholar, met in four libraries to dis-cuss various aspects of this theme. One section, called "Finding the Center,"met on Thursday evenings to discuss such books as The Way to Rainy Moun-tain, Walden, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Another group concentratedon "The World of William Faulkner." Kent led a third section, "Songs of theOpen Road: Men and Leaving Home," which included Whitman, Moby-Dick, Walden, and Huckleberry Finn. For the fourth group, Michelle Taigue, aPh.D. candidate at the University of Arizona, used "Journeys to the Interior"as her focus. To introduce the theme, she quoted W.T. Pilkington, writingabout Cabeza de Vaca: "One of the recurring motifs of American literature isthe voyage of exploration, of physical and spiritual discovery, the journey tothe interior, in which the dominant figure is man isolatedalone in the wil-derness, alone with himself."

Because of the Tucson locale and her own cultural heritage, Taigue in-cluded native American oral tradition and Hispanic literature. For six weeklytwo-hour sessions, thirty adults considered the selections they had read be-fore each meeting, beginning with Dine Bahane': The Navajo Creation Story byPaul G. Zolbrod. They also discussed N. Scott Momaday's The Way to RainyMountain, the story of the author's experience as a Kiowa; Cabeza de Vaca'sAdventures in the Unknown Interior of America; Moby-Dick; "The Bear" byFaulkner; and Casteneda's Tales of Power.

These readings generated an interest in myth and imagery, says Esther V.Flory, one of the participants in Taigue's group. "I'm from a small town onMaryland's Eastern Shore, and the last thing on my mind cihen I moved toTucson was getting involved in Indian mythology," she remarks. "My hori-zons have widened and I am planning to concentrate on native Americanlore in my personal reading this summer."

Using such techniques as asking the participants to read aloud their favor-ite passages, Taigue has led several other discussion groups. She comments,"Many of my group participated in the entire two-year series, and began todiscover that a certain pattern emerged: that whether the characters in thebooks were male or female, native American, Spanish, or New EnglandYankee, they were all part of the American voice and helped to create therich, large pattern of Anw.rican life."

Taigue and the other group leaders were free to select their own readinglists, choosing from a common pool of books, but always adding writingsunique to their own exploration of the topic. The Tucson library purchasedcopies of every book discussed, and the members of the reading groups bor-rowed them. "This was a good way to augment the branch libraries' collec-tions," Taigue notes.

At first the participants were mostly women, but by the third readingunitpoetrythe audience had broadened. It might seem that the some-what esoteric subject of modern poetry would not have wide appeal, butTucsonans, both men and women, loved it. The community has many writ-

Promotional material from the Tucson Public Librar, called attention tovarious themes of the library's reading program.

ers, Kent explains, so the topic was a natural. The members of the seven po-etry discussion groups were inspired by a lecture by visiting scholar and lit-erary critic Helen Vend ler, who spoke on Wallace Stevens. "Her talk fit rightinto the discussion my group was having on Emily Dickinson," Taigue re-marks. "It takes a good lecturer and a good storyteller to open a poet to anaudience."

Other scholars visited Tucson as part of "America: A Reading": Writer andprofessor Alfred Kazin introduced the first topic with a talk, "The Landscapein American Writing"; Daniel Aaron, president of the Library of Amenca,delivered a lecture on Longfellow, using him as an example of the carelessway we tend to undervalue the place of our secondary writers; literary criticLeslie Fiedler spoke on Walt Whitman; writer, teacher, and editor RichardPoirier lectured on the way value and languages are interrelated; andCharles Scruggs, University of Arizona professor of English, examined thecity and its image in American literature.

The University of Arizona professors and doctoral candidates who led thesessions were chosen for their dynamism and love of their subject matter"Some of the group leaders developed a following and found the same peo-ple attending one section after another led by them," Kent says. CharlesScruggs, whose field is the Harlem Renaissance, guided one group in an ex-ploration of books by black women writers and, as an outgrowth of this top-ic, a section on black men writers. "My groups were mostly composed ofwhite, older people," Scruggs states, "but they could identify with a lot ofthe incidents in the novels. The life experiences of older people are quite di-verse; they bring so much living to their discussion of literature. Throughthem I realize how rich American literature is."

On the other side of the coin, participant Leo Mogi!l observes that at age75, reading novels, especially those of black writers, is new to him. "I wasstruck by the anger in these books, yet I could understand the authors' feel-ings. I think I would like to continue my reading, going to a broader groupof authors to get different perspectives."

Programs such as "America: A Reading" present librarians with extra bur-dens in add:!:-,n to their regular duties, but Kent believes that librariesshould undertake the task of being th" keepers of the nation's imagination,rather than limiting their services to the dispensing of information "Withouta formidable effort to create a climate of receptivity for serious literature,past and present, interest in America's mastr: writings will become increas-ingly specialized, the exclusive domain of universities and schools," Kentfears. "It takes work to keep the imagination functioning. People build theirbodies by jogging or working out in a spa. Reading-discussion programssponsored by libraries serve the same function for the intellect."

Participants Mogill and Flory concur that they learned much more fromthe discussions than they would have learned by merely reading the bookson their own. Through "America: A Reading," the Tucson Public Library hasmounted a vigorous campaign to make serious reading fashionable in thecity, says Kent. "Of course we hope that for every discussion group partici-pant we saw, there were at least two or three readers we didn't see. In anycase, reading-discussion programs express to people in a public way that theAmerican language and literature are important. People who gather togetherto discuss literature gain a heightened sense of the power of language, therealization that language connects us to those who have gone before."

To support "America: A Reading," the Tucson Public Library received $206,605 inoutright funds in 1986 through the Humanities Projects in Libraries and ArchivesProgram of the Division of General Programs.

LFROM LONDON

E1 TER

BY JOSEPH H. BROWN

JACK LONDON ONCE confessedto being "the rottenest letter writ-

er that ever came down the pike"and to hating letter writing "worsethan poison." Despite these pro-testations, he was a conscientiousletter writer who wrote th-...sands ofletters during his short, busy life.Prompt, thoughtful; and straight-forward, London apparently an-swered all correspondence, regard-less of the obscurity of the corre-spondent or the triviality of the con-tents, and often in painstaking detail.

With support from NEH, three ed-itorsEarle Labor, professor of En-glish at Centenary College of Loui-siana; Robert C. Leitz III, professorof English at Louisiana State Univer-sity in Shreveport; and I. MiloShepard, executor of London's es-tatehave reviewed some 4,000 ofLondon's letters, selecting and an-notating more than 1,500 for inclu-sion ;-1 The Letters of Jack London. Thefirst fully annotated collection ofLondon's letters will be published ina three-volume set in October 1988by the Stanford University Press.

"Although London has always en-joyed a fine commercial reputation,"notes Leitz, "he has never been wellreceived in the academic community,precisely because of the suspicionthat he wrote for commercial ratherthan literary purposes." Recently,however, scholarly interest in Lon-

Joseph Brown is a promotions managerwith the University of Chicago Press.

don has increased. Shepard firstnoticed this after he received repeat-ed requests to reprint Letters from JackLondon, a 1965 edition edited byKing Hendricks and Shepard's fa-ther, Irving Shepard, whose mother,Eliza, was London's stepsister. MiloShepard welcomed the proposal ofLeitz and Labor to produce .1 nPwedition that would inc:ide all ofLondon's significant correspondence.

