Of course all of them are not true nor adequate.  But who can say the truth of the United States if any?
 
 

...Who claims Truth, Truth abandons.  History is hir'd, or coerc'd, only in
Interests that must ever prove base.  She is too innocent, to be left within the
reach of anyone in Power, who need but touch her, and all her Credit is in the
instant vanish'd, as if it had never been.  She needs rather to be tended lovingly
and honorably by fabulists and counterfeiters, Ballad-Mongers and Cranks of ev'ry
Radius, Masters of Disguise to provide her the Costume, Toilette, and Bearing,
and Speech nimble enough to keep her beyond the Desires, or even the Curiosity,
of Government..." (p.350)

"Facts are but the Play-things of lawyers, Tops and Hoops, forever a-spin....
Alas, the Historian may indulge no such idle Rotating.  History is not Chronology,
for that is left to lawyers, nor is Remembrance, for Remembrance belongs to the
People. History can as little pretend to the Veracity of the one, as claim the
Power of the other, her Practitioners, to survive, must soon learn the arts of
the quidnunc, spy and Taproom Wit, that there may ever continue more than one
life-line back into a Past we risk, each day, losing our forbears in forever,?
not a Chain of single Links, for one broken Link could lose us All, rather, a
great disorderly Tangle of Lines, long and short, weak and strong, vanishing into
the Mnemonick Deep, with only their Destination in common."  (p.349)
 

Reviewer: burlytone from Nashville

These are short stories by perhaps the all-time master of the short-story genre.  I still wish Salinger would publish a complete volume of his 36 stories, so that it doesn't become impossible to find his earlier stories.  I, for one, will do my best to keep them all alive, if only because the ones he is less proud of serve to reinforce the themes and ideas of his
truly great stories, one of which I will now discuss.

The structure of Salinger's 20th story, the first of the "Nine Stories," "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," seems bizarre at first.  It is divided into two sections.  The first deals with a discussion between Seymour's wife and his mother-in-law.  The second half describes a discussion, on a beach, between Seymour and a little girl named Sybil, then follows Seymour to his room where he commits suicide.   The reader is surprised by the ending, and is left with two major questions: why does Seymour kill himself, and what is the significance of Seymour's Parable of the Bananafish?

Many analyses have been published which purport to give the answer to these two primary questions. Most of them, are (alas!) wrong! Most of them answer the first question correctly, in part; anyone who has read The Catcher in the Rye knows that Salinger creates protagonists who are brilliant, inspiring, wise people, surrounded by a culture that produces and glorifies shallow, materialistic people and values.  Seymour, like Holden, is destroyed by the world around him; this much, at least, is beyond question.

These analyses usually have, at best, a weak answer to the second question.  Because both the Bananafish and Seymour die, it is easy to work backward logic and conclude that Seymour has stuffed himself with intellectualism as the Bananafish stuff themselves with bananas, and that his death is as a result of his intellectual greed. That is NOT the correct interpretation of the story, and let no one tell you otherwise.

The Bananafish are those people like Muriel and her mother - superficial, judgmental, ignorant.  They glut themselves with superficial, material things and ideas.  This is why half the story is spent describing Muriel as a "girl," never a woman, obsessed with her appearance and the appearances of others, completely devoid of any understanding of art, beauty, or higher thought.  She is cruel (the woman in the "awful dinner dress"), she ignores Seymour's attempts to teach her to love poetry or music, and she respects nothing.  Thus, the point of Seymour's parable is that such shallow people kill themselves-- not literally, as he does, but spiritually.  Consider how Salinger treats spiritual versus literal death throughout these Nine Stories, especially "Teddy."

Now, about Sybil. She is the key to the whole story, as children often are in Salinger's stories (think of the children in "Catcher").  Consider her name alone: she bears the name of the undying seer-witch of ancient legends, who desires only to be allowed to die.  Seymour speaks to her, hoping to find in her the innocence of childhood, desperately hoping she has not yet been corrupted by culture.  At first she seems to be what he is looking for (and no, there is NO SEXUAL TENSION here!), but through subtle hints, he slowly realizes that it is too late; she is corrupt.  She, like Muriel, is cruel (she pokes a dog with a stick), jealous (she shoves another girl off a piano bench), and vain (among other clues, she is wearing a bikini, not a swimsuit, despite being about seven or eight years old).  He tells her theparable of the bananafish, hoping to save her (just as he tried to save his wife by sending her Rilke's poems), but his story is completely beyond her comprehension.  Seymour now realizes that there is no hope; even children are at the mercy of our mindless culture.   This is why he kills himself.

