Friday, December 8, 1972 THE MICHIGAN DAILY Page Five Friday, December 8, 1972 THE MICHIGAN DAILY Page Five Let the crime fit the punishment Reefer madness: A day in the life OUR CHILDREN'S KEEPERS, by Larry Cole. Grossman Pub- lishers, 150 pp., illustrated, $6.95. By MICHAEL CASTLEMAN OUR SOCIETY has always been both perplexed and terrified when faced with its more rebel- lious children. The Puritans had a uniquely straight forward way of handling their problem off- spring. A Connecticut law of 1650 aimed at curbing juvenile delinquency put it plainly: If any man have a stubborne and rebellious sonne of suffic- ient years and understanding which will not obey the voice of his father or the voice of his mother . . . and that will not harken. unto them . .' then may his father and mother lay hold on him and bring him to the Magistrates assembled in Courte, and testifie unto them that theire sonne is stubborne and rebellious . . . Such a sonne shall be put to death. Forward-thinking citizens 200 years later decided that child- ren did not deserve death for dis- obedience, nor was it productive to imprison them with adult of- fenders. In 1823 the Society for the Reformation of Juvenile De- linquents opened the House of Refuge in New York as - ' e of safety and rehabilitatin the city's youthful offend Yet it soon became merely a sep- arate place of punishment. Leg irons, hand cuffs, and the cat-o- nine tails were the typical instru- ments of character-building. In 1848 the assistant superintendant of the House of Refuge, Elijah Devoe, wrote: "nothing short of excessive ignorance can enter- tain for a moment the idea that the inmates of Refuge are con- tented. Life in th6 Refuge is dark and stormy." BUT, LIKE adult prisons, which many observers criti- cized from their inception, youth prisons proliferated until, by the begining of this century, every state had them. Devoe's descrip- tion of the conditions that pre- vailed one hundred years ago would be applicable today to the overwhelming majority of them. Our Children's Keepers discus- ses the conditions that the au- thor found in various youth de- tention facilities around the U.S.: Youth House in New York, Mount View School for Girls in Col- orado, and Scotlandville State In- dustrial School for Boys in Louis- iana. What he describes, very simply, is a catalogue of horrors. His contention is that not only are youth prisons punishment- oriented like adult prisons, but he develops a case to show that the conditions inside many youth prisons are worse than those found in adult facilities. How could they possibly be worse? First of all, children can Subscribe to The Michigan .Daily be imprisoned for many "crimes" for which adults are not liable, such as truancy from school, running away from home, or fail- ure to obey the lawful orders of their parents. It is not uncom- mon for such "criminals" to be sent away to a youth prison for six months to a year for hav- ing the good sense to leave a broken and destructive h o m e . Children need not be convicted in many states to be imprisoned. Even after the Supreme Court's Gault decision, which extended a defendant's constitutionalguar- :antees to minors, many are still imprisoned on "complaints." Furthermore, children are less aware of their rights than most adult offenders, and rarely con- sider an appeal if their rights have been violated. Most don't even know what their rights are, even rights as obvious as t h e right to defense counsel. Cole relates the following from -an in- terview with a former inmate of Scotlandville: Q: How did you get there? A: Glue. Q: How long did you spend there? A: Eight months, a week, and four days. Q: What kind of trial did you have? A: It lasted a few. minutes. Judge took a look at me, plunk his cigar, and told me to get out of there. Man took me . .. to Scotlandville. Q: How many times had you been in fro 't of this same judge before? A: That was my first time ever in court. This type of thing is by no means rare. Ozone House h a s sprung a number of kids from Maxey Boys Training School in Whitmore Lake by appealing illegal incarcerations. ONE OF the aspects of youth detention that Elijah Devoe. criticized in 1848 was the practice of indeterminate sentences. "In a conversation with a boy who made one of the most desperate attempts to escape that occurred while I was at the institution, he told me that if he knew how long he had to remain, he could re- concile himself to his punish- ment; but that he could not en- dure to have his mind constant- ly racked by uncertainty and su- spense." This