The volumes cover the years1896-1905, 1906-12, and 1913-16 re-

Jack London aboardthe Roamer, Octo-ber 1910. Londonand his wife Charm-um hoed on theirboat for months at alime, sailing aroundthe San Joaquin deltaregion of California.

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spectively. In solurne 1, the mostwide ranging of the three, reaac:smeet London in his twentieth yearand travel with him first as he pros-pects in the Klondike and later cov-ers the R.....5.,o-Japanese War for theHearst syndicate. During thoseyears, he began the intensive reg-imen that made him into a profes-sional writer, married and divorcedhis first wife, Bessie Mae Maddern,and courted his second wife,Charmian Kittredge.

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Volume 2 includes letters aboutLondon's ill-fated voyage on his boatthe Snark, meant originally to cir-cumnavigate the globe but aban-doned in Australia after two years.Also included are letters about hisrecurring ill health and his businessventures, including the purchaseand :9nsolidation of several ranchesin California's Sonoma Valleythrough which he pursued his inter-est in agriculture and animal hus-bandry. His fragile health and hisbusiness ventures command increas-ing attention through volume 3.

Until recently, London's lettershave been available primarily in onlytwo books: Hendricks' and Shepard'sLetters from Jack London and The Bookof Jack London (1921), a two-volumebiography by Charmian KittredgeLondon. Both books are now out ofprint, and according to Leitz, eachhad its own limitations. CharmianLondon's book, says Leitz, is charac-teristic of the nineteenth-century"life in setters" approach to bio-graphy, in which the life of a lovedone is portrayed sympathetica4.Leitz explains that Charmian's tran-scriptions were sometimes inaccu-rate, the letters included often frag-mentary, the choices highly partisan,and the editing arbitrary and mis-leading. Hendricks and Shepard, fortheir part, included only 400 of Lon-don's letters and annotated mini-mally, Leitz adds.

Many of the early letters are miss-ing because London made no copies.He even discarded the manuscriptsof his published work. Fortunately, afew of his closest friends saved hisletters, and Charmian, who begantyping for him in 1904, made car-bons and saved all he wrote. The Let-ters of Jack London will include all theessential correspondence that has sofar come to light.

Directness was a virtue for Lon-don, and he was seldom one tomince words. On occasion, especial-ly when he felt cheated, betrayed, orchallenged, his candor deterioratedinto meanness. Previously un-published and particularly virulentexamples of this dark side can befound in London's correspondencewith his ex-wife, Bessie, and hisdaughter Joan.

At the time the letters were writ-ten, London's two daughters by hisfirst marriage were living with theirmother. London's frustration at Bes-sie's refusal to allow his daughters tovisit him on his ranch provoked thisresponse in a January 1911 letter:"Your narrowness is the narrownessof the narrowest cell in all hell." Buthis treatment of twelve-year-old Joanin this February 1914 letter seemsgratuitously cruel:

Please remember that in whatever youdo from now on, I am uninterested. I de-sire to know neither your failures noryour successes; wherefore please nomore tell me of your markings in HighSchool, and no longer send me yourcompositions. . . . If you should bedying and should ask for me at yourbedside, I should surely come; on theother hand, if I were dying I should not

lack and CharmianLondon in 1916 withtheir dog Possum.When Charmian be-''an typing for herhusband in 1904,she saved carbons ofall that he wrote.

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care to have you at my bedside. A ruinedcolt is a ruined colt, and I do not likeruined colts.

Such instances are exceptional,Leitz is quick to point out. "In mostof his correspondence, London keptthese outbursts fairly well in check,maintaining to the end his public im-age as a robust adventurer, dynamicliterary entrepreneur, and generoushost. It was a demanding role for ahealthy man in his prime and an in-credible accomplishment for a mandying of uremia.

"In preparing this new edition, wedidn't pull any punches," Leitz ex-plains. "In lieu of a definitive bio-graphy, we intended to give as hon-est a portrait of London as we could,allowing him to tell his own story.The portrait that emerges is that of a

, :

confident, yet unassuming, oftensensitive human beingan excep-tionally open and energetic individu-al capable of great personal courageand generosity but also susceptibleto spells of self-pity and willful abra-siveness as well as moments of bru-tal frankness."

The earliest letters reveal a fledg-ling writer, intent on improving hisliterary skills, confessing to friendand former sweetheart Mabel Ap-plegarth in December 1898, "The artof omission is the hardest of all tolearn, and I am weak at it yet. I amtoo long-winded, and it is hardtraining to cut down." A letter writ-ten in June 1899 shows him still un-sure of himself, telling CloudesleyJohns, a friend and minor literaryfigure, "You see, I am groping, grop-ing, groping for my own particularstyle, for the style which should bemine but which I have not yetfound." Finally, in June 1900 a letterto another writer friend, ElwynHoffman, shows London settled intowhat became a lifelong habit of turn-ing out 1,000 publishable words eachday: "Let me tell you how I write. 1type as fast as I write, so that each

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day sees the work all upon the finalMS. I fold it up and send it off with-out once going back to see what allthe previous pages were like. So, infact, when a page is done, that is thelast I see of it till it comes out in print."

The letters also penetrate the pub-lic mask of Jack London, tough guy."Ask the people who know me to-day," he wrote Charmian in June 1903:

A rough, savage fellow, they will say,who likes prizefights and brutalities,who has a clever turn of pen, a char-latan's smattering of art, and the inevita-ble deficiencies of the untrained, unre-fined, self-made man which he striveswith a fair measure of success to hide be-neath an attitude of roughness and un-conventionality. Do I endeavor to uncon-vince them? It's so much easier to leavetheir convictions alone.

Not just London scholars butAmericanists generally stand to prof-it from publication of The Letters ofJack London. As the editors note,London's letters present even themost casual of readers with a fas-cinating account of a remarkable andrevolutionary period in Americanhistory. London himself was an oys-ter pirate, hobo, janitor, jailbird, so-

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cialist activist and candidate for may-or of Oakland, stockbreeder, farmer,factory worker, lecturer on the aca-demic circuit, war correspondent,and many more things besides. Hecorresponded with publishers, fel-low socialists, aspiring writers, awide circle of faithful friends fromall walks of life, even his many fansamong ordinary Americans. Hetalked about :,is experiences freely toanyone who would listen. The let-ters, written in the same spon-taneous manner as London's fiction,remain as entertaining and alive to-day as do the best of his works. d+

In 1980,, Louisiana State University wasawarded $88,950 in outright fundsthrough the Editions category of the Di-vision of Research Programs to support adefinitive scholarly edition of Jack Lon-don's correspondance. Since 1985, theStanford University Press has received atotal of $20,427 in outright fundsthrough the Publication Subvention cate-gory of the Division of Research Pro-grams to publish three volumes of TheLetters of Jack London.

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in Glen Ellen, Cali-fornia (1909). Lon-don developed a life-long habit of turningout 1,000 publish-able words a day.

I

In theGUIDE

39 Supportfor theHumanitiesat Two-yearlnst'tutions

42 Recent NEHGrants byDiscipline

46 Deadlines

1 e

Support for the Humanitiesat Two-Year InstitutionsBY JUDITH JEFFREY HOWARD

How does a two-year institution pre-pare and submit a competitive pro-posal for a project that strengthens itshumanities curriculum? The processbegins with ideas for improving hu-manities instruction generated by col-lege faculty and administrators. Thenext step is often a telephone call tothe Division of Education Programs todiscuss with a program officer ways inwhich division programs might help tostrengthen the humanities curriculum.

