4 5 p I F b I F A* # Af 0 i l Am q - 7 4 A less than brilliant venture in p 3 Hinterland star- dazzles i I city bastards 4 The Line of Least Existence and Other Plays, by Rosalyn Drexler. Random House. $4.95 hardbound, $1.95 paperbound by Elaine Georges "This is very exciting!" a girl in one of Rosalyn Drexel's plays admits to her boyfriend. Unfortunately, that much cannot be said for this collection of farces. Mrs. Drexel has attempted to write very modern satires about very modern people. For timeliness, however, she seems to have traded in meaning and relevance, and the result is less than brilliant. The titles are promising: "Softly, Con- sider the Nearness;" "The Bed Was Full;" "Hot Buttered Roll". The characters range from a 30-year-old vir- gin who yearns to be deflowered to a nun who sports a platinum-blond wig under her wimple to a psychiatrist who is an Mississippi -Continued from page two In Mississippi Morris had been com- pletely enfolded by the Mississippi ethic; in Texashe had grown up and not only found, but asserted himself. Moving to New York in 1963 he could meet the city at least partly on his own terms. He was still put off by New York, which he came to call the "Big Cave". Mor- ris doesn't like bullshit wherever it is found, and he suspected a large quan- tity of it in the New York literary world. He especially didn't like the games the New York literati play, in particular the literary party where all the names gath- er to look at all the other names. At one of these he felt so out of place that he undercover pimp. The style is reminis- cent of the early absurdism of Ionesco and Albee, but lacks their purpose and nihilistic vision. Somehow the potentially good things are lost in the author's pre- sentation of the finished product. Aiming at the sublime, one kindly sup- poses, by way of the ridiculous, Mrs. Drexel merely arrives at the trite. An FBI agent infiltrates a rock and roll group called The Feds. People off-hand- edly light up and turn on. Other more original gimmicks are em- ployed. Several characters in "Line of Least Existence" wear microphones as security re-inforcers. In "Hot Buttered Roll" movie projectors and tape record- ers help set the mood, and indeed are virtually forced to carry the whole plot. Some of the plays even take on a sort of Gilbert and Sullivan quality as people are constantly bursting into song -the ti lyrics least : The tion." usual create a per little The of the very c of the effect. phrasE plays them stance "Ev writes the ar The Elain( in th State XZ I _ SA a :{ 761111 North Toward Home, by Willie Morris. Houghton Mifflin. $5.95. by Roger Black The first thing one asks when con- fronted with Willie Morris and his auto- biography, North Toward Home, is: What in hell is this 32-year-old doing writing his memoirs? This is quickly answered by the book's jacket, with its laudatory blurbs about the newly-appointed editor of Harper's magazine by such personages as John Kenneth Galbraith, Michael Harrington, and Oscar Lewis. It is later answered by the realization that anyone who is editor of the Daily Texan, the Texas Observer, and Har- per's at various times by the age 32 is almost obliged to write his memoirs - if only to establish his place as an editor among the 50-year-old deans of the literary world, the people who will contribute to his magazine, the kind of people who can sit in a mahogany- paneled room, sip brandy, and read Harper's without getting uncomfortable. If you are looking for a "How to Make It Big in the New York Publishing World by the Time You Are 32", you will not find it here. Morris does not tell us how he did it; with a little imag- ination we can infer how this remark- able young man could be appointed the editor-in-chief of a literary-journalistic pillar such as Harper's, but that is left up to us. Nor is North Toward Home a set of embarassing confessions of what a nice Southern boy has to go through to "make it big" in a lousy place like New York. Willie Morris does not reveal any of his inner hang-ups, nor those of his friends. His story serves basically as a background for a raft of intelligent, amusing, sometimes hysterical, always entertaining comments about the things around them. These are mainly: life in the South, Texas politics, and the New York publishing world. Morris grew up in Yazoo City, in the Mississippi delta. He was a Mississippi product, instilled wth all the Mississippi