practice is still the rule in most states, including Michigan. The social workers at Maxey support this for the good of the boys. It enables them to work out their problems at their own pace, so they can be re- leased when they are fully re- habilitated and able to cope with the outside world. A case can be made for this argument,sbut none of the boys out there would en- dorse it. It would be impossible to at- tempt to summarize the condi- tions Cole discovered while re- searching his book, but a few short and by no means excep- tional examples should suffice to communicate a feeling for what youth detention is like in many states: Youth House in the Bronx was built to accommodate 325 in- mates. It houses 500 at a cost to taxpayers of $18,000 per year per child. "On my second day at Youth House, I saw a young girl being beaten over the head with a chain by a supervisor because she refused to join with the oth- er inmates in reciting the Lord's Prayer. I learned that the girl followed the religion of Islam." At Mount View School for Girls solitary confinement is a typi- cal punishment: "She remained in the Rose Room (the hole) for 81 days : . . As a result of this confinement, Patricia b e c a m e psychotic and was taken to Col- orado Psychopathic Hospital in Pueblo." At Scotlandville, the law knows no age limits. "Q: What was the six year old in there for: A: He was with his brother when his brother stole a car. His brother was fourteen and he was six. So they convicted both of 'em. Q: How dong did the six year old stay there? A: Seven or eight months." It should be noted here that the conditions in Michigan's youth prisons are not as bad as those described above. At Maxey there is no longer a hole, and there is no physical punishment, but the doors are locked, and boys are locked in their tiny rooms f o r rule infractions. The conditions in youth prisons in this state may not be as bad as those C o 1 e described, but they are far from good. In 1969, HEW ranked Mich- igan tied for 43rd place among the states in the amount of mon- ey it spent on each resident un- der the age of 21. In hearings conducted by the State Senate this testimony was offered: "For training schools alone the cost per child was $4368. For $500 more we could send the child to Harvard and pay his tuition, room and board, and personal ex- penses." COLE ADVOCATES closing down all youth prisons. His contention is that a closed youth prison is better than any open one. But there is resistance to this idea from many quarters. Cole cites three groups whom he calls the "status quo conspira- tors": the civil service, which re- fuses to fire incompetents and sadists in the name of job se- curity; the unions, which repre- sent institutional workers and care more about job security than about the welfare of the kids; and the professional social work- ers, who often identify with the institution rather than with t h e kids. Although Cole was v e r y impressed with some of the peo- ple he met who work inside kids' prisons, he comes down violent- ly on those he felt were ignoring the welfare of the inmates, es- pecially the professionals: Good people with good ideas are challenged by institutional professionals on the basis of their lack of credentials, while professionals persist, with cre- dentials, in support of destruc- tive programs. Any citizen who criticizes institutional practices is open for attack regardless of the validity of the criticism simply because "the profession- als know what they are doing." They don't. If they did, the in- stitutions that imprison child- ren either wouldn't exist, or at least wouldn't be in the terrible conditiin they are in. On one, hand, professionals know a I1 the answers and everyone else should bow out. On the other, they should not be heldrespon- sible. While glacial "change" grinds along in most states, Massachu- setts has closed all of its youth prisons except one which now houses 60 boys. The rest are in halfway houses where they learn to deal with the world by living in it. Michigan recently closed the Lansing Boys Training School and Maxey now has its lowest population in years. There is also an increasing number of half- way houses in this state. These are progressive steps, yet it is difficult to convince any of the 150 boys still imprisoned in Max- ey that any progress is being made while they are locked in. FOR LEESHA, by A. Rock, Street Fiction Press, $.75.. By DAVID KOZUBEI IMAGINE A TOWN of 100,000 humans of whom 2000 are university faculty and 34,000 stu- dents; where those who read, read only textbooks, apart