Staff members are happy to workwith applicants to translate ideas intoproposals. Competitive proposals leadteachers and students into direct en-gagement with key texts, documents,artistic works, and cultural artifacts byproviding opportunities to read, wrrte,and discuss major topics in the hu-manities. A competitive applicationshould present a clear rationale for theProposed project a well-articulatedgoal, a carefully thought-out scheduleof activities to achieve that goal, aclear institutional commitment to sup-port the project activities, and, whereapplicable, an institutional commit-ment to assume costs of continuing theprogram after outside funding has ended

NEH encourages but does not re-quire submission of preliminary draftssix to eight weeks prior to the applica-tion deadline. A staff member of theDivision of Education Programs willread the draft,, anticipate questions that

Judith Jeffrey Howard is a program of-ficer for the NEH Division of Educa-tion Programs

Y.410

a review panel might raise about theproposal and return comments intime for revisions and submission of afinal proposal by the deadline. Appli-cation deadlines for each program arelisted on page 46.

The division can help institutions tostrengthen teaching and learning inthe humanities through several typesof activities serving various institution-al needs. Funded projects often in-volve faculty study, curriculum devel-opment, or planning activities.

Faculty Study

Projects of this type bring together agroup of faculty in a single institutionwith outside scholars to discuss majorworks and topics in the humanities. Agroup of faculty members in English,,history, and drama might decide, forexample, to read Shakespeare togetherfor three weeks in the summer and toinvite two or three noted scholars togive public lectures and faculty semi-nars on a given play oi topic. NEHfunding could be sought for honorariaand expenses for speakers, and sti-pends or released time for participat-ing faculty.

Faculty and CurriculumDevelopment

Currently under way is a more exten-sive faculty and curriculum develop-ment project at the Community Col-lege of Philadelphia,, "incorporatingCultural Literacy as an Explicit Goal inthe Introductory English CompositionCourse." The project includes two

summer institutes engaging faculty inthe study of major works, includingThe Autobiography of Benjamin Frank-lin, "Song of Myself," The 5( ado Let-ter arid Their Eyes Were WatchingGod and considering ways of incorpo-rating these texts into compositioncourses. In follow-up seminarsthroughout the academic year, partici-pants will meet to discuss curricularrevisions made in light of their sum-mer study and to compare notes ontheir classroom experiences. The pri-mary audience for this project consistsof part-time faculty teaching Englishcomposition courses in off-campuslocations.

Planning Grants

To help institutions at early phases ofcurriculum development, NEH pro-vides support in the form of planninggrants Pie mont Virginia CommunityCollege recently completed a projectsupporting released time for a facultytask force to pla i for new and re-designed course offerings, for strength-ening the library collection, and forplanning for faculty professionaldevelopment.

Endowment funds are used to meet awide range of institutional needs, fromimplementing new core curricula todesigning new humanities programs,and from serving a college's honorsstudents to supporting efforts amonggroups of institutions.

Core Courses

The Endowment is eager to assist in-stitutions attempting to provide a com-

mon learning experience for their stu-dents through Lore humanitiesLours Fhe planning grant at Pied-mont Virginia Community College ledt.) a comprehensive faculty and curric-ulum development project now beingfunded. The core course deve:opedunder this grant engages students inthe study of works such as Antigone,Othello, and "The Magic Flute.'

Humanities in a New CollegeMission

Many two-year instinitions seek sup-port for development of humanitiesprograms as their missions change.South Puget Sound Community Col-lege, which began its institutional lifeas Olympia Vocational-Technical Insti-tute, began awarding associate of artsdegrees in 1982 and has smc beenengaged in building its humanitiesprogram. To develop a comprehensivehumanities curriculum, the college hasreceived NEH support for releasedtime for faculty and curriculum devel-opment, library acquisitions, and par-tial support for two new positions.

Honors Courses

"The Classics Cluster Program" atRichland College in the Dallas CountyCommunity College District integratesmaterials from the classical heritage ofWestern culture into existing generaleducation and honors courses. An En-glish course on the epic for example,includes The Epic of Gilgamesh TheIliad, The Odyssey, and The Aeneid.To examine the classical roots of our po-litical system, an American governmentcourse analyzes Aristotle's Politics and

Tacitus' The Annals of Impend! Romeainong other \A orks NEH also supportssuch activities as summer ,eniinars forfaculty to study major classical textswith outstand:ng scholars

Improving StatewideHumanities instruction

The division can also fund cooperativeefforts to improve teaching and learn-ing in the hum. -cities among a groupof institutions. ror example, a statesystem might apply for funds to bringtogether university, community col-lege, and technical college faculty tofind ways of sharing resources fcr fac-ulty and curriculum development inthe humanities.

Over the past ten years, the Endow-ment has awarded grants to more thana hundred two-yedi colleges and to as-sociations such as the Community Col-lege Humanities Association. The ac-ceptance rate of grant proposals fromtwo-year institutions is substantiallythe same as the acceptance rate for thetotal pool of applicants. Approximate-ly one in three applications is funded.

For guidelines and further informa-tion, write or call the Division of Edu-cation Programs, Room 302, NationalEndowment for the Humanities, Wash-ington, D.C. 20506, 202/786-0380.

Other NEH divisions also serve two-year institutions. For information onsummer seminars for college teachers,call the Division of Fellowships andSeminars at 202/786-0458. For infor-mation on public programs, call theDivision of General Programs at202/786-0267. ,49,

II

Please enter my subscription to Humanities: $9 for 6 issues.

MAIL TO. Superintendent of Dor uments,, Government Printing Offkr,Wa4. .igton, D C. 20402-9371

(('ompany or personal name)

(Additional address/attention line)

l'Areet address)

I( ity, Stale, LIP ( oriel

1Cher k payable to the Superintendent of Do( uments

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VISA or Master( and Ar r ()tint. .

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il).tylime phone int ludirws area «xlel `,IL;ri,iiiir,9/88

COMING IN NOVEMBER: The scholar's role in public humanities programs.

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Archaeology andAnthropology

American Schools of Oriental Research, Philadel-phia, PA, Seymour Gitin $27,500 To supportpostdoctoral fellowships in archaeology and relat-ed subjects at the Albright Institute for Archaeo-logical Research in Jerusalem RA

Flowerdew Hundred Foundation, Hopewell, VA,James F Deetz $75,000 To conduct a five-weekinstitute for college teachers on the historical ar-chaeology of European expansion in the 200 yearsfollowing the voyages of Columbus EH

U of Virginia, Charlottesville, Malcolm Bell Ill$16,396 To study a Greek colonial city at Mor-gantina in central Sicily by documenting the pub-lic buildings in the city center, preparing a study ofcity planning principles, and tracing the history ofthe city into Roman times RO

Yale U., New Haven, CT, Harvey Weiss $17,000OR; $8,000 FM To conduct an international con-ference on the origins of urbanization in Meso-potamia, ca. 3000 B C RX

Arts-History andCriticism

Actors Theatre of Louisville, KY, Rhea H Leh-man $187,988 To prepare a series of interdisci-plinary programs and e; hibitions that would illu-minate the cultural sensibility of the Victorian eraand the interrelationships of the social, moral, andintellectual forces of the period GP

American Dance Festival, Inc., New London, CT,Gerald E Myers $72,821 To conduct a series otnine panel discussionsand an interpretive bookletexploring the achievements c black Americancnoreographers in the development of modernAmerican dance GP