small-town prejudces. He was, per- haps, an above-average product. He was valedictorian of his high school and edi- tor of the Yazoo Flashlight. His sense of humor was slightly more refined than that of the average Yazoo City boy. But his sense of violence was the same, and his racial bigotry identical: One summer morning when I was twelve, I sighted a little Negro boy walking with a girl who must have been his older sister on the sidewalk a block from my house. The little boy could not have been more than three; he straggled along behind the older girl, walking aimlessly on his short black legs from one edge of the sidewalk to the other. I hid in the shrubbery near the sidewalk in my yard, peering out two or three times to watch their progress and todmake sure the street was deserted. The older girl walked by first, and the child came along a few yards behind. Just as he got in front of me, lurking there in the bushes, I jumped out and pounced upon him. I slapped him across the face, kicked him with my knee, and with a shove sent him sprawling on the concrete. The little boy started crying, and his sister ran back to him and shouted, "What'd he do to you?" My heart was beating furiously, in terror and a curious pleasure; I ran into the back of my house and hid in the weeds for a long time, until the crying drifted far away into nig- gertown... For a while I was happy with this act, and my head was strangely light and giddy. Then later the more I thought about it coldly, I could hardly bear my secret shame. Morris's boyhood in the South during the forties is about as foreign to some- one who has grown up in a northern middle-class suburb during the fifties as the boyhood of David Copperfield. He was much closer to Negroes in Yazoo City than a liberal is in white suburbia. He was trained from child- hood to despise Negroes, and to treat them cruelly. He was at the same time trained to expect respect from Negroes, and on occasion to view them with pity. Through his anecdotes about the tricks he and his friends played on the Ne- groes in Yazoo City, through his descrip- tion of the country white trash, and through his stories about the schools he went to there, one can begin to under- stand what made certain Southerners beat civil rights demonstrators and throw rocks at Negro children trying to attend previously white schools. One also begins to understand that Morris as a child in Mississippi was no different from the rock-throwers. He completely accepted the southern tradi- tions. Intelligence alone is no escape from the southern ethic. Morris might easily have gone on to edit the Jackson Daily News instead of Harper's. It was just by chance that he got out. One day his father suddenly suggested he go to the University of Texas instead of Ole Miss. And that made all the difference. Morris's stories about his life at the University of Texas will be a revelation to a multiversity student in the activist sixties. UT during the Eisenhower era was a place of fraternities, sororities, and football games. The residents of the dorm where Morris lived his first year spent most of their time devising ways to control the big clock on top of the tower (causing it at times to chime 18 and 20), preparing better cheat notes, and playing all sorts of practical jokes on visiting Texas A&M students-"Ag- gies." Once, when a general from San Antonio was reviewing the ROTC ranks, Morris among them, they rigged up a loud-speaker system and announced over it, "The War is over, boys! Gen- eral Lee just gave his sword to o1' Grant! Go home to your families and your crops!" As editor of the Daily Texan, Morris engaged the board of regents in a battle over censorship, and he won. The Daily Texan's status as one of the best and most free student newspapers was pre- served for a time. That was Morris' first bout with the Texas Establishment, and it gave him a taste for Texas pol- itics that later led him, after a Rhodes scholarship at Oxford, to accept the edi- torship of the Texas Observer, an ex- cellent bi-weekly devoted to Texas pol- itics. As editor of the Observer, Morris met a great number of Texans, many of them colorful and quite a few of them down right hilarious. He describes Texas politics brilliantly and succinctly. He probably comes closer to explaining the background of LBJ than either John- son's partisans or his opponents. Continued on page eleven boy makes began to imagine one of the