As proof, I offer this: if Seymour was a bananafish, the title would be: "A Perfect Day for A Bananafish," since Seymour would be fulfilling his destiny as a bananafish on this day.   However, since "Bananafish" is plural, it can only refer to the shallow, ignorant masses who have succeeded this day in destroying one of the few humans with the intelligence to reject them.

This story was not intended, when first written, to be the first of what have become known as the "Glass Series."  In one of these later stories, Salinger (hiding, thinly, behind his narrator) says that he has come to regret writing this story, since Seymour's character had to be altered significantly in order to fit into the later stories.

These stories are (for those who wish to find out more about Seymour): Franny, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters, Zooey Seymour--an Introduction Hapworth 16, 1924

  If you want more detail on this interpretation, read Eberhard Alsen's book on the Glass Stories.  These ideas were his before they were mine, and I am VERY grateful.  --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
 

Ann Romines, Constructing the Little House: Gender, Culture, and Laura Ingalls Wilder (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), p.304
 

In Constructing the Little House: Gender, Culture, and Laura Ingalls Wilder, George Washington University English professor Ann Romines provides a feminist analysis of aspects of nineteenth-century American culture as seen through the lens of Laura Ingalls Wilder's popular series of books.   Both scholars of American literature and culture and fans of the "Little House" series will find the book a satisfying, rich assembly of information and analysis.

In general, Romines analyses the novels in chronological order.   She finds in each, however, different aspects of nineteenth-century American culture to examine.  Thus, Little House on the Prairie is used as a means of discovering racial attitudes while On the Banks of Plum Creek is used to examine attitudes toward materialism.  Along the way, fans will find much new information that will help them understand Wilder's life in a deeper, richer way.  Meanwhile, scholars will find their understanding of nineteenth-century American culture expanded.

I found the chapter "Indians in the House" to be particularly enlightening.  The work of Glenda Riley and others has shown us the attitudes of white pioneer women toward Native Americans as being mixed and based on personal experience.   Ma's attitude toward Native Americans was primarily one of fear, based on stories and rumors she must have heard, while Laura's was one of curiosity.   She embraced the differences between herself and the Native Americans she met.  For example, she envied them their freedom from the constraints of the kind of clothing she herself was made to wear.  She also, through her father's guidance, was able to see the similarities between herself and her family and Native Americans.

One aspect of Romines' analysis proved troubling to me.  Here I must acknowledge my own professional biases.  Having been trained as an economic historian, I find psychological analysis inherently flawed.   So Romines treatment of patriarchy and Wilder's close identification with her father troubled me.  While I do understand the hierarchic nature of Victorian family life and acknowledge the role Pa played in the family as head, I think Romines has read too much into certain aspects of the stories.  For example, in her chapter on materialism, "Getting and Spending", she uses the story of the family's visit to the Pepin Township general store to demonstrate Pa's control over the family.  He insists that Ma select cloth for an apron, and when she protests the expenditure, he threatens to buy her the Turkey-red's fabric.  Embarrassed, Ma selects a more demure cloth for her new apron.  Romines uses this incident to argue that Pa dominated the family even in areas which would normally have been the province of women's control--their clothing.  But I wonder, can it not be that Pa wanted to be generous toward Ma and teased her when she protested?  The incident, and others like it, can either convey Pa's desire to dominate, or his desire to serve.  I think Pa's generosity is the more direct interpretation.

A controversial issue surrounding scholarly treatment of the Little House series has been the question of authorship, controversially raised by Holtz in Ghost in the Little House.  Romines has adopted the view that the series is the result of collaboration between Wilder and her daughter, noted writer Rose Wilder Lane.  However, the question of authorship, in this reader's opinion, is not particularly pertinent to the nature of the research Romines undertook.  I only mention it here as I know readers will want to know.