from those few who, an ecologically endangered species, carry trade books (books published as non- textbooks) hidden under their clothes for fear a renegade read- er might inform the sheriff'srde- partment (the new marshal is called McLuhan) or the univer- sity watchdog committee (not the German shepherd variety which would have to be trained for that sort of work); and where an unknown poet, call him Chet Jones, writes, like the poet Cree- ley, with a consciousness of the individuality of each word he uses, but more richly and com- plexly, and superhero of the imagination, imagines the Egyp- tian deity Isis in Ypsilanti; and where a little-known Ph.D. in music writes science fiction that has its points, he would be called Biggle: in short, imagine a town like Ann A r b o r ' s unidentical Siamese twin, Ypsilanti; or one like Detroit, or better yet, worse still, one where industrial heat, trapped under a pall of inert smoke, keeps trees (flora) dull green, as around Gary, Indiana, when trees elsewhere are bou- quets of fall color; or imagine some other apparently unlikely place, where perhaps a white, black, or other minority cat (fauna) who will be known as America's greatest writer, and who has no home at all yet, is living, or dying, in the polluted air, with a few scraps of paper and a chewed-on pencil in his hand (or is it hers?). AND WHILE all this is going on elsewhere, somewhere in Ann Arbor, under our very noses, Street Fiction Press puts out a story of about 20 unnumbered pages by A. Rock (minerology). It is called For Leesha (Leesha is a girl in the story, not a dog), and is at present obtain- able at Borders, Centicore, and University Cellar at 75 cents the piece. The presence of For Leesha in an anthology of the world's best short stories, of Verga, Bunin; Marquez's "The Very Old Man with Enormous Wings," Robert Walser's "Kleist in Thun," late C h e k h o v, Daniel's "Moscow Speaking," Tertz's "Pkhensk" and so on-would not be a cause for future shame to anyone con- nected with it. In other words, an unknown writer has popped up in our midst who is great. But the story, what about the story? It consists of lots of de- t; is that add up to a picture of one day in the life of a young marijuana dealer and like Sol- zhenitsyn's book it has its own perfection (if one ignores mis- prints). Like all literature, it transcends its subject. T h a t means that if I had been told what it was about before I had read it, I would have given an anticipatory groan, imagining all sorts of cliches and sordidness such subjects associate with. But the ability of the author to pre- sent it all without getting tram- meled-up in some way with the subject, in fact, the ability of the author to function as a hu- man being, as he had to in order to write as he did, to be so aware, and to move around with- in this awareness to produce his effects, is the thing that does it. Nobody writes that well who can't get away with unpleasant subjects, witness . the mhystery genre's Dashiel Hammett, Chan- dler, R o s s MacDonald, and Emma Lathen. THE SENTENCES are all short, but not so monotonous as Hemingway can be if one has an, ear for it; and there is a density that grows till the end, imaking a big slice of life out of what had been a speck on my horizon. The details do it. They are like bricks. You can build just a wall with them (which tends to be boring) or a space, which is livable, and his details have built a big space inhabited by several people, and inhabitable by the reader who is willing to move in. I prophesy: such blurbs will' appear on the jacket of his first sizable book as "A promising young writer," "the best I've read this year." But the promise is already fulfilled, and besides I always suspect reviewers who' write "the best I've read this year" have read nothing else in that time; so I'll just say I need to read itdat least once more- and if I do, it will be for. the fourth time. Orwell: Stranger in a strange land. THE UNKNOWN ORWELL, by Peter Stansky and William Ab- rahams. Alfred A. Knopf, $8.95. By NIGEL GEARING TjHERE IS something so reso- lutely English in George Or- well that one wonders at times how his charisma - like those quintessentially Edwardian nov- els of E. M. Forster - manages to survive in other national cli- mates. His early years, as considered in this admirable account by Pet- er Stansky and William Abra- hams, run the gamut of some tra- ditionally British horrors: prep school, Eton, service in the out- posts of the Empire. These were the years of Eric Blair, before he became a writer and