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420 Maynard Street, Ann Arbor, Mich.
Edited and managed by students at the
University of Michigan
Editorials printed in The Michiaon Doily express the individual
opinions of the author. This must be noted in all reprints.
Even in good times there
is nothing to smile about
Friday, August 14, 1970
THE MICHIGAN DAILY
Durrell
clioses another cy
FRIDAY, AUGUST 14, 1970
News Phone: 754-0552
It's not just the war
MOST OF THE congressmen and university presidents
testifying before the President's Commission on Cam-
pus Unrest conclude that campus disruptions will con-
tinue until the Administration ends both the war in Viet-
nam and the snowballing involvement in Cambodia. They
imagine that once the war's over, college men and women
will return to "normal."
Any one of the students involved in last year's 1800
campus demonstrations can tell the commission t h a t
when the fighting overseas ends, campus unrest won't.
Even Attorney General John Mitchell sees no stopping
them. "There will be turbulence on campus for years to
come, regardless of the outome of the war," he conceded
recently. "I'm afraid that now we've had a taste of this,
there will always be active campuses."
But why is Mr. Mitchell "afraid"? Before the Berkeley
Free Speech Movement sparked campus activism in 1965,
people grumbled that students were too complacent; that
they were leftovers from the Eisenhower days, interested
in nothing more than good grades and Homecoming. The
campuses need dissent and their share of disruption. Uni-
versities, as former University of California president
Clark Kerr points out, rank among the most conservative
institutions; they have learned too well to toe the line in
order to get thir annual handouts from big business, gov-
ernment, and alumni who have made it. Professors know
that stability and the status quo, not academic ferment,
will earn them tenure. "If there were no tensions on cam-
pus there should be a commission established to create
some," says one educational philosopher,
NO COMMISSION can wave a wand and ward off student
activism. The university is a microcosm of the whole
society, also a social surrogate - students can't seize the
White House and Pentagon to protest social insensibilities,
so they sit-in the campus administration building and
ROTC headquarters instead, because on almost e v e r y
campus, there are administrators who have formed the
habit of listening more clearly to the Pentagon and to the
drummers of the supercorporation than to their own stu-
dents.
University affairs are controlled not by the faculty,
and not by the students for whom education ostensibly
exists, but by trustees who sit on corporation boards when
they are not attending the once-monthly college policy
sessions. Black youths and other racial minorities account
for about 20 per cent of the country's student-age popula-
tion, but less than five per cent ever find their way to col-
lege.
NO WITNESS before the commission called louder than
University of Michigan president Robben Fleming for
universities to follow the "unassailable logic" of admitting
more minority students but he neglected to add that on
his own campus, students, faculty and nonacademic em-
ployes shut the college for one week before the adminis-
tration would pledge markedly increased minority en-
rollment.
Students don't expose themselves to arrest and crack-
ed skulls on campus because it's fun; there often seems to
be no other way they can force the university to listen.
THE WAY TO SOLVE the problems causing campus un-
r rest is to confront the problems on the campus. The
Commission on Campus Unrest can't reorder national pri-
orities - overhaul the federal budget, reform industry,
clean up pollution and rebuild the slums, all targets of
student unrest. But it can press for a change at the uni-
versity level, and can work to give students the power to
construct a society on their own campuses as a start for
rebuilding the society which they will inherit outside
them. That means putting students elected by students on
the boards of trustees, on curriculum committees and on
nonacademic policy boards - opening all the decision-
making processes to the students whom, after all, the de-
cisions will affect the most.
Congress took. a step toward giving youth their share
of the nation's political power when it passed the 18-
year-old vote; why should students be given less respon-
sibility on their own campuses? Congress should require,
as a prerequisite for federal aid, that colleges demonstrate
they have given students a fair share of voting power on
their policy boards the way it not long ago passed a law
denying federal aid to political districts which have dis-
criminatory voting laws.
--THE NEW REPUBLIC
Aug. 15
NIGHT EDITOR: DEBRA THAL
By LEE KIRK
T IS WINTER now in Monte-
video, Uruguay, which means
that there is less than usual to
smile about. Not that there is all
that much to smile about when the
weather gets better.
Uruguay, South America dullest.
and next to Paraguay, least no-
ticed country, has been thrust on-
to front pages around the world
following the kidnapping and
murder of Dan Mitrione, an Amer-
ican adviser, by the Tupamaros, a
group of young Uruguayan rad-
icals.
