4 9 t II 9 -V 419 0 74 t ;t £frdian 3an1M 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 ..."