Sixty-Sixth Year EDITED AND MANAGED BY STUDENTS OF THE IUNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN UNDER AUTHORITY OF BOARD IN CONTROL OF STUDENT PUBLICATIONS STUDENT PUBLICATIONS BLDG. * ANN ARBOR, MICH. * Phone NO 2-3241 Representative Contemporary Books -1956 hen Opidnolls Are Free, Truth will Prevai" Editorials printed in The Michigan Daily express the individual opinions of staff writers or the editors. This must be noted in all reprints. Y, APRIL 22, 1956 NIGHT EDITOR: JANET-REARICK Is Freedom Itself Enough For West to Offer? 4 a_ A REPORT came out recently that out of every four refugees who came to the West from behind the Iron Curtain, one defects back to the Communists. Among the reasons, cited for this sad state of affairs in which the West is batting only .