American Musicological Society, Philadelphia,PA, Richard Crawford J06,690 To prepare acoordinated, national series of scholarly editionsof American music RE

Boston U., MA, Robin Littauer $50,436 OR,$25,000 FM To fund a program in theater criti-cism for high school students who will exploredramatic texts as they are produced on stage at theHuntington Theater. GP

John R. Elliott: $28,500 To support a.1 edition ofma nuscript evidence of all dramatis performancesat the Inns of Court in London before 1642 RE

Filmmaker's Collaborative, Semen, ille, MA, CarlP Nagin. $20,000 To plan a one-hour documm-tary film on the life and work of Chinese painterand forger Chang TaCh'ien, 1899-1983 GN

Hampshire College, Amherst, MA, Jerome Lieb-ling To plan a one-hour documentaryon the history of bluegrass music and the legacy ofone of its most influential players, Bill MonroeGN

Jewish Theological Seminary of America, NY,Vivian Mann $150,000 OR, $50,000 FM Tosupport, in cooperation with the Jewish Museum,a resource center to train historians of Jewish artEH

National Public Radio, Washington, DC, DeanBoal $20,030 OR $205,000 FM To produce aseries of feature modules on art history and crit-icism to be distributed on National Public Radio'sdaily arts magazine, Performance Today GN

Public Art Films, Inc., NYC, Tony Silver$50,000 To write one script for "Comic Strips," aproposed three-part, three-hour television seriesexploring aspects of the form, content, and cultur-al impact of American comic strips and books GN

Lois A. Rosow. $30,000. To prepare a criticaledition of Jean-Baptiste Lully's opera, "Armide "RE

U. of California, Berkeley, Alan H Nelson:$75,000 OR; 525,000E 1. To continue an editionof all the records of eariy English drama in theBritish Isles from the beginnings to 1642 RE

U. of California, Santa Cruz, Michael J Warren$80,879. To support a series of public lectures,forums, bibliographies, and displays illuminatingShakespeare's use of Roman material in four playsto be presented during a summer Shakespearefestival. GP

U. of Chicago, IL, Philip Gossett $56,000 OR,$69,000 FM To prepare a critical edition of theworks o' Giuseppe Verdi RE

U. of Illinois, Chicago, Bruce A Murray $10,000OR, $15,000 FM To conduct an interr in/y-41f,interdisciplinary conference to consider how Ger-man cinema has interpreted German history (lur-ing the 20th century and the implications of suchinterpretation for German cinema, history, andculture RX

U. of Illinois, Urbana, David A Grayson$40,000 To prepare a critical edition of De-bussy's opera, "Pelleas et Melisande RE

U. of Maryland, College Park, Mitchell Litton$389,384 To produc? a television adaptation ofSamuel Beckett's Waiting for Coda!, directed bythe author and followed by a discussion of thenature of theatrical texts in the era of televisionGN

Washington U., St Louis, MO; Michael Becker-man. $15,000 OR, $10,000 FM To conduct aninternational conference on Leos Janecek to ex-plore research problems in his music The confer-ence will coincide with a festival of Czech musicthat will include the first Amer( an performanceothis Third Symphony. RX

ti 3

Waverly Consort, Inc , NYC, Michael Jaffee$200,381 OR, $40,000 FM To fund a two-ye,project with lectures and program notes, exam!ing the relationships between music and relatefields in the humanities, including history, liteature, and the history ot the visual and dramaarts GP

Classics

American Philological Association, Bronx, tMark Morford $14,023 To fund activities reing to the American Philological Association cfere nce on the place of classical studies in Amcan precolleg.ate education ES

American Philosophical Association, New,[)E, David A Hoekema $300,704 OR, $50FM To continue work on the edition and trarLion of the ancient commentators on Aristotle f5C0 B C to A D 600 Some 36 titles are planfor publication RL

Columbia U., NYC, Leonardo Taran $25,00Cprepare an edition of Simplicius's commentarAristotle's Physics RE

History-Non-U.S.

American Oriental Society, New HavenMordechal A Friedman $39,620. To trancorrespondence, court records, and legaltracts, mostly written in Judeo-Arabic fron10th to 13th century's, that deal with marriagedivorce practices in Mediterranean lewishmunities RL

Appalachian State U., Boone, NC, Allen V$16,087 To complete a study of °oldies andetv in vucatan during and prior to the MeRevolution, 1850-1915 RO

Columbia U., NYC, Edward A Allw$68,000 To translate the key works of Abd.Rashid-00h Fitrat, 1836-1938, a modern ciAsian reformist RL

Committee on Bicentennial of French Retion, Baltimore, MD, Robert Forste: 515,00$25,000 FM To conduct an international cience devoted to evaluating the state of schol,dealing with the French Revolution RX

Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, JamesHefternan $10,000 OR, $3,000 FM To fcinternational conference that will analyzeinterdisciplinary way the dtterent representof the French Revolution through litcraturand historiography RX

Film Arts Foundation, San Francisco, CA,S Cox 520,000 To plan one-hour filmmentary, "Gullah Tides," on the Afro-Airculture of the Sea Islands of South CaroliiGeorgia GN

Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC,Lena C Odin. $422,043 OR, $50,000 FM loconduct a three-year series of institutes, seminars,public lectures, workshops, arid colloquia onvarious aspects ot Shakespeare studies EH

Fordham U., Bronx, NY, Bernice Glatzer Rosen-thal. $15,000 OR, $5,000 FM To tune an interna-tional conference that syill locus on the miluenceof Nietzsche's writings and thought on the devel-opment of Sovi:1 culture RX

George Washington U., Washington, DC, JoanChung-wen Shih. $15,000 To ieN, Ise the script lora one-hour documentary film on the Tang dynastyof China, 618-906, as the pilot of a nine-partseries on China's cultural history. GN

Indiana U., Bloomington, Helen Nader. $39,944To retranslate the Book of Privileges, a collectionof royal documents by King Ferdinand and QueenIsabella granting offices, privileges, and audio .tyto Columbus for the discovery and settlement ofthe New World. RL

Lara Classics, Inc., Cambridge, MA, Pamela CBerger. $25,000 To revise the script for a teature-length dramatic film recounting the events leadingto a mid-13th-century uprising of shepherds inand around Bourges, France. GN

Lehigh U., Bethlehem, PA, Michael G Baylor$30,000 To translate the writings of ThomasMuntzer, an early Protestant religious and politi-cal thinker and a leading figure in the Peasants'War. RL

Metropolitan Arts, Inc., NYC, Andrea Simon$117,146 To write two scripts for a proposedminiseries of three two-hour historical dramastracing the Imes and ideas ot selected artists, writ-ers, philosophers, and politicians in Vienna, Aus-tria, from the 1880s to 1938. GN

Michigan State U., East Lansing, David Robinson$43,934 OR, $20,000 FM To translar., as a re-source for scholars from different Jisciplines,seven volumes of historical, literary, political,philosophical, and religious materials in variousAfrican languages. RL

Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, MA, Mar-garet L Switten: $8,79'). To fund the final phase ofan interdisciplinary project on the medieval lyric,including the preparation of teaching guides andcommentaries and the addition of several mon-astic songs and Middle English lyrics. EH

New York Foundation for the Arts, NYC , Hava KBeller $200,381 OR, 550,000 FM. To produce a90-minute film exploring the motivating pi:nci-pies and activities of a small group of individualswithin wartime Germany who comprised theanti-Nazi underground GN