Somehow, it doesn't sound at all
like the Uruguay I knew. Monte-
video seems an unlikely place for
revolutionary activities.
Montevideo is the most Euro-
pean city in South America. It
recedes humbly from the broad
Rio de la Plata, a never-ending
series of low, grayish buildings, all
of which look as if they could use
a coat of paint.
The streets, lined with palms
gnarled and shortened by occa-
sional winter frosts, are never
crowded, and the bulk of Monte-
video traffic resembles an old car
show. Uruguay manufactures no
cars and has no petroleum, so the
cost of owning and operating a car
is extremely high. Pre-World War
II autos abound, and the Model A
is very much in.
Buses and streetcars, also rather
expensive, are the preferred meth-
of of transportation, and as there
are too few of them and the ones
that do run are very old, they are
very crowded.
URUGUAYAN universities have
been moribund for years. The
main university in Montevideo is
located in the warehouse district
near the docks, and unless you
knew what you were looking for,
you couldn't tell the university
buildings from the warehouses.
The inside is no great improve-
ment. Lectures are given in poorly
lit rooms which are so long and
skinny that students in the: back
cannot hope to see the scratched
slate blackboard.
Uruguay is a nation of shop-
keepers and bureaucrats. It is an
excellent illustration of one of
Parkinson's laws, the one that says
the number of officials increases
as the amount of work to be done
decreases.
Montevideo is a seemingly end-
less stream of lower middle-class
people who just barely scrape by,
constantly threatened by infla-
tion. Amass whose credit is ever
so slightly over-extended.
In the winter, all these woes are
reflected in the gray sky. Whether
Montevideo's blandness is accen-
tuated by the endless cloudy days
of winter or vice-versa is hard to
determine. But always are there
clouds, or a rain shower-it never
gets cold enough for snow.
AS THE WORKING day ends,
scores of tired and tattered men
head for cafes near the harbor to
forget with a ten-cent bottle of
red wine, while the slightly more
affluent head home in buses or
perhaps cars, to forget in front of
the television.
Downriver from the center of
the city, where the port was orig-
inally located, there is nothing but
brush and a rocky beach. And only
a few yards from the main road
down the river, under a small
clump of willows, there is a small
hobo jungle, temporarily inhabited
only by a scrawny but self-satis-
fied white cat. And, in the street
beyond the trees, a garbage man
unhitches his horse from the trash
cart and walks her into the chilly
river to bathe her.
The people in the newish looking
'houses across the street probably
always have their blinds drawn,
Letters to the Editor
Inconsistent
To the Editor:
I WISH TO point out what.
seems to me to be a glaring in-
consistency between the words
and actions of The Michigan
Daily. It seems that one of the
biggest issues with which y our
paper has been concerned recent-
ly is the iniquity of meting out
academic punishments for non-
academic offenses. Indeed, I just,
read today in your paper substan-
tial criticism of one situation in
which for commiting a non-aca-
demic offense a student was de-
prived of his credits. In the notice
I just received in the mail from
you, it says "Credits will be with-
held if we do not receive payment
by July 31, 1970". Is failure to
pay for you Daily subscription an
academic offense? I strongly
doubt that it is, and thus feel
that your editorial policy in this
one case is ignored by the individ-
uals involved in the more tem-
poral aspects of the functioning of
your paper-or to put it more in-
formally, you don't practice what
you preach.
There is one last difficulty to
which I would like to draw your
attention. The card I received to-
day, August 4, states that pay-
ment must be received no later
than July 31. Quite obviously, it
is impossible for me to meet this
deadline. I'm getting this payment
to you as fast as I can, and al-
though it doesn't meet your dead-
line, it will have to suffice.
Stephen T. Marshal
Aug. 4
EDITOR'S NOTE: The Daily
policy of placing hold credits
for non-paying of subscriptions
is indeed unjustifiable. B u t ,
that is one of the lesser in-
consistencies at the Daily. Con-
certed effort by the student
body will be necessary in order
to eliminate those inconsist-
encies.-A.C.
Letters to the Editor should
be mailed to the Editorial Di-
rector or delivered to Mary
Rafferty in the Student Pub-
lications business office in the
Michigan -Daily building. Let-
ters should be typed, double-
spaced and normally should not
exceed 250 words. The Editorial
Directors reserve the right to
edit all letters submitted.