adopted a "nom de guerre," before (as the last part of The Unknown Or- well outlines) he turned his back on the received orthodoxies of his social caste and became the figure by which we know him- or think we know him: variously (you pay your money and you take your choice) conscience of the democratic left, socialist revolutionary, radical conserva- tive, bourgeois revisionist . . . . The list is endless. A man hailed for his no-nonsense frankness, he is also one of the most paradoxi- cal writers of the century, and it is to the credit of these au- thors that in establishing Blair's changing response to those insti- tutions which moulded his first years they manage to explicate much of the later Orwell's multi- faceted and confusing personal- ity. George Orwell stated in his will that he did not wish a biog- raphy to be written - in large part, perhaps, because he did it himself in writings of a sup- posedly more generalized tenor. Whatever his subject, whether he was writing about the British in colonial Burma or the betray- als of the Republican front in Spain, his perceptions were al- ways expressly and openly de- rived from a personal standpoint, from this specific man reacting at this particular time. The Un- known Orwell is in this sense a breach of trust, but it has been pointed out that in the 2000-odd pages of The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters there is only one personal correspondence that predates 1930 (this book ends with 1933, the year of publi- cation of Down and Out in Paris and London) and that in any case those theoretically revela- tory writings illustrate a social criticism to which personal his- tory (often, as in Down and Out, fictionalized) is subordinate and rigorously tailored. This book, then, supplements and substantiates what previous- ly we could only infer. ORN INTO an Anglo-Indian family which had noticeably come down in the world, Eric Blair suffered the ignominies of the English "lower-upper-middle- class" - later characterized by him as "the shock-absorbers of the bourgeoisie." Its ethic was above all one of keeping up ap- pearance despite evident mater- ial impoverishment. Servants of a system to which they belonged only as functionaries, its mem- bers nevertheless perpetuated the ideology: Eric Blair's first appearance in print, at the age of eleven, is with a jingoistic a commission with the Indian Im- perial Police in Burma. Peculiar as the decision may at first seem, the authors suggest three important factors: ennui with academia; a nostalgia for the Indian climate he left as a four- year-old; and the surface ac- commodation to his father's wishes and own past background. Here he encounters the raw ma- terial which a later and more polemical Orwell will incorporate into Burmese Days (his first nov- el, published 1934) and expose in the famous essays "A Hanging" (1931) and "Shooting An Ele- phant" (1936). By then he will have come to see his time in the East as a schooling in the hu- miliations of imperialism - hu- miliations effecting both subjects and rulers. Stansky and Abra- hams suggest indeed that he did from a simple hunger for "ma- terial" (a perennial and per- haps misleading problem for the incipient writer). Only later did these researches connect with Blair's own sense of social dis- possession to forge the familiar Orwellian socialism. In their ac- count of them, these early years also hold the key to later ano- malies: a patriotism unusual for so virulent a critic 'of 'the hier- archic structure; a certain prig- gishness which rests uneasily be- side his espousal of populist causes; a continuing sense of dis- placement which renders even his beloved England somehow remote, making of him even here a perpetual stranger in a strange land. IT IS AT JUST this point - Or- well's apprehension of the re- books books books- - . A GIFT FROM CENTCORE... - i r- f .5'. .r l4 sr - r f.4 This book is about a pointer, and the expression of himself that he wanted to leave behind, that is, his paintings, his drawings, his sculptures and those paper cut-outs that he invented to crown his work. Every canvas, every sheet of paper over which his charcoal, his pencil or his pen wondered is Matisse's utterance about himself . .. It's through this that I have, sought to reveal my protagonist."-LOUIS ARAGON A poet and painter fuse their creative genius in one of the most beautiful and original art books ever published. The most exciting book to have appeared this fall is the two-volume monUment devoted by Louis 'Aragon to Henri Matisse . . . the illustrations count among thebest ever printed. With 541 illustrations, 155 in breathtaking full color. Two volumes, boxed, Each 8 3/8" x 10 5/8". 