New York Public Library. NYC, Diantha DScholl. $191,168 OR, $100,000 FM To imple-ment three exhibitions, a catalogue, a symposi-um, lectures, curricular materials, and other pub-lications on the role of printing in the FrenchRevolution. GL

Newberry Library, Chicago, IL, Mary Beth Rose.$360,938 To conduct a two-year series ot insti-tutes, workshops, and symposia in various areasof Renaissance studies EH

Northwestern U., Evanston, IL, John 0 Hun-wick: $76,723 OR, $10,000 FM To prepare anannotated translation of a 1656 Arabic chroniclewritten in Timbuktu covering the history of theSonghay Empire and of the Middle Niger RL

Marshall S. Shatz: $28,500 To translate, fromRussian, Michael Bakunin's Statism and Anarchy(1873), a work of theoretical and historical signifi-cance. RL

Stanford U., CA, Mary Jane Parrine $10,000 Tocontinue work on Poverty and Crime in EarlyModern Europe. A Bibliographical Survey RC

Unicorn Projects, Inc., Washington, DC, Ray AHubbard $80,045 To omplele production ot aone-hour animated documentaty television pro-gram based on David Mac aulay s book PyramidGN

U. of Akron, Main Campus, OH, Barbara P C lern-ents $1 5,000 OR, 55,000 To conduct aninternational confererice designed to turthei re-search on the roles ot yy omen in Russian historyfrom the medieval period to the 1930s RX

U. of California, Los Angeles, Charlotte ACrabtree 51,500,000 Ti) develop um iiationaicenter fur research to improve history instructionin elementary and secondary schools EV

U. of California, Los Angeles, Ludwig Lauerhass,Jr $15,903 To plan an exhibition, an inter-pretive catalogue, and essays on Latin Americandevelopment in the 19th century GL

U. of California, San Diego, La Jolla, David RRingrose. $14,633 To fund the final revisedphases of a collaborative study of wealth and pol-itics in 19th-century Spain, with emphasis on agri-cultural and urban economic interests in the re-gion around Madrid. RO

U. of Illinois, Urbana, Patricia B Ebrey $27,309To translate the Family Rituals of Master Chu by12th-century neo-Confucian philosopher ChuHsi For centuries this manual has been the modelfor Confucian rites in the home throughout AsiaRL

Western Michigan U., Kalamazoo, James J Mur-phy: 515,000 OR; $5,000 FM To support aninternational, interdisciplinary conference to ex-amine the p _sent state of knowledge about medi-eval educ lion in language and literature, and toconsider topic. future research RX

William 0. Douglas Institute, Seattle, WA;Lyman H legters $24,710 OR, $5,000 FM Totranslate the first thre9 volumes in a projectedseries on modern social and political thought incentral and eastern Europe RI

History-U.S.

American Historical Association, Washington,DC, Morey D Rothberg $40,000 CR, $25,000FM To prepare a three-volume edition of thecollected works of J. Franklin Jameson, teunder ofthe American Historical Association. RE

Baruch College, NYC, Glenn W LaFantasie$49,491 OR, $52,640 FM To prepare tne firstp-in(ed iolume and the index to the microfilmedition c papers of Albert Gallatin, diplomat

Scci y ot the Treasury from 1801 to 1814RE

CtJNY Research Foundation/Queens College,NYC, Elizabeth M Nuxoll $176,030 OR,$30,000 FM To prepare a nine-volume edition ofthe papers of Robert Morris and the Office ofFinance,, 1781-84 RE

Calliope Film Resources, Inc., Somerville, MA,Randall Conrad $750,872 OR, $50,000 FM Toproduce a 90-minute drama based on Shays' Re-bellion, the postrevolutionary clash between NewEngland farmers and merchants that tested theinstitutions of the new republic GN

Duke U., Durham, NC, Anne F Scott $55,000OR, $74,000 FM To complete a comprehensiveguide to the microfilm edition of the papers of laneAddams and the preparation of the first of tourvolumes of the print edition RE

Film America, Inc., Washington, DC, KarenThomas $100,015 OR, 599,999 FM To producea one-hour documentary film about the historyand legacy of the Virginia Statute for ReligiousFreedom. GN

qg

Florida State U., Tallahassee, C Peter Ripley.$110,000 OR, $60,000 FM. To prepare two vol-umes of the edition ot the Black Abolitionist Pa-pers Project RE

Mabou Mines Development Foundation, Inc.,NYC, William Raymond $36,500 Ti, write ascript, adapted iron) the stage play Cold Harbor,tor a 90-minute that will examine the lite andtimes ot Ulysses S Grant and the processes bywhich historical events are interpreted GN

Martin Luther King, Jr. Center, Atlanta, GA,Caybonie Carson 5138,000 OR, 5118,000 FMTo prepare a 12-volume selective edition of thewritings of Dr Martin Luther King, Jr RE

Rice U., Houston, TX; Lynda L Crust $42,840OR, $20,000 FM. To prepare five volumes in anedition of the papers of Jefferson Davis. RE

Ulysses S. Grant Association, Carbondale, IL,John Y Simon $40,000 OR, $5,000 FM To pre-pare an edition of the papers of Ulysses S Grant.RE

U. of Hartford, West Hartford, CT, Donald MRogers $36,706 To support an eight-part lectureseries on the extension of the right to vote from thetounding period to the present. GP

U. of Maryland, College Park, Ira Berlin $75,000OR, $70,000 FM. To prepare a seven-volumeedition of selected documents from the NationalArchives illustrating the transformation of the livesof black people in the wake of emancipation,1861-67 RE

U. of Massachusetts, Amherst, Patricia G. Hol-land $110,000 OR, $75,000 FM To complete amicrofilm edition of the papers of Elizabeth CadyStanton and Susan B. Anthony. RE

U. of Miami, Coral Gables, FL; Walter D. Kam-phoefner $25,000 OR; $10,000 FM. To translatea volume of letters written between 1834 and1936 by 20 German immigrants to the UnitedStates RL

U. of Tennessee, Knoxville, Harold D. Moser.$60,000 OR; $85,000 FM To prepare a 16.volume selective edition of the papers of AndrewJackson. RE

U. of Tennessee, Knoxville, Wayne Cutler$80,000 OR, $50,000 FM To prepare a 12-volume edition of the correspondence of James KPolk. RE

WITF, Harrisburg, PA, Stewart Cheifet.$160,666. To produce a one-hour television doc-umentary on the development of the- AniericanConstitution, focusing on the basic ideas, issues,and historical circumstances involved in its cre-ation GN

Interdisciplinary

American U., Washington, DC, Betty F. Bennett$226,709 To conduct a three-week summer sem-inar, in which faculty members will study Westernand non-Western classics in art, literature, andphilosophy, and released time to permit partici-pants to develop h, w general education coursesEH U8

Association of Public Library Administrators,Lancaster, SC, Elizabeth G Ehrenclou $151,115To implement "Let's Talk about It" reading anddiscussion programs in 30 South Carolina librar-ies GL

Clinton-Essex-Franklin Library System, Platts-burgh, NY, Abby Zito $100,397 OR. 525,000FM To support reading and disc ussion programsin 56 New York libraries about social mobility,change, and dreams in America and about the

history of the 1920s, 30s, and 40s as reflected inliterature. GL

Colorado School of Mines, Golden, Barbara MOlds $84,428 To develop a course integratingthe humanities into undergraduate c hem.cal engineering education EH