Members of the Laura Ingalls Wilder electronic discussion group will find this book extremely enjoyable, no matter what their perspective.   Fans will enjoy the new information and the discussion of Wilder's life and stories, and scholars will find the analysis of nineteenth-century gender and culture issues fascinating.  All readers will find the book engagingly written, with clear language, and obvious affection.   I highly recommend it to all.
 

   Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

   Whose woods these are I think I know.
   His house is in the village though;
   He will not see me stopping here
   To watch his woods fill up with snow.

   My little horse must think it queer
   To stop without a farmhouse near
   Between the woods and frozen lake
   The darkest evening of the year.

   He gives his harness bells a shake
   To ask if there is some mistake.
   The only other sound's the sweep
   Of easy wind and downy flake.

   The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
   But I have promises to keep,
   And miles to go before I sleep,
   And miles to go before I sleep.

             The Road Not Taken

   Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
   And sorry I could not travel both
   And be one traveler, long I stood
   And looked down one as far as I could
   To where it bent in the undergrowth;

   Then took the other, as just as fair,
   And having perhaps the better claim,
   Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
   Though as for that the passing there
   Had worn them really about the same,

   And both that morning equally lay
   In leaves no step had trodden black.
   Oh, I kept the first for another day!
   Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
   I doubted if I should ever come back.

   I shall be telling this with a sigh
   Somewhere ages and ages hence:
   Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
   I took the one less traveled by,
   And that has made all the difference.
 

   Yesterday, at the campus grill with my
   blond, blue-
   eyed students, over burgers and fries,
   Gordon
   Hirabayashi spoke of refusing the '42
   curfew,

   how he wandered all night the Seattle
   streets.
   Finally, foot-weary, hackled, he
   slapped open
   the Police Station doors, strode to
   the desk,

   and ordered they arrest him in his
   civil protest.
   For months he would pace his cell,
   roaches
   like sparks scattering from his steps,

   and after countless prayers to his
   Quaker God,
   he stood before the Court and uttered
   a "no"
   they refused to hear. Sent to camp
   without a ticket,

   whistling in the dark, he thumbed his
   way there,
   wild horses scattering across the
   white-lined asphalt,
   the Dipper spilling overhead its cup
   of stars . . .

   With wire-rimmed glasses, and hair
   softly greying,
   looking almost a double of my father,
   he reached into that era, held it
   before me

   pulsing like a vein. And somehow knew:
   Had he been my father, had my father
   spoke once
   like this, I would not be dabbing
   shoyu

   from the chin of our happa-eyed
   daughter;
   your pilgrim face could not have
   compelled me
   in quite the same way. Love, did my
   desire

   sprout where history died? It's all
   speculation,
   We are together, My father is alive.
 

     My little grandson
     bewildered by flashing news
     asked me:
     'What happened?"
     I said:

     She was a beautiful butterfly
     who raided her heart for colour
     and painted the dreary, pink,
     She used to visit,
     a tornado of scent and silk
     to bewitch things
     turn dreams into friends
     and give the friendless

     'But what happened?"
     the child asked.
     I said

     She was an impulsive butterfly
     who, shunned the sky
     plunged into flames
     and exploded
     in a carnival of lights
     leaving behind
     endless, friendless souls.
     The tale ended
     There were tears
     in the child's eyes.

Basketball is like this for young Indian boys, all arms and legs
and serious stomach muscles.  Every body is brown!
These are the twentieth-century warriors who will never kill,
although a few sat quietly in the deserts of Kuwait,
waiting for orders to do something, to do something.

God, there is nothing as beautiful as a jumpshot
on a reservation summer basketball court
where the ball is moist with sweat,
and makes a sound when it swishes through the net
that causes Walt Whitman to weep because it is so perfect.

There are veterans of foreign wars here
although their bodies are still dominated
by collarbones and knees, although their bodies still respond
in the ways that bodies are supposed to respond when we are young.
Every body is brown!  Look there, that boy can run
up and down this court forever.  He can leap for a rebound
with his back arched like a salmon, all meat and bone
synchronized, magnetic, as if the court were a river,
as if the rim were a dam, as if the air were a ladder
leading the Indian boy toward home.