group rising up and yelling at him, "Get out of this room." The New York section of the book is the roughest. Morris has come to con- sider New York his home, hence the book's title and the last lines: Why was it, in such moments just before I leave the South, did I al- ways feel some easing of a great burden? It was as if someone had taken some terrible weight off my shoulders, or as if some old griev- ance had suddenly fallen away. The big plane took off, and circled in widening arcs over the city, over the good landmarks of my past, and my peo- ple's. Then, slowly, with a lifting heavy as steel, it circled once more, and turned north toward home. Morris wrote North Toward Home partly to present his credentials to the New York literary world. But I get the impression that to do so he plays on our liberal sensibilities. It is a very witty and amusing book. Those of us who did not come from New York and who weren't playing Lenin and Stal- in when we were kids, but cops and rob- bers, come quickly to identify with Mor- ris. ("Bright Star from Hinterland vs. Texas Fascists and the Inbred New York Bastards".) We laugh at his FOLLETT'S FOIBLES By E. Winslow A Pol Sci's thesis got a grade lift For its solution to the cold war rift. Follett's gave him the clue For reconciling The Two - A reciprocal good-book Christmas gift. bizarr ists. Estab right of his his in his re It is a Mor ible li seems literal They Wher South( per's us en with, chang sumal memo questi Ron come( in th serves he we b is ( peol heal tout dan fror ing er how H to c his aga We one C curio Nortl ceive it he Missi M1 aginc and inp( theI The Chica Editor-in-Chief.........David L. Aiken Managing Editor .... Mary Sue Leighton Associate Editor........Richard Hack Advertising Manager ..H. Wayne Meyer Advertising Assistant.......Dick Clark Art Editor..............Bob Griess Art Assistant ..............Sarah Burns Loyola Editor..... .......Paul Lavin Michigan Editor ......... Lisa Matross Mundelein Editor........Kathy Riley Valparaiso Editor . .Mary Jane Nehring Wayne State Editor.......Tony Zineski Wisconsin (Milwaukee) Editor Mike Jacobi Wooster Editor.........Gary Houston Editorial Staff............Jean Rudd Jeanne Safer Chief editorial offices: 1212 E. 59th Street, Chicago, Illinois 60637. Phone: MI 3-0800 ext. 3276. Subscriptions: $2.50 per year. Copyright 1967 by The Chicago Literary Review. All rights reserved. ago Literary Review PICTURE CREDITS Sarah Burns........ ......page 4 Bob Griess ........................3, 10 David Levine (courtesy of Random House, Inc.) ........................ 1 Marion Sirefman .................... 5 The Chicago Literary Review is pub- lished six times per year under the aus- pices of The University of Chicago. It is distributed by the Chicago Maroon, the Illinois Institute of Technology Tech- nology News, the Wooster Voice, the Lake Forest Stentor, and the Valparaiso Torch. Reprint rights have been granted to the Michigan Daily, the Roosevelt Torch, the Loyola News, the Mundelein Skyscraper, the Wayne State South End, the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee U.W.M. Post. Fill that gift need with something to read from Follett's Think of books as bricks for building bridges from heart to heart. - m CHICAGO CHAMPAIGN WEST LAFAYETTE " There's something extra special and sincere in giving books for Christmas. The recipient can't help but appreciate your insight and thoughtfulness. Especially if it's a book by his favorite author or about his hobby or main interest. And, you don't have to worry about styles, or getting the right colors or sizes. Follett's has loads of gift-worthy books-fiction, non-fiction, hard-cover and paperback. BOOK FOLLETT'SSOE STORES * ANN AR BOR * OXFORD, OHIO MINNEAPOLIS 0 ATHENS, OHIO ;,;,;yri};.;,;irh; ".{; . r: is:":"i " 'r'"::iii::i=::;i.^". :: ti:, "::r ":i::i":":"::"i4:":'"::J:i:::. ""Yri:ii{"}i:{"Yi:Yii.;w"ii"?i::TX??:J:i.?}:d}}:{i4i: i+."iiii:{{4i}: :"::":%{"{i:": %'.'"'> ititi ::?i:%. i{:%::'L?":"iiiiii:Yi-{{: ::;"ti}ti}}::%if ti::i':"::.::+. ::: r:". :S.+r "v::. "i::":: ::::::::::::::r i::ti4 i:ii4i;""::": $+:4:":"i:" ir .. ... -:._::. _:: :............:::M4:...",r...."...".".....:.....:i:.. r..........: .....r.::..:.:..n... J..... f............ u.... }r:> :...............". :{.:"'"Si:4r::::Y:}::r" is is:::":":":":::::. :::............-:''.{: 2 " CHICAGO LITERARY REVIEW 0 December, 1967 December, 1967 * CHICAG December, 1967 0 CHICAG