Defiance College, OH, Kenneth E Christiansen$64,047. To conduct a summer institute for 15faculty members to develop two new cure cours-es, The Roots of Western Civilization" and "TheHistory of Science," for addition to the college'sinterdisciplinary studies curriculum EH

Harvard U., Cambridge, MA, Nathan I Huggins5116,083 To prepare ten undergraduate instruc-tional modules for introductory courses in Afro-American studies. EH

Howard County Library, Columbia, MD, PatriciaL. Bates $135,600 To conduct reading and dis-cussion programs in public libraries and seniorcenters throughout Maryland. GL

Lebanon Valley College, Ann% ille, PA, WarrenThompson $27,016 To conduct two workshopsfor faculty who teach the four required core hu-manities courses. EH

Metropolitan Pittsburgh Public Broadcasting,Westport, CT, R Kirk Morris $300,795 OR,$25,000 FM. To produce a 90-minute documen-tary on the life and work of American photojour-nalist W Eugene Smith, 1918-78. GN

National Humanities Center, Research TrianglePark, NC, Wayne J Pond. $401,000 OR,$60,000 FM To produce 52 weekly half-hourradio programs featuring conversations with fel-lows and visitors to the National Humanities Cen-ter. GNPiedmont Virginia Community College, Char-lottesville; Evelyn Edson: $311,067. To developan introductory course in the human:ties, expandlibrary holdings, and support faculty develop-ment EH

Saint Joseph's Colle ?, Rensselaer, IN, Robert IGarrity $69,958 OK, $45,000 FM To conductfaculty seminars on humanities texts for both hu-manities and nonhumanities faculty EH

Southwestern U., Georgetown, TX, Jeanie Wat-5200,000 To support faculty and curriculum

velopment to enhance and expand the academ-ic programs on Asia EH

U. of Alaska, Fairbanks, Edna A MacLeanS36,831. To transcribe and translate "What OurElders Tell Us," a collection of legends and storiesof the Inupiat people of rorthern Alaska RL

U. of California, Los Angeles, Robert M Mani-quis $150,903 OR, $125,000 FM. to conducttwo lecture series, three symposia, and a touringfilm series on the French Revolution and its inter-pretations in historiogr?phy, literature, and filmGP

U. of California, Jos Angeles, Robert A HillSi 30,000 OR, '',,o5,000 FM To prepare an editionof the papr..rs ,if Marcus Garvey and the UniversalNegro Improvement Association RE

U. of Chicago, IL, James Nye $57,000 OR,$15,000 FM To support additions to IndologicalBooks in Series, a guide to texts published in allSouth Asian monographic series in Sanskrit, Pali,and the Prakrits, and to translations and studies inseries published between 1849 and 1984 RC

U. of Kentucky, Lexington, LOWS J Swift$90,954 To conduct two three-week faculty sem-inars, "Western Traditions" and "American Histo-ry and Literature," in preparation for a new cross-disciplinary requirement in the curriculum EH

U. of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Austin J McLean$15,589 To plan a traveling exhibition, an inter-pretive catalogue, and print and media materialabout the emergence of a new Afro-American

identity during the Harlem Renaissance of the1920s GL

U. of Mississippi, Unit ersio Ronald 'Vt, Ballet5114,112 To w rite a script tor a 90- t() 12U-minute dramatic. ?dm un the An 11,4 d Incident GN

U.of Portland,OR, Marilyn J Miller 556,046 Toconduct a tour -week scmincir at Sophia Unit ersityin Tokyo to permit members ut the Japanese stud-ies tat. ultt to pursue c. urric ulum and research proj-ects EH

U. of Southern Maine, Gorham, Joseph A Con-tort! $48,616 To add six graduate courses inNew England studies by pro iding the tacultt withopportunities to plan, prepare tor, and implementthem EH

U. of Texas, Austin, Frances E Karttunen$239,090. To conduct a six-week institute at theInstitute of Latin American Studies ( n Nahuatl andthe literatures of Mesoamerica and the NewWorld EH

Utah State U., Logan, Barre Tuelken $25,898 Toplan a series of projects involving four isolatedwestern communities in an exploration of localculture and shared traditional and emerging val-ues. GL

Jurisprudence

New Images Productions, Inc., Berkeley, CA,Avon Kirkland $1,000,880 OR, $500,000 FMTo produce five one-hour television programs fora dramatic miniseries based on Simple Justice,Richard Kluger's history of the Supreme Courtdecision Brown vs Board of Education GN

Language and Linguistics

J. of Michigan, Ann Arbor; Benjamin A Stolz-520,000 OR; $10,000 FM To fund an interna-tional, interdisciplinary conference to assess theprogress of knowledge in the past 25 years of thelinguistic prehistory of man, and to plan furtherresearch RX

Literature

American Library Association, Chicago, IL, PeggyBarber $358,000 To support a series of programsabout the work and lives of 13 American poets GL

Arizona State U., Tempe, Jeanie R Brink3144,215 To conduct a six-week summer insti-tute on Cervantes' Don Quixote at the ArizonaCenter for Medieval and Renaissance Studies for24 teachers ot history, literature, and art historyEH

Brooklyn Academy of Music, Inc., NYC, BarbaraS Miller. $150,762 OR; $250,000 FM To pro-duce a six-hour dramatic film for television basedon the Sanskrit epic, The Mahabharata GN

Brown U., Providence, RI, Arnold L Weinstein$140,000 OR, $40,000 FM To condu( t a three-year project designed to expand the teaching otGreat Books to include works from Asia, Africa,and Latin America, and to examine changing in-terpretations and the concept of the canonical EH

CUNY Research Foundation/Lehman Zollege,Bronx, NY, W Speed Hill. $45,000 To completea six-volume edition of the works ot RichardHooker, a late Elizabethan English theologian RE

Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, LaurenceDavies $120,000 OR, $12,000 FM To complete

an eight-v uluine edition of the letters of JosephConrad. RE

Fayetteville State U., N( , Ion M Young552,7 51 To conduct a mnterence and irk diaryprograms illuminating the lite and w ark u1CharlesW Chesnutt, a pioneer Afro-Americ an Author GP

Globe Radio Repertory, Seattle, VvA, John P Sis-coe $81,498 To produce 13 halt -hour radio pro-grams dramatizing Gustate Flaubc,1 s MadameBot ary GN

Edward P. Harris: 527,880. To complete one vol-ume in an edition of the works of Friedrich Max-imilian Klinger, a late 18th-century German play-wright and novelist RE

Howard S. Hibbett: $45,874 To translate a vol-ume of poetry with interpolated explanatory com-ments and descriptive passages composed in1692 by Japanese writer Ihara Saikaku. RL

H. Mack Horton: $27,500. To translate and anno-tate the diary of Japanese poet Saiokuken Socho,1448-1532, who chronicled the literary and po-litical developments that ushered in Japan's earlymodern period. RL

Curt Leviant: $26,180 To translate a volume ofshort stories by Yiddish writer Abraham Reisin,,1876-1956 RL

New England Foundation for the Humanities,South Hadley, MA; Sarah Getty $100,000 OR;$75,000 FM. To conduct a series of reading anddiscussion programs at public libraries in six NewEngland states by developing one new series ofprograms and exchanging existing programs andresources. GL

Newberry Library, Chicago, IL, Harrison Hay-ford- $141,397. To complete a 15-volume editionof the writings of Herman Melville RE

Richard I.. Pevear: $36,000. To retranslate Dos-toevsky's The Brothers Karamazov from the defini-Me Russian text published in 1976 RI.