Some of the Indian boys still wear their military hair cuts
while a few have let their hair grow back.
It will never be the same as it was before!
One Indian boy has never cut his hair, not once, and he braids it
into wild patterns that do not measure anything.
He is just a boy with too much time on his hands.
Look at him.  He wants to play this game in bare feet.

God, the sun is so bright!  There is no place like this.
Walt Whitman stretches his calf muscles
on the sidelines.  He has the next game.
His huge beard is ridiculous on the reservation.
Some body throws a crazy pass and Walt Whitman catches it
with quick hands.  He brings the ball close to his nose
and breathes in all of its smells: leather, brown skin, sweat,
black hair, burning oil, twisted ankle, long drink of warm water,
gunpowder, pine tree.  Walt Whitman squeezes the ball tightly.
He wants to run.  He hardly has the patience to wait for his turn.
"What's the score?" he asks.  He asks, "What's the score?"

Basketball is like this for Walt Whitman.  He watches these Indian boys
as if they were the last bodies on earth.  Every body is brown!
Walt Whitman shakes because he believes in God.
Walt Whitman dreams of the Indian boy who will defend him,
trapping him in the corner, all flailing arms and legs
and legendary stomach muscles.  Walt Whitman shakes
because he believes in God.  Walt Whitman dreams
of the first jumpshot he will take, the ball arcing clumsily
from his fingers, striking the rim so hard that it sparks.
Walt Whitman shakes because he believes in God.
Walt Whitman closes his eyes.  He is a small man and his beard
is ludicrous on the reservation, absolutely insane.
His beard makes the Indian boys righteously laugh.  His beard
frightens the smallest Indian boys.  His beard tickles the skin
of the Indian boys who dribble past him.  His beard, his beard!

God, there is beauty in every body.  Walt Whitman stands
at center court while the Indian boys run from basket to basket.
Walt Whitman cannot tell the difference between
offense and defense.  He does not care if he touches the ball.
Half of the Indian boys wear t-shirts damp with sweat
and the other half are bareback, skin slick and shiny.
There is no place like this.  Walt Whitman smiles.
Walt Whitman shakes.  This game belongs to him.
 

            Going Home

Ngoh m' sick gong tong hwa--
besides the usual menu words,
the only phrase I really know.
I say it loudly,
but he is not listening.
He keeps on talking with his smile,
staring, it would seem, past me
into the night without a moon.

He's lost, presumably.
But I don't know what he's saying.
He is an old man, wearing a hat,
and the kind of overcoat
my father wears:
the super-padded shoulders.
His nostrils trickle with wet drops,
which he does not care to wipe away.

Ngoh m' sick gong tong hwa--
I try again, to no avail.
I try English: what street?
and think of taking out
some paper and a pen.
 

                Just then,
two young fellows approach us
carrying a chair; one look
and I can tell
that they will oblige him.

I sigh, and point them out,
and hastily cross the street,
escaping. Once on the other side,
I glimpse around, and catch
their gestures from afar,
still able to hear those familiar,
yet no less incomprehensible sounds.

I head home, and visualize
this old man with his small beady eyes
and the two glistening lines
below them, vertical,
like makeup for some clown.
Out loud, I wonder:
but Chinamen aren't supposed to cry.
 

          Editorial Reviews

          Amazon.com
"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."

It is typical of Gabriel Garcia Marquez that it will be many pages before his narrative circles back to the ice, and many chapters before the hero of One Hundred Years of Solitude, Buendia, stands before the firing squad.  In between, he recounts such wonders as an entire town struck with insomnia, a woman who ascends to heaven while hanging laundry, and a suicide that defies the laws of physics:

A trickle of blood came out under the door, crossed the living room, went out into the street, continued on in a straight line across the uneven terraces, went down steps and climbed over curbs, passed along the Street of the Turks, turned a corner to the right and another to the left, made a right angle at the Buendia house, went in under the closed door, crossed through the parlor, hugging the walls so as not to stain the rugs, went on to the other living room, made a wide curve to avoid the dining-room table, went along the porch with the begonias, and passed without being seen under Amaranta's chair as she gave an arithmetic lesson to Aureliano Jose, and went through the pantry and came out in the kitchen, where Ursula was getting ready to crack thirty-six eggs to make bread. "Holy Mother of God!" Ursula shouted.