Lawrence Durrell. NUNQUAM.
New York: E. P. Dutton. $7.95
By JOHN RODENBECK,
Quick, let us make love be-
fore another human being is
born.
Nnfqua, p. 14
"Such a lack of theme .."
Ibid., p.20
Well, old Larry's done it again
just as he promised he would.
When Tune came out in 1968
and English critics fell over each
other's human engaging fingers
making guesses about what in
the world its title might mean,
a little note from the author at
the end of the book described it
as the first deck of a double-
decker novel. A small gasp went
up as we all recalled the sim-
ilar note at the beginning of
Justine (published 1957; inspir-
ation of a bad movie made in
one of those countries run by
the C.I.A. and a rumor in Ann
Arbor that a certain faculty
wife must be Justine's original),
promising the remainder of what
we would come to call the Alex-
andria Quartet. Could we ex-
pect another masterpiece that
its author would likewise dis-
miss, after it had made a pile
of money, as written in extreme
haste for the sake of making a
pile of money? Could we expect
this dismissal to be made public
soon or would we have to wait
until after we had bought and
paid for the second of the two
promised.volumes?
The fact is, we didn't quite
trust old Larry not to be pulling
our legs, which is why we en-
couraged the English critics of
Tune to find out what its title
really meant. For many weeks
the air was filled with wild sur-
mise, much of which was ob-
viously being quietly absorbed
by the author to be played back
without malice in the text of
Nunquam. Pages 81 to 86 culmi-
nate, for example, in a drawing
of the Tunc - charm used to
counteract Koro (see British
Medical Journal, 9 March 1968).
As depicted in Nunquam, this
charm combines the major ob-
sessions, anagrammatic and an-
atomic, of the critics of Tune,
as if Durrell had decided to
gratify them by confirming in
its sequel their best or worst
suspicions. The real joke, of
course, is that Durrell had been
pretty straightforward all along,
intending no tricks, verbal or
otherwise.
"Aut tune, aut nunquam..
It was now or never," the epi-
graph of Nunquam, ascribed
by L. D. to the Satyricon, (ser-
mo plebeius?), explains the titles
of both books quite acceptably,
and also suggests major dif-
ferences between them. No one,
I think, has pointed out that
Tune is among many things a
historical novel, purporting as it
does to tell us the "pasts" of the
characters who live on in one
form or other through both
books. These "pasts" take us
back to the years roughly be-
tween 1909 and 1923.'-One says
roughly here, of course, because
in both Tune and Nunquam
Durrell suppresses every pos-
sible date and deliberately in-
troduces anachronism to re-
mind us that 'after all we are
reading fiction. In Nunquam
the characters are brought more
or less up to date as Durrell ful-
fills his stated intention of cre-
ating "a novel-libretto based on
the preface to The Decline of
the West." At the end of Nun-
quam he places his narrator on
the brink of actions that might
be taken as symbolizing the
final collapse of modern West-
ern civilization. Though clearly
imminent, this latter event has
presumably not yet occurred in
reality either. We readers are
at the same point of "never"
that is reached by Durrell's
characters.
The chief questionsthat a good
reviewer should answer is
whether or not Nunquam will
stand by itself as a novel. Tune
seems generally to have been
regarded as capable of this feat,
and Durrell was certainly care-
ful enough in all his headlong
haste to put the Quartet to-
gether so that each of its com-
posing novels could be read sep-
arately. It must be said, how-
ever, that Nunquam profits a
great deal in the reading from
a background in Tune. One of
Durrell's habitual tactics as a
novelist, of course, is to make
all his characters talk extensive-
ly about each other, a good tac-
tic to use when one is inter-
ested in impressing a reader
with the "reality" of one's char-
acters; i.e. with the idea that
each has a sort of separate dis-
tinct existence beyond what is
strictly necessary to the plot.
This tactic creates, first, that
knowing allusiveness of texture
that is typical of all Durrell nov-
els and gives one, secondly, the
frequent impression that one
has misseda previous install-
ment somewhere even when
one has in fact not mssed any-
thing. One should be warned,
therefore, that reading Tune be-
fore reading Nunquam does not
necessarily supply some sort -of
skeleton key to the latter but
rather provides it with a rich-
ness of background that can be
tapped with a minimum of
words.