Princeton U., NJ, Jerome W. Clinton: $56,743.To translate selected stories from the Shahname,the Persian national epic, that traces the history ofthe Persian nation from the first shah to the Islamicconquest in the 7th century RI.

Donald H. Reiman: $25,080 To fund a facsimileedition, with transcription, of the Shelley manu-scripts in the Bodleian Library and manuscripts ofthe younger romantic poets held in other reposi-tories RE

Society of Biblical Literature, Denver, CO, Burke0. Long $74,150 OR, $5,000 FM To translatefour volumes in a series of writings from the an-cient Near East "Prs from Ancient Egypt, Sume-rian Letters, Correspondence from Ugarit, andAramaic, Hebrew, and Phonecian Letters RL

Southern Connecticut Library Council, Hamden;Susan E Davidson. $155,839. To explore chang-ing American values, using biographies and auto-biographies in 120 scholar-led reading and dis-cussion programs. GI.

Maria M. Tatar: $30,500 To translate the firstscholarly edition of Grimms' Nursery and House-hold Tales, which was originally aim -d at a ma-ture audience. RL

U. of Arkansas, Pine Bluff, Viralene J Coleman$54,193 To conduct a three-week workshop forthe English faculty who will teach a requiredcourse on world literature. EH

U. of California, Berkeley, Robert H Hirst:$17(1,000 OR, 5235,000 FM To prepare a com-prehensive scholarly edition of the works and pa-pers of Mark Twain RE

U. of California, Santa Cruz, Joseph it Silverman:$93,902 OR, 522,000 FM To prepare an editionof Judea Spanish traditional bal:ads. RE

U. of Massachusetts, Boston, Eric H Robinson$70,000 10 complete an eight-volume edition ofthe collected poems of John Clare, 1793-1864RE

U. of Mississippi, University, IA illiam R Ferris$12,000 To revise a script for a 90-minute filmadaptation of William Faulkner's As 1 Lal, DyingGN

U. of New Hampshire, Durham, Nancy Lukens$46,349 To prepare the first English-languageanthology of short prose by the current generationof East German women writers RL

U. of Texas, Austin, William W Kibler $10,188To translate the medieval French romances ofChretien de Troyes RL

Lawrence M. Venuti: $4,000. To translate Fan-tastic Tales, a selection of short stories by Italianwriter Iginio Ugo Tarchetti, 1839-69 RL

Viewfinder Films, Inc., San Anselmo, CA, Jean MMudge: $6,000 To support the revision of a scriptfora one-hourdocumentary film about the life andwork of Edgar Allan Poe. GN

VOICES, NYC, Everett C. Frost $20,000 To plana 13-part radio series of one- and two-hour pro-grams presenting English-language productions ofradio dramas written by 20th-century German auihors. GN

Yale U., New Haven, CT, Marshall Waingrow$110,000 OR, $55,000 FM. To prepare an editionof the correspondence and literary manuscripts ofJames Boswell RE

Philosophy

American Council of Learned Societies, NewYork City; John J McDermott $160,000 OR,$20,000 FM. To prepare a complete edition of . ecorrespondence of American philosopher Wil-liam lames. RE

Saint Bonaventure U., St Bonaventure, NY, Fran-cis E. Kelley. $14,122. To translate William ofOckham's Quodlibeta Septem, quaestiones 1-4,written between 1321 and 1324 and containingseveral key elements of Ockham's moral philwo-phy metaphysics, and epistemology RL

U. of Chi-ago, IL, Russell Hardin. $15,000 OR,$5,000 FM To prepare an international, interdis-ciplinary conference to examine theories regard-ing the development and operation of moralnorms in the social order. RX

U. of Minnesota, Minneapolis, C Anthony An-derson: $15,988 OR, $8,000 FM To conduct aninternational, interdisciplinary conference thatwill bring together logicians, philosophers of lan-guage, and philosophers of mind to assess thecurrent state of problems concerning proposi-tional attitudes RX

U. of Notre Dame, IN, Karl P Amenks. $34,024To translate Kant's "Lectures on Metaphysics," astranscribed by his students, to be included in theforthcoming Cambridge Edition of the Works ofImmanuel Kant. RL

U. of Notre Dame, IN, Alfred J Freddoso.$36,169. To translate William of Ockham'sQuodhbeta Septem, quaestiones 5-7, written be-tween 1321 and 1324 and containing several keyelements of Ockham's moral philosophy, meta-physics,, and epistemology. RL

Robert M. Wallace: $8,000. To translate the firstwork of philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, inwhich the historical interpretation of Plato andSocrates contributes to the development of mod-ern hermeneutics. RL

Religion

Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, CA, MarkK luergensmeyer $109,643 To prepare a slidelibrary and catalogue as a national resource fordepartments of religious studies EH

Karen C. Lang: $38,967 To prepare the editionand translation of Candrakini's commentary onthe Four Huralied Stanzas, 6th to 7th century,which gives practical advice to lay practitionerson the cultivation of etical behavior and medita-tion techniques. RL

Trinity College, Hartford, CT, Milla C Riggio.$21.064. To conduct a symposium for the generalpublic to examine the cultural legacy of"Ta'Ziya," Persian passion drama, and its relationto Western culture. GP

U. of Massachusetts, Amherst; Yvonne Y Had-dad. $15,000 OR, $5,000 FM To conduct aninternational conference on Muslims in theUnited States. RX

Social Science

Georgetown U., Washington, DC, Kathleen MLesko $60,000 OR; $15,000 FM To conduct twoconferences, with lectures and media programs,on the American judiciary and on religion and theU S Constitution GP

Capital 'etters following each grant amount havethe following meanings FM (Federal Match);OR (Outright Funds). Capital letters followingeach grant show the division and the programthrough which the grant was made.

DIVISION OF EDUCATION PROGRAMS

EB Central Disciplines in UndergraduateEducation

EK Improving Introductory CoursesEL Promoting Excellence in a FieldEM Fostering Coherence Throughout an

InstitutionES Humanities Instruction in Elementary and

Secondary SchoolsEH Exemplary Projects in Undergraduate and

Graduate EducationEG Humanities Programs for Nontraditional

Learners

DIVISION OF GENERAL PROGRAMS

GNGM

GPGL

Humanities Projects in MediaHumanities Projects in Museums andHistoricel Organizations'.'ublic Humanities ProjectsHumanities Programs in Libraries andArchives

OFFICE OF PRESERVATION

PS PreservationPS U.S Newspaper Program

DIVISION OF RESEARCH PROGRAMS

RORXRHRPRARIRT

RE

RLRC

Interpretive Research ProjectsConferencesHumanities, Science and TechnologyPublication SubventionCenters for Advanced StudyRegrants for International ResearchToolsEditionsTranslationsAccess

4/ &

mil hi

401

O.

A

A

NEH Drops Waiting Rule forSecond-Time Challenge Grants

The Endowment has changed the rulesfor an institution wishing to apply forits second challenge grant: Institutionsno longer need to wait two years be-tween the successful completion of thefirst challenge and application for thesecond. Up to now,, grant recipientshad been required to complete theirfund-raising activities (usually a five-year process) and then wait an addi-tional two years before reapplying.This change reflects the experience ofrecent competition in the program,..Iiich suggests that institutions mightenhance their fund-raising abilities bybeginning their second challenge cam-paign as soon as the first ends.