The story follows 100 years in the life of Macondo, a village founded by Jose Arcadio Buendia and occupied by descendants all sporting variations on their progenitor's name: his sons, Jose Arcadio and Aureliano, and grandsons, Aureliano Jose, Aureliano Segundo, and Jose Arcadio Segundo.  Then there are the women--the two Ursulas, a handful of Remedios, Fernanda, and Pilar--who struggle to remain grounded even as their menfolk build castles in the air. If it is possible for a novel to be highly comic and deeply tragic at the same time, then One Hundred Years of Solitude does the trick.  Civil war rages throughout, hearts break, dreams shatter, and lives are lost, yet the effect is literary pentimento, with sorrow's outlines bleeding through the vibrant colors of Garcia Marquez's magical realism.  Consider, for example, the ghost of Prudencio Aguilar, whom Jose Arcadio Buendia has killed in a fight.  So lonely is the man's shade that it haunts Buendia's house, searching anxiously for water with which to clean its wound.  Buendia's wife, Ursula, is so moved that "the next time she saw the dead man uncovering the pots on the stove she understood what he was looking for, and from then on she placed water jugs all about the house."
 

            Summary

Strobe is half urban surrealism, one quarter travelogue, and one quarter bizarre love triangle.  Henry Downs and Philip Long have fallen for the same woman, though Henry has forgotten her and Philip has not quite found her.  Lucy, distant subject of their dim affection (and sporadic psychic vampire), has been unsteadied by Henry's desire: she has a hard time remembering who or where she is.

Time breaks down. Some chase scenes ensue

                                   3.

Phil stepped inside the Edge with the tall Australian he had met at the bar.

Coconuts was the only bar in Orlando where he had a tab. Nearly broke-he was pretty sure he'd spent more than the three hundred bucks his parents paid on his Visa card, and the money they deposited in his account for expenses, food, books, gas, and rent, that was nearly gone too, and none of it used for expenses either.  The month was still a whole week shy from being over and he'd cashed the last of the Christmas bonds already-he knew he shouldn't have tried to pick her up, shouldn't have gone to the bar at all.  But it was being broke that made him want a beer-that was all he wanted: one.  One beer. He hadn't counted on seeing this amazing creature sitting on a stool and drinking a Bud straight from the bottle, sitting alone and flipping through a battered paperback, a lithe, lovely blonde with pale blue eyes, alone at five in the afternoon in a college hangout.   She looked too old for college-didn't seem the Ph.D. type either.  Wearing a black miniskirt with legs that did the skirt justice (or vice versa), she was girlish in a spent, defeated way, and looked faded, suggesting thirty or near it, a face fit for a stage.
       "What you reading?" he asked.
       "Jung."
It sounded familiar. He'd read Jung.  He'd read him, right?-or was it Levi-Strauss? Jung, maybe, maybe he knew him. Not enough, however, for a non-asinine commentary.
       "Can I sit here?" he asked.
       She looked at him, then surveyed the bar, wanting him to notice the empty tables far from her, and shrugged.
       "Go to school?" he asked.
       "No.  Live near it though." She had closed the book.  Polite, Phil thought, under the circumstances.
       "Ah," he said.
       "Ah," he repeated, realizing he had run dry of conversation.  He noticed a strange fragrance, not strong or flowery enough for perfume, but too ethereal for something a human being would emanate naturally; he thought it might be talcum powder or eau de cologne, but it was too cool, this chilly, minty sigh that seemed to come from her.
       "I've seen you around," the girl said.  "Live by Lariat Lane, don't you?"
Phil nodded.  "Thought so. What you in for?"
The phrase, odd out of its prison movie context, made Phil aware of her accent.  The lilt leaned towards unschooled Brit.  Not Cockney though. He couldn't quite place it.
       "You're not from here, are you?"
       "Australia," she said, looking outside. A little girl, maybe five, ran in circles. "Never answered my question. You're supposed to introduce yourself before you try and get personal."
       "I wasn't-"
       "Yes," she said, nodding abstractly toward her empty bottle of Bud.  "You were."
       "I didn't, I mean, sorry, I forgot you know, hot day and midterms coming up."
He flapped his arms.  "You know, and all.  Sorry.  Name's Phil. Education major. American History."
       "You guys do Jung?"
       "Some, not much. Most of us hardly venture out there, and it's like for philosophers, not psychologists.
        Nietzche.  Hobbes.  Those guys. Jung's really left field for us."
       "What's your last name, Philip?"
She was smiling, her eyes warm and focused on him for the first time.
       "Uh, Long."
       "Lucy."
They shook hands.
Phil motioned the barkeep for another beer, asked Lucy if she wanted anything.  She shook her head.
       "And, uh, what's your last name?"
       "None of your business."
Phil, lost in those clear eyes, saw that it wasn't.
 
 

           The New York Times, October 11, 1999

              WRITERS ON WRITING
              Web Special Featured Author: Saul Bellow

              By SAUL BELLOW

When I was a boy "discovering literature," I used to think how wonderful it would be if every other person on the street were familiar with Proust and Joyce or T. E. Lawrence or Pasternak and Kafka.  Later I learned how refractory to high culture the democratic masses were.  Lincoln as a young frontiersman read Plutarch, Shakespeare and the Bible.  But then he was Lincoln.

Later when I was traveling in the Midwest by car, bus and train, I regularly visited small-town libraries and found that readers in Keokuk, Iowa, or Benton Harbor, Mich., were checking out Proust and Joyce and even Svevo and Andrei Biely.  D.H. Lawrence was also a favorite.  And sometimes I remembered that God was willing to spare Sodom for the sake of 10 of the righteous.  Not that Keokuk was anything like wicked Sodom, or that Proust's Charlus would have been tempted to settle in Benton Harbor.  I seem to have had a persistent democratic desire to find evidences of high culture in the most unlikely places.

For many decades now I have been a fiction writer, and from the first I was aware that mine was a questionable occupation.  In the 1930s an elderly neighbor in Chicago told me that he wrote fiction for the pulps.  "The people on the block wonder why I don't go to a job, and I'm seen puttering around, trimming the bushes or painting a fence instead of working in a factory.   But I'm a writer.  I sell to Argosy and Doc Savage," he said with a certain gloom.  "They wouldn't call that a trade."  Probably he noticed that I was a bookish boy, likely to sympathize with him, and perhaps he was trying to warn me to avoid being unlike others.  But it was too late for that.

From the first, too, I had been warned that the novel was at the point of death, that like the walled city or the crossbow, it was a thing of the past.  And no one likes to be at odds with history.  Oswald Spengler, one of the most widely read authors of the early '30s, taught that our tired old civilization was very nearly finished.  His advice to the young was to avoid literature and the arts and to embrace mechanization and become engineers.

In refusing to be obsolete, you challenged and defied the evolutionist historians.  I had great respect for Spengler in my youth, but even then I couldn't accept his conclusions, and (with respect and admiration) I mentally told him to get lost.

Sixty years later, in a recent issue of The Wall Street Journal, I come upon the old Spenglerian argument in a contemporary form.  Terry Teachout, unlike Spengler, does not dump paralyzing mountains of historical theory upon us, but there are signs that he has weighed, sifted and pondered the evidence.

He speaks of our "atomized culture," and his is a responsible, up-to-date and carefully considered opinion.  He speaks of "art forms as technologies."   He tells us that movies will soon be "downloadable" -- that is, transferable from one computer to the memory of another device -- and predicts that films will soon be marketed like books.  He predicts that the near-magical powers of technology are bringing us to the threshold of a new age and concludes: "Once this happens, my guess is that the independent movie will replace the novel as the principal vehicle for serious storytelling in the 21st century."

In support of this argument, Teachout cites the ominous drop in the volume of book sales and the great increase in movie attendance: "For Americans under the age of 30, film has replaced the novel as the dominant mode of artistic expression."  To this Teachout adds that popular novelists like Tom Clancy and Stephen King "top out at around a million copies per book," and notes, "The final episode of NBC's 'Cheers,' by contrast, was seen by 42 million people."