Richness has certainly always
been one of Durrell's major
ims. Sometimes it is achieved
by purely "literary" means: e.g.,
"Real birds sang all day in the
gardens, while indoors the me-
chanical nightingales from Vi-
enna had to be wound up; at
certain times one became aware
of the beetles ticking away like
little clocks behind the dama-
scene hangings full of dust," a
passage that links up Marianne
Moore, Yeats, and Tennyson to
create with wonderful allusive
economy the notion of our
death-watch over a culture in
its neo-Byzantine decadence.
Sometimes, though less abund-
antly than in Tune, it is the
sudden mental richness of aph-
orism: e.g., a definition of love
as "raids on each other's nar-
cissism" or a definition perhaps
of aphorism itself as the "at-
tempt to capture the idea quite
nakedly before it strays into the
c o n ce e u t a l field like some
heavy-footed cow." And of
course there is the highly arti-
ficial richness of characteriza-
tion.
Despite his efforts to give each
of them an interesting singu-
larity, as Fielding or Dickens
did theirs, I find the characters
of Durrell all essentially very
much the same. All of them are
baffled, to begin with, and the
only important differentiation
among them is the separation
caused by sexuality, the men be-
ing baffled in the use of intelli-
gence, the women in the use of
passion. This twin bafflement
seems to me to be central in
Durrell's work and to reflect the
way he actually sees real people.
Given the substantial similari-
ties of all his characters, more-
over, and his consequent fasci-
nation not with "character" but
with relationships, this baffle-
ment becomes perfectly expres-
sive of his persistent interest in
alchemy, "the great night ex-
press which jumps the points
and hurtles out of the causal
field, carrying everything with
it." Or perhaps alchemy is ex-
pressive of the bafflement Dur-
rell sees everywhere.
Both Tune and- Nunquam are
alchemical books, riddled with
the language and ideas of that
marvelous art-science-craft and
c e n t e r e d ultimately on the
question of knowledge and
power that alchemy first raised.
Like the alchemists, Durrell sees
us as living in a universe of ir-
reversible process, a universe
where nothing can remain un-
changed, where no face, body,
soul, or relationship can ever
stay the same for long. Not only
alchemy but the world itself in
the alchemical vision is a "great
night express which jumps the
points and hurtles-out of the
causal field"--the only trusted
field of thought for post-Ba-
conian Western man, created
originally out of Greek conjec-
ture, symbolized in Tune and
Nunquam by Merlin's, the Firm
-"carrying everything with it."
Felix Charlock, the narrator
of both books, is an alchemist
anque, condemned by his mo-
ment in history never to prac-
tice his craft but instead to
turn out technological toys for
the Firm. The dispersive effect
of Tune derives from his efforts
to escape the Firm. The effect
of Nunquam, on the other hand,
derives from the fact that it all
takes - place within the Firm,
the "genetic silhouette of Mo-
bego" and "its closed system."
At the beginning of Nunquam
Charlock is confined to the
Paulhaus, a private sanitarium
maintained by the Firm for its
employees, especially those re-
captured after an escape; at its
end he is standing with nearly
every other character in the
tourist-thronged nave of St.
Paul's looking down at the corpse
of Julian, the firm's mysterious
head, killed attempting to save
the "life" of Iolanthe, a me-
chancial contrivance of his own
manufacturing.
Since Iolanthe is also at least
as human as most of the people
one meets in life, several, exqui-
site moral questions are raised
by her behavior, in this instance
as well as in others; she is the
only character in Nunquam,
moreover, that ( who?) appre-
ciably effects in any important
way the behavior of other char-
acters, becoming Indeed the sub-
ject or "heroine" of the book
as it moves from private mad-
house to a mobbed Secularized,
demythologized church. It is
tempting to see in Iolanthe Dur-
rell 's symbol for the tradition of
Western Civilization: as she ap-
pears in Nunquam, of course,
she is only a mechanical simu-
lacrum of the Iolanthe who died
In Tune -a little Greek prosti-
tute who for no particular rea-
son became a world-famous cele-
brity, who died sometime in the
past but whose walking, talking
effigy suddenly turns up in
strange places, doing unchar-
acteristic things, and who final-
ly is put out of her posthumous
misery for once and for all.
There is no replacement in sight
for Iolanthe, and there are
those, aparently Durrell among
them, who see no future for the
Firm either.
All of which might be expect-
ed to make depressing reading.