The next deadline in the ChallengeGrants Program is May 1, 1989. Appli-cations for second-time awards willcontinue to be given lower prioritythan applications for first-time awards.All highly meritorious applica::ons fora first-time challenge grant will beselected for awards before any appli-cations for a second-time grant areconsidered for selection. Recipients ofsecond-time awards are required toraise from nonfederal donors fourtimes the amount of federal fundsoffered.

Moving?To receive Humanities at your new ad-dress, send your mailing label (or afacsimile), along with your new ad-dress, to Superintendent of Docu-ments,, Attn: Chief,, Mail List Branch,Mail Stop SSOM, Washington,, D.C.20402-9373.

Credit for photograph on page 12 Pur-chased with funds from the Burroughs Well-come Purchase Fund, Leo Castel'', theWilfred P and Rose I. Cohen Purchase Fand,the Julia B Engel Purchase Fund, the Equitable Life Assurance Society of the UnitedStates Purchase Fund; the Sondra andCharles Gilman, Ir.,, Four.z.1.Z.,-A, 1r.c., S.Sidney Kahn; the Lauder Foundation;Leonard and Evelyn Lauder Fund, the SaraRoby Foundation; and the Painting andSculpture Committee.

EADLINES7,1 project

Area code for all telephone numbers is 202. Deadline beginning

Division of Education Programs Jerry L Martin, Director 786-0373

Higher Education in the Humanities--Lyn Maxwell White 786-0380 October 1, 1988 April 1989

Elementary and Secondary Education in the HumanitiesLinda Spoerl 786-0377 January 8, 1989 July 1989

Teacher-Scholar Program for Zlementary and Secondary School TeachersLinda Spoerl 786-0377 May 1, 1989 December 1989

Division of Fellowships and Seminars Guinevere L Guest, Director 786-0458

Fellowships for University TeachersMaben D. Herring 786-0466 June 1, 1989 January 1, 1990

Fellowships for College Teachers and Independent ScholarsKaren Fuglie 786-0466 June 1, 1989 January 1 1990

Fellowships on the Foundations of American SocietyMaben D. Herring, 786-0466 June 1, 1989 January 1, 1990

Summer Stipends Joseph B. Neville 786-0466 October 1, 1988 May 1, 1989

Travel to CollectionsKathleen Mitchell 786-0463 January 15, 1989 June 1, 1989

Faculty Graduate Study Program for Historically Black Colleges and UniversitiesMahen D. Herring 786-0466 March 15, 1989 September 1, 1990

Younger ScholarsLeon Bramson 786-0463 November 1, 1988 June 1, 1989

Summer Seminars for College Teachers--Stephen Roc!, 786-0463

Participants

Directors

March 1, 1989 Summer 1989

March 1, 1989 Summer 1990

Summer Seminars for School TeachersMichael Hall 786-0463

Participants

Directors

March 1, 1989 Summer 1989

April 1, 1989 Summer 1990

Division of General ProgramsDonald Gibson, Director 786-0267

Humanities Projects in Medialames Dougherty 786-0278 March 17, 19r: October 1, 1989

Humanities Projects in Museums and Flistoncal OrganizationsMarsha Senimel 786-0284 December 9, 1988 July 1, 1989

Public Humanities ProjectsWilsonia Cherry 786-0.'71 March 17, 1989 October 1 1989

Humanities Projects in Libraries--1 homas Phelps 786 -027;

Planning November 4, 1988 April 1, 1989

Implementation March 17, 1989 October 1, 1989

447

Area code for all telephone numbers is 202 DeadlineFor projectbeginning

Division of Research Programs--Richard Ekman, Director 786-0200

TextsMargot Backas 786-0207

EditionsDavid Nichols 786.0207 June 1, 1989 April 1, 1990

TranslationsMartha Chomiak 786-0207 June 1, 1989 April 1, 1990

Publication SubventionMargot Backas 786-0207 April 1, 1989 October 1 1989

Reference Materials -- Charles Meyers 786-C358

ToolsHelen Aguera 786-0358 November 1, 1988 July 1, 1989

Accesslane Rosenberg 786-0358 November 1, 1988 July 1, 1989

Interpretive Research-786-0210

ProjectsDavid Wise 786-0210 October 1, 1988 July 1, 1989

Humanities, Science and TechnologyDaniel Jones 786-0210 October 1, 1988 July 1, 1989

Regrants-786-0204

ConferencesDarrel de Chaby 786-0204 February 15, 1989 October 1, 1989

Centers for Advanced Study--David Coder 786-0204 December 1, 1988 July 1, 1989

Regrants for International ResearchDavid Ccder 786-0204 March 15, 1989 January 1, 1990

Regrants in Selected AreasDavid Coder 786-0204 March 15, 1989 January 1, 1990

Division of State ProgramsMarjorie A. Berlincourt, Director 786-0254

Each state humanities council establishes its own grant guraelines and application deadlines.Addresses and telephone numbers of these state programs may be obtained from the division

Office of Challenge GrantsHarold Cannon, Director 786-0361 May 1, 1989 December 1, 1989

Office of PreservationGeorge F. Farr, Jr , Senior Preservation Officer 786-0570

PreservationGeorge F. Farr, Jr. 786.0570 December 1, 1988 July 1, 1989

U.S. Newspaper ProgramJeffrey Field 786-0570 December 1, 1983 July 1, 1989

Guidelines are available Iron) the Office of Publications and Public Affairs tv o months in adt e ()law application deadlines

Telecommunications dew e for the deaf: 786-0282

National Endowment PublicationsHumanities for the Humanities Office

1100 Pennsylvania Avenue. N. W.Advisory Washington. D. C. 20506 202/786-0435

Contact: Humanities202/786-0435

LITERATURE IN AMERICA: WHAT MAKES WRITERS WRITE?

How have changes in publishing and in book marketing affectedthe writing of serious fiction?

What is the role of the critic and the editor in the tradition

of American letters?

Has contemporary literature consciously drifted away fromnarrative?

These were some of the issues addressed by Cleanth Brooks,

father of the New Criticism, and Willie Morris, writer and

former editor of Harper's magazine, in a wide-ranging

conversation for Humanities about writers, editors, critics,

writing, and publishing in America. Humanities also invited

Brooks and writer Eudora Welty to discuss the same questions,

particularly as they affect the writing of short stories and

the future of the southern novel. The September/October issue

of Humanities features both of these conversation about

literature, which were moderated by editor Caroline Taylor.

In his search for the distinctive features of American

literature, literary scholar Stephen 3. Donadio discovered in

the works of some of America's early writers--Emerson, Whitman,

Dickinson, and Melville--a "declaration of literary

OVER

..A..11 4

2

indeper lence" from the literary norms of the past. The

importance of place in American fiction is examined by writer

and scholar Ellen Pifer, who points to novelist Saul Bellow's

vision of the urban metropolis as a temple for America's

worship of material expansion.

Other articles in this issue describe Edmund Wilson's

contribution to American letters and trace the literary history

of the American West from Garci Rodriguez Ordonez de Montalvo

in 1510 to Joan Didion in 1984. Also featured are essays about

forging an academic discipline to study the literature of

America, publishing the works and papers of Mark Twain and the

correspondence of Jack London, and adapting a Katherine Anne

Porter short story for children's television.

You may reprint any of the articles published in Humanities,

except those that are already copyrighted. Please credit

Humanities and the bylined author as the source, and send a

copy of the reprint to the editor.

The National Endowment for the Humanities is an independent

federal agency that supports research, scholarship, education,

and humanities programs for the general public.

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