On majoritarian grounds, the movies win.  "The power of novels to shape the national conversation has declined," says Teachout.  But I am not at all certain that in their day Moby-Dick or The Scarlet Letter had any considerable influence on "the national conversation." In the mid-19th century it was Uncle Tom's Cabin that impressed the great public.  Moby-Dick was a small-public novel.

The literary masterpieces of the 20th century were for the most part the work of novelists who had no large public in mind.  The novels of Proust and Joyce were written in a cultural twilight and were not intended to be read under the blaze and dazzle of popularity.

Teachout's article in the Journal follows the path generally taken by observers whose aim is to discover a trend.  "According to one recent study 55 percent of Americans spend less than 30 minutes reading anything at all. ... It may even be that movies have superseded novels not because Americans have grown dumber but because the novel is an obsolete artistic technology."

"We are not accustomed to thinking of art forms as technologies," he says, "but that is what they are, which means they have been rendered moribund by new technical developments."

Together with this emphasis on technics that attracts the scientific-minded young, there are other preferences discernible: It is better to do as a majority of your contemporaries are doing, better to be one of millions viewing a film than one of mere thousands reading a book.  Moreover, the reader reads in solitude, whereas the viewer belongs to a great majority; he has powers of numerosity as well as the powers of mechanization.  Add to this the importance of avoiding technological obsolescence and the attraction of feeling that technics will decide questions for us more dependably than the thinking of an individual, no matter how distinctive he may be.

John Cheever told me long ago that it was his readers who kept him going, people from every part of the country who had written to him.  When he was at work, he was aware of these readers and correspondents in the woods beyond the lawn.  "If I couldn't picture them, I'd be sunk," he said.   And the novelist Wright Morris, urging me to get an electric typewriter, said that he seldom turned his machine off.  "When I'm not writing, I listen to the electricity," he said.  "It keeps me company.  We have conversations."

I wonder how Teachout might square such idiosyncrasies with his "art forms as technologies."  Perhaps he would argue that these two writers had somehow isolated themselves from "broad-based cultural influence."  Teachout has at least one laudable purpose: He thinks that he sees a way to bring together the Great Public of the movies with the Small Public of the highbrows.   He is, however, interested in millions: millions of dollars, millions of readers, millions of viewers.

The one thing "everybody" does is go to the movies, Teachout says.   How right he is.

Back in the '20s children between the ages of 8 and 12 lined up on Saturdays to buy their nickel tickets to see the crisis of last Saturday resolved.  The heroine was untied in a matter of seconds just before the locomotive would have crushed her.  Then came a new episode; and after that the newsreel and "Our Gang."  Finally there was a western with Tom Mix, or a Janet Gaynor picture about a young bride and her husband blissful in the attic, or Gloria Swanson and Theda Bara or Wallace Beery or Adolphe Menjou or Marie Dressler.  And of course there was Charlie Chaplin in "The Gold Rush," and from "The Gold Rush" it was only one step to the stories of Jack London.

There was no rivalry then between the viewer and the reader.  Nobody supervised our reading.  We were on our own.  We civilized ourselves.  We found or made a mental and imaginative life.  Because we could read, we learned also to write.  It did not confuse me to see Treasure Island in the movies and then read the book. There was no competition for our attention.

One of the more attractive oddities of the United States is that our minorities are so numerous, so huge.  A minority of millions is not at all unusual.  But there are in fact millions of literate Americans in a state of separation from others of their kind.  They are, if you like, the readers of Cheever, a crowd of them too large to be hidden in the woods.   Departments of literature across the country have not succeeded in alienating them from books, works old and new.  My friend Keith Botsford and I felt strongly that if the woods were filled with readers gone astray, among those readers there were probably writers as well.

To learn in detail of their existence you have only to publish a magazine like The Republic of Letters. Given encouragement, unknown writers, formerly without hope, materialize.  One early reader wrote that our paper, "with its contents so fresh, person-to-person," was "real, non-synthetic, undistracting."  Noting that there were no ads, she asked, "Is it possible, can it last?" and called it "an antidote to the shrinking of the human being in every one of us."  And toward the end of her letter our correspondent added, "It behooves the elder generation to come up with reminders of who we used to be and need to be."

This is what Keith Botsford and I had hoped that our "tabloid for literates" would be.  And for two years it has been just that.  We are a pair of utopian codgers who feel we have a duty to literature.  I hope we are not like those humane do-gooders who, when the horse was vanishing, still donated troughs in City Hall Square for thirsty nags.

We have no way of guessing how many independent, self-initiated connoisseurs and lovers of literature have survived in remote corners of the country.   The little evidence we have suggests that they are glad to find us, they are grateful.  They want more than they are getting. Ingenious technology has failed to give them what they so badly need.
 

                                                               1
 

A Rock, A River, A Tree
Hosts to species long since departed,
Marked the mastodon,
The dinosaur, who left dried tokens
Of their sojourn here
On our planet floor,
Any broad alarm of their hastening doom
Is lost in the gloom of dust and ages.

                                                               2
 

But today, the Rock cries out to us, clearly, forcefully,
Come, you may stand upon my
Back and face your distant destiny,
But seek no haven in my shadow.
I will give you no hiding place down here.

                                                               3
 

You, created only a little lower than
The angels, have crouched too long in
The bruising darkness
Have lain too long
Face down in ignorance.
Your mouths spilling words

                                                               4
 

Armed for slaughter.
The Rock cries out to us today, you may stand upon me,
But do not hide your face.

                                                               5
 

Across the wall of the world,
A River sings a beautiful song.  It says,
Come, rest here by my side.

                                                               6
 

Each of you, a bordered country,
Delicate and strangely made proud,
Yet thrusting perpetually under siege.
Your armed struggles for profit
Have left collars of waste upon
My shore, currents of debris upon my breast.
Yet today I call you to my riverside,
If you will study war no more. Come,
Clad in peace, and I will sing the songs
The Creator gave to me when I and the
Tree and the rock were one.
Before cynicism was a bloody sear across your
Brow and when you yet knew you still
Knew nothing.
The River sang and sings on.

Page 2
 

                                                               7
 

There is a true yearning to respond to
The singing River and the wise Rock.
So say the Asian, the Hispanic, the Jew
The African, the Native American, the Sioux,
The Catholic, the Muslim, the French, the Greek
The Irish, the Rabbi, the Priest, the Sheik,
The Gay, the Straight, the Preacher,
The privileged, the homeless, the Teacher.
They hear.  They all hear
The speaking of the Tree.

                                                               8
 

They hear the first and last of every Tree
Speak to humankind today.  Come to me, here beside the River.
Plant yourself beside the River.

                                                               9
 

Each of you, descendant of some passed
On traveller, has been paid for.
You, who gave me my first name, you,
Pawnee, Apache, Seneca, you
Cherokee Nation, who rested with me, then
Forced on bloody feet,
Left me to the employment of
Other seekers -- desperate for gain,
Starving for gold.
You, the Turk, the Arab, the Swede, the German, the Eskimo, the Scot,
You the Ashanti, the Yoruba, the Kru, bought,
Sold, stolen, arriving on the nightmare
Praying for a dream.
Here, root yourselves beside me.
I am that Tree planted by the River,
Which will not be moved.
I, the Rock, I the River, I the Tree
I am yours -- your passages have been paid.
Lift up your faces, you have a piercing need
For this bright morning dawning for you.
History, despite its wrenching pain
Cannot be unlived, but if faced
With courage, need not be lived again.

Page 3
 

                                                               10
 

Lift up your eyes upon
This day breaking for you.
Give birth again
To the dream.

                                                               11
 

Women, children, men,
Take it into the palms of your hands,
Mold it into the shape of your most
Private need.  Sculpt it into
The image of your most public self.
Lift up your hearts
Each new hour holds new chances
For a new beginning.
Do not be wedded forever
To fear, yoked eternally
To brutishness.

                                                               12
 

The horizon leans forward,
Offering you space to place new steps of change.
Here, on the pulse of this fine day
You may have the courage
To look up and out and upon me, the
Rock, the River, the Tree, your country.
No less to Midas than the mendicant.
No less to you now than the mastodon then.

                                                               13
 

Here, on the pulse of this new day
You may have the grace to look up and out
And into your sister's eyes, and into
Your brother's face, your country
And say simply
Very simply
With hope --
Good morning.

African American Women Writers of the 19th Century -- from the Collection of New York Public Library