-~ -9 -. PAGE SIX THE MICHIGAN DAILY SUNDAY. NOVEMBER 7. 1954 SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 1954 THE MICHIGAN DAILY I More Character Revelations by O'Conner Sen. McCarthy Meets His Peers ~4~ I MORE STORIES, By Frank O'Connor By BOB HOLLOWAY IRELAND is a rebellious country, and all of its great writers have been rebels. Starting with Swift and continuing with Joyce and Shaw, they have rebelled against English domination, or the Catho- lic Church, or the bourgeosie, or Ireland itself; sometimes again the whole shebang together. Frank' O'Connor, in. his latest collection of stories, seems superficially to adhere to this tradition: most of his stories are about boys who run away, or girls who marry men their families don't approve of, or priests who begin to find their Irish Catholic conventions are not lib- eral enough. But it is not so much rebellion O'Connor is interested in as reconciliation. 'People mostly come back," he says at the end of one story, "but their protest re-. mained to distinguish them from all the others who had never run away." The running away is im- portant, for him, mostly as proof of the value of what there is to come back to. With this predisposition, O'Con-1 hor is at his best in light, anecdotal stories, where he can assume the4 air of a comfortable, happy man you'd meet in a pub. Such a story is "Orpheus and His Lute," which begins, "There's no music now like there was in the old days." It's the tale of the Irishtown band, once the best in all Dublin. Their prowess as musicians was depend- ant largely on their ability to out- drink everybody else in the city. They met their downfall one cold, wet, winter night whern, dead broke and all of them dying for a drink, they pawned their instruments. When . the word got around, of1 course, none of their patrons wouldf given them a penny to redeem thet instruments in time for the St. Patrick's Day parade. The band perished with a flourish, though. z They wiped up the streets with a7 rival band, took away their instru- ments, and led the parade. When the police arrived, they marchedr into Bridewell prison playing "Auldi Lang Syne." O'Connor handles this kind of story brilliantly. Likes Synge, he has a real gift for using the rich language of the Irish low- t er classes. IN HIS MORE serious stories,t O'Connor usually shows us char-s acters in the process of getting a revalation. Sometimes it's a child; in "The Face of Evil," the hero isc a boy who's always been what her calls "a saint." He keeps tabs on his sins in a notebook and yet has managed to be one of the boys. His revelation comes when he tried to redeem a very unregenerate friend. The friend makes a valiant attempt, goes to confession, but isn't able to keep it up. The hero, seeing his friend sink back into the mire of sin, gets his revalation: "I wanted to go with Charlie and sc'are his fate. For the first time I realized that the life before me would have complexities of emo- tion that I couldn't even imagine." Sometimes the revelation comes to an adult, like Anna in "The Cus- tom of The Country," who is "sud- denly filled with a great sense of liberation and joy. The strain of. being a Henebry-Hayes is some- thing you cannot appreciate until it is lifted," so off she goes to join her bigamist husband. In all of these stories, it is as if O'Connor saw the world as an infinate series of concentric circles of awareness. The larger your cir- cle is, the more aware you are of the significance or insignificance of life's conventions. In each story, he carefully works out the revela- tion by. which a character gets from a smaller circle to a larger one. What is somehow disappoint- ing about O'Connon is his lack of desire to see the entire series as a whole, or to draw the ultimate circle of death or exile around the series. THE SPIRIT which motivates O'Connor, and which moves his characters from one circle of awareness to another, is the spirit of common sense. Probably the greatest implement of common sense is the rule-of-thumb and Mr. O'Connor abounds with them. For instance, "Unapproved Route" be- gins "Between men and women, as between neighboring states, there are approved roads which visitors must take. Others take at their peril, no matter how high- minded their intentions may be." The story that follows is simply an illustration of this rule of com- mon sense. Whatever else com- mon sense involves, it does not involve mysteries. It is concern- ed with values that can be spokent straight out, without recourse tos symbols. All the values that mo-Y tivate O'Connor's characters arel described quite correctly, both as to quality and quantity. As a re- sult, they sometimes seem a littlec pedestrian.1 The worst that can happen to at character