What sustains any work of
Lawrence Durrell's, however, is
his stunning superabundance of
creative invention (or discovery
-for the Quartet is in many
ways a pasticcio of secondary
t
J
J
1
1
l
1
i
Bridging two c i
Stanley Burnshaw, THE SEAM-
LESS WEB, Braziller, $7.50.
A. M. Taylor, IMAGINATION
AND THE GROWTH OF
SCIENCE, Schocken, $1.75.
By NEAL BRUSS
"Poetry begins with the body
and ends with the body," Stan-
ley Burnshaw trumpets at the
opening of his book, which, he
says, is concerned with "the
type of creature-mind develop-
ed by the human organism in its
long movement through time
out of the evolutionary shocks
which gave birth to what we
have named self-consciousness."
This is an attractive thesis,
promising what might have been
a new description of the close
attention some poets give to in-.
ternal, semi-conscious messages
outside ego control. The method
of the study might valuably have
been anthropological, psycho-
linguistic or Hegelian, but it
might just as well have been
something no more academic
than a careful, detailed report-
ing of what poets feel.
In any case, much more should
be known about those messages,
for as D. H. Lawrence came to
know, the organic wisdom of the
total organism is superior to the
fragmented notions of the ego-
organized "mind."
One poet, Donald Hall, wrote
in a Daily article (reprinted in
this spring's Michigan Quarterly
Review) that this "vatic voice,"
often heard after dreaming and
ignoring surface thought, is the
major, most dependable source
of his poetry. Burnshaw has col-
lected similar statements from
an impressive number of major
poets of, the last two centuries~
These messages are not only
poetically important. A writer in
a recent issue of Psychology To-
day claims bluntly if not origin-
ally that the necessary and
sufficient condition of success-
ful therapies of every style is
the patient's listening to him-
self, to quiet, perhaps deeply
embedded but manifest and de-
cisive decisions and desires en-
tirely unavailable in surface
thought-currents.
The point of A. M. Taylor's
skimpy book of Bowdoin Col-
lege lectures is that the most
important scientific discoveries
virtually explode into awareness
in irrational, imagistic bursts
of inspired poetry, character-
istically when the scientist's at-
tention is furthest from his ra-
tional method, when he is, say,
dozing or walking the dog. One
of Taylor's examples is poetic-
ally archetypical:
Consider the benzene ring of
organic chemistry, postulated
by Friedrich August Kekule
(1829-96) in 1865. His original
conception that molecules of
aromatic substances are form-
ed of chains of atoms coiled
in a ring, like the snake eat-
ing its own tail, that he saw
in a halfwaking dream as he
slumbered before the fire, is
still unchanged today. Though
Kekule himself never doubted
his vision, and its essential
truth was soon accepted by
most chemists, it had to wait
until they could use the physi-
cists' method of wave-mecha-
nical calculation before the
theoretical stability of the
ring structure could be estab-
lished with certainty.
The principle is simple enough
but not grasped by the present
culture which anaesthetizes the
pain in institutional brutality
and callousness with a zealous
reverence for the denatured,
which it calls "objective": sci-
entific method, like other forms
of rationality, are formal, not
substantial, providing proce-
dures for careful examination.
The ideas which truly restruc-
ture science and human affairs
come from sources of what
B u r n s h a w calls "creature-
knowledge." which the reason-
ing mind cannot touch. Most
generally: science doesn't pro-
vide anything that could be call-
ed objective, absolute truth, but,
as Taylor quotes Karl Popper,
"all science is cosmology . ."
And as Shelley stated in the
"Defense of Poetry," cosmolo-
gies are created from the sub-
stance of poetry.
Yes, it is a good thesis, and
it would certainly support many
thinkers with vastly differing
viewpoints. Burnshaw, however,
doesn't do much with it. He has
read much literature, criticism,
human biology and history of
the hard sciences. But, it ap-
pears, "creature knowledge" is
a platitude for him, and he
doesn't have the insights or
careful descriptions prophecied
in his opening.
The book largely consists of
present-day literary thought,
accounts of structuralism, new
criticism, English scansion and
the history of recent poetry, all
of which are competently nan-
dlc but don't constitute ap-
proaches to the declared subject
of the book, although Burn-
shaw would like them to. To
mold conventional scholarship
for his subject, Burnshaw mysti-
fies and solipsizes poetry And
_i
"Richard, remember last month when you said if you
had any money you'd be buying stocks....well, I took
our savings and ..."