752 pages. $75.00 verse ("Awake! Young Men of England!"), and in The Road to Wigan Pier he is to look back on his schoolboy ignorance "that the working class were human beings," appearing to him then as "brutal and repulsive." An established sense, however, of being in some way the "poor relation" is augmented when he is sent to St. Cyprians, an ele- mentary school for the sons of gentility which was later casti- gated in his bitter memoir Such Such Were The Joys. Blair is accepted on reduced fees with the understanding that he will later reflect glory to the in- stitution by winning a scholar- ship to some notable English public school such as Winchester or, Eton. Stansky and Abrahams record that seminal incident to which Orwell the successful writ- er would years later return: a frightened "new boy," away from home for the first time, he wets his bed and is subsequently marked out for public humilia- tion and flogging; Blair, in ways he cannot yet understand, is vic- timized by the authorities, made to feel guilt. From here he duly wins his scholarship to Eton and, despite later disclaimers, things seem to look up. He finds classmates who share his mild iconaclasm. Academically and physically un- exceptional, he none- theless "plays the game," though the authors note a recurrent mo- tif: friendly with others as he may be, he never has intimates and is conspicuous for a certain aloofness. WHEN HE finishes school in 1921 Blair decides not to fol- low the example of his contem- poraries (by going to Oxford or Cambridge) but opts instead for not despise the system until he could look back in anger as George Orwell: again no social mixer, he seems to have wea- thered the hardships and respon- sibilities with some esprit, and it is contended that his later "expiation" (he would claim he went "down and out," became a writer, in direct compensation) is largely at having enjoyed much of his time there. He finally resigns his commis- sion in 1927 and to the horror of his parents declares his decision is precipitated by an urge to write. Again, the turn-about is superficially surprising: Blair had never displayed much crea- tive talent and his reading up to this time eschews contemporary innovators (Joyce, Huxley, Vir- ginia Woolf) for the like of Som- erset Maugham, Thackeray, Conrad, and Kipling (later the subject of a famous essay). A to- tal absorption in his new-found role is, however, striking and later Orwell will bear witness ("Why I Write," 1947) to a ten- dency since childhood to indulge in a continuous interior mono- logue. NOW FOLLO\ S the transi- tional stage between Eric Blair and George Orwell. In the spirit of Jack London, whom he admired, he explores the big- city slums. He dresses, in old clothes, , sleeps in doss houses, observes at first hand the pov- erty of England's social rejects. There is always some self-con- sciousness here - an element of imposture - and it is not per- haps till he leaves London for Paris that the full weight of what he is, recording is felt on his nerve ends. He gets pneu- monia and is incarcerated in a hospital for the poor, so horrify- ing in its conditions and proce- dures that he will consider it "a version of hell," a hell, more- over, so daunting he will not tackle it in writing till 1946 ("How the Poor Die") and in- stead chooses for Down and Out the more negotiable aspects of that destitution he has observed and in some part shared. After three rejections (one by T. S. Eliot) Down and Out is publish- ed. Eric Blair choose the pseu- donym George Orwell; authors lational stress between himself and his class-bound society - that one feels the authors might have profitably intensified their otherwise thorough account. On- ly so much can be deduced from personal case history, and The Unknown Orwell rightly avoids some of the more vulgar Freu- dian reductions. Where they might have amplified their work, however, is in a somewhat more inclusive perspective on that prickly English background. Mostly they are content to stay within their formulation of a Blair-Orwell dichotomy, and de- spite the occasional lapse (once or twice they seem to play off Eric against. George as if they were figures in some doppel- ganger extravaganza), their the- ory of a changed mode of per- ception from Down and Out on seems satisfactory. The possi- bility that the significant divi- sion is to be found in English life at least as much as in Orwell is less readily considered. Follow- ing