who conducts himself oyf rules of common sense is meeting3 an experience that will make him "sadder but wiser." This is the fate of all of O'Connor's charact- ers who do not become "happier and wiser." The possibility of com- ing to a tragic end is as far from them as the possibility of becoming neurotic. All this is not to say that O'Con- nor is not a careful workman, or that his stories are dull. They are beautifully put together, and the play of irony within them pre- vents them from ever being lethar- gic or sentimental. But still, the common-sense world to which he limits himself is stifling by the time you have finished More Stories. You long to read about people who risk more than the loss of some time on a love affair, and who risk their souls, as well as their social acceptability on reli- gion. PSYCHOLOGICAL STUDY: A New Look at Old Relationship Mother-Daughter, By a Craftsman By LEE MARKS TOMORROW, the United States Senate convenes in special ses- sion to act on recommendations submitted by the Select Commit- tee To Study Censure Charges. Senate Resolution 301, to censure Senator Joseph R. McCarthy (R.- Wis.), was submitted by Senator Ralph E. Flanders (R.-Vt.) on July 30 climaxing a stormy career in which the junior senator from Wisconsin made newspaper head- lines with charges, counter charg- es, exposes and sensationalized hearings. Serving on the committee with Senator Arthur Watkins, (R-Utah), chairman, were John C. Stennis (D-Miss.), Frank Carlson (R-Kan.), Francis Case (R-S.Dak.), Sam J. Ervin, Jr. (D-N. Car.) and Vice- Chairman Edwin C. Johnson (D.- Col.). They were authorized by the Senate to investigate and hold hearings on more than 30 charg- es of various forms of misconduct submitted by Senator Flanders, Senator Wayne Morse (Ind.- Ore.) and Senator William Full- bright (D.-Ark.). To a certain extent, the Watkins Committee was appointed by Sen- ator Richard Nixon for the anony- mity of its members. Although ex- perienced in judicial proceedings, none of the six Senators were na- tionally prominent or on record as being rabidly opposed to or in sym- pathy with McCarthy. Aug. 24, after preliminary hear- ings, Senator McCarthy was in- formed that the charges had been reduced to 13, divided into five categories. As noted in the tee report these their subdivisions official commit- categories and were: United States employes to violate the law and their oaths of office. 3) Incidents involving receipt or use of confidential or classified document or other information from executive files. 4) Incidents involving abuses of colleagues in the Senate. 5) Incident relating to Ralph W. Zwicker, United States Army Gen- eral. Final conclusions of the com- mittee as submitted to the sec- ond session of the 83rd Congress called for a censure of Senator McCarthy. Senator Watkins and his col- leagues found Senator McCarthy "contemptuous, contumacious and denunciatory without reason or jus- tification" in his actions toward Senator Hendrickson and his sub- committee. They found his conduct "uncon- donable and improper." And for his actions toward Gen- eral Zwicker, the committee rec- ommended censure claiming that McCarthy was "reprehensible." At the outset of their hearings, the Watkins Committee said, "This sub-committee has but one object -Daily-Dick Gaskill AT THE AGE OF INNOCENCE A EAT Bookstore... WHEN YOU come browsing at Bob Marshall's per- haps you've noticed virtually every section in the store is carefully alphabetized and organized, that just one copy of each title is on display . - THUS A PERPETUAL, daily inventory is maintained, thus titles can be reordered quickly, the high stand- ards of our stock maintained, thus your browsing is more pleasant, your request for a specific title more efficiently handled, and thus the stock you buy is cleaner and fresher,. . for these and so many many more reasons when it comes to just about anything in books, you 'l do better at .. . BOB MARSHALL'S BOOK SHOP 211 south state - ann arbor - mail orders invited browsers always welcomed - open 6 nites till 10 1 s c { b 1 Ib ly 41 C f^f V it p The Bad Seed. By William. March; By HARRY STRAUSS ONE OF THE more anticipated productions of this Broadway theater season is Maxwell Ander- son's adaptation of William March's novel, "The Bad Seed," published last spring. The work was the last by this writer from New Orleans for he died shortly after its publication. His previous writings had for the most part been critically success- ful, but not commercially. Two years ago he wrote "October Is- land" which had a fair degree of success. Most of his readers, and his critics, however, agree that March (real name: William March Camp- bell) did his best writing in his last work. "The Bad Seed" is a grim little horror story. It is excellent. The book centers around a nine- year-old girl and her mother. There has been a rise in recent times of novels with children as their pro- tagonists. From J. D. Salinger's adolescent Holden Caulfield in "The Catcher in the Rye" to Davis Grubb's youngster John Harper in "The Night of the Hunter," the character has warmth and the sym- pathy of the reader. But there is a lot of difference in the case of Rhoda Penbroke. Rhoda is an overtly sweet, po- lite, excessively neat little girl with an ethical code all her own. At the tender age of nine, she has three murders to her credit. THE STORY revolves around Christine Penbroke and her at- tempts to comprehend, to under- stand her daughter's actions and possible motives. The girl had always been quietj and peculiarly advanced for her age (at any age) and continually seemed to know what kind of a! mood her parents were in, especial- ly her mother, so she could act ac- cordingly and get her way. When the novei opens, Rhoda is furious to discover that the school penmanship medal she had so cov- eted was given to another pupil though she adamantly insists "ev- eryone knows that it's rightfully mine." The class goes off on their annual picnic, the boy wearing his medal, Rhoda taunting him end- lessly. Rhoda returns home and to her mother's surprise and joy, she does not mention the medal. Listening to the radio, Christine hears -the boy is missing and fear- ed drowned. It isn't long before the body is recovered, minus his medal. Christine becomes suspicious but then realizes that she suspects her own daughter. She tries to pass the whole incident off as mere co- incidence but it all seems to fit in- to too precise a pattern. The school's mistresses send their regrets but find they must release Rhoda from their rolls. Demand- ing an explanation, she is told, among other things, that during the picnic, Rhoda was continually seen following and really persecuting the boy-that she was in fact the last to see him alive. Christine finds the medal among her daughter's things. When faced with this reality, Rhoda is almost defiant-almost positive her moth- er will not tell anyone. WITH HER husband in South America on business, Christine does not know whom to turn to. A neighbor tries to help her when she believes Christine to be down- cast. And what can the latter say? She has no proof, only inklings. But then she remembers the old woman who lived near them in Baltimore before they moved West. She suddenly fell down a flight of stairs to her death. The old wo- man had something she'd promis- ed Rhoda who wanted the trinket very much. Christine tries talking to a friend who write well-conceived murder mysteries about motives, especially in children, but it doesn't help her nor does it solve anything. Where is the line between reality and imagination? Christine begins to search her mind for she had to know something, yet knew not how she could find it. She faces reality when she surprises Rhoda trying to throw her new shoes down the incinerator. These shoes have metal clips at the heels. The dead boy had ,sharp marks on his hands and forehead. Perhaps he had hung on the ledge of the precipice before drowning. Now Christine is sure about her daughter's action (or is it actions?) and she need only find the reason. She remembers that Rhoda had al- ways been different from other girls. Her husband and she had tried to make her happy and at- tempted to understand her. Where had they failed? Where had she failed, for, she is sure it was a fault of hers-something she had done to her daughter. .Christine becomes desperate. Then vaguely she remembers that she once asked her mother whe- ther she were adopted. By chance, Christine learns of a famous mur- See MOTHER'S, Page 8 Two Beautiful Reasons 1) Incidents of contempt of the Senate or a Senatorial Commit- te. Repeated refusals to appear before Senate committees, fail- ing to supply information to the Senate Sub-Committee on privi- leges and elections, denouncing the Sub-Committee, showing gen- eral contempt for the Senate and calling Senator Robert Hendrick- son (R-N.J.) a "living miracle without brains or guts," were included in this charge. 2) Incidents of encouragement of and that is to reach an impar and proper conclusion based u facts." At the conclusion, they rec mended censure on two of the charges and severely criticized: JOSEPH WEL( ... this is the ar w # ri/' Why "Little Evenings" A Our Felt Skirt And Jun "r EC 4c AA *\ \ M~i4; L, I ME 71 ' i Charles Adams - HOME BADI S Walt Kelley- INCOMPLEAT POGO . THE BENCHLEY ROUNDUP . Searle - THE FEMALE APPROACH . Price -THE RICH SARDINE 2.95 1.00 3.50 3.50 1.00 n4 ii PLEASE COME IN AND BROWSE Shop at FOLLETT'S State Street at North U.