these lines, they might have concluded that Orwell is, after all, more consistent (more banal even) than we took him for: as a child he identified with a rul- ing elite, discoveredon his re- turn from Burma the true ten- sions and contradictions, and from there went on to mythicize England - in a famous phrase - as a decent "family" but "with the wrong members in control." That this last stage might also strike us as an unhappy solu- tion is not the immediate point: Stansky and Abrahams do jus- tice to the surface complexities of English life but arguably limit their view by a neutrality which stops short of wider value judg- ment, by setting for a focus which on occasion can't see the forest for the trees. This possible flaw will become more crucial in their promised sequel covering those years when Orwell will directly address him- self to political lines of force. In the meantime, we have a sensi- tive and intelligent account of a writer inembryo struggling to formulate his own perceptions, but as yet conspicuously apoli- tical. And here perhans, in this transcribed nexus of institutional influences, is the springboard to a truer estimate of Orwell's stre- ip ngetive a s is of gest, can now he appraised in the extent to which he expanded and revitalized a discredited liber- al humanism; in this respect he is comparable to that very dif- ferent figure of Forster. On the' one hand Orwell's work, and that life which is inseparable- from it, returned the tradition to a firm moral base, reestab- lishing the worn connections with. Hazlitt and William Morris. On the other hand, he saw and stat- ed those relations between lan^ guage and ideology, between cul- tural manifestation and social arrangement, which have since been furthered by the like of No- am Chomsky and Richard Hog- gart. That we do not underesti- mate his significance in this is as vital as our recognizing that the years of Eric Blair took their toll. The rejection of St. Cyprians, of Eton and the Burt mese Police allowed him some alertness and freedom from fac tionalism the converse of whiuh; is the outsider's continual ten- dency toward isolation and alen- ation. It is thus. in the essays on popular culture (e.g. "The Art f' Donald McGill") and the graphic observations of specific social milieus (The Road to Wigan Pier, Homage to Catalonia) that he made his mark and by which in the long term he is most to be valued; it is in the more theo- retical and abstract hypotheses beyond these that he is at his weakest and most parochial. ONE MUST inevitably feel hes- itant of criticizing a man who so stubbornly and courage- o0sly laid his life on the line, ex- nosing himself to the hard real- ities of destitution and revolution- ary warfare. In another light, however, that remoteness which Stansky and Abrahams empha- size as a defense mechanism from his schooldays onnowmust appear to us as damaging and? a necessary limitation: if it gave him a critical edge, it also pre- conditioned those subsequent feelings of betrayal and disillu- sion, the failre to evolve a con- sciosness of felt community and contining socil relations be- vond the specific crises of his time. For Orwell (as for his hero George Bowling in Coming Up - for Air, and incidentally as for so many American writers) the present is a wasteland, the fu- t ire a bad dream and (despite his own early and bitter exneri- ences) only the past a viable locus for the positivesr he can sufggest:.. the good' times are in the past tense, somewhere before the contaminations of indus- trialism and the urgencies of politicl intrusion. As Richard Nixon plows on, one realizes the need for a ltter- day Orwell and paradoxically 'the inadequacies of such a fleure should he be found. Eric Blair compromised the humanist lurge which mkes "George Orwell": so admirable a man by never en- gaging with the fundamentals of class solidarity, of economic relities, of cogent organizational counters. Renudiating prevalent cant, he still balked at those commitments which, affirming personal and .political identity, might one dv oust Big Brother and with it the hard-won insular- ity he first evolved in his ,boy- hood years. Tough verdict asit seems to this wider sftr1i g~e Blair-hecore- Orwell is irrelevant. Tougher still is our growing perception tht t"'Is. perhaps, is the--,nly str-gele. Today's writers . p~v,-r I J jt&a rn it K Vi n ~re I i"V w r iV"Ha /{, {/n . ..(MY . C l'.4 VVL- I s Tw Give More to Christmas Seals FUTURE TEACHERS WE STOCKTHE NEW PROFESSIONAL EDUCATION SERIES °"' W~hat.4.,,o u ,. r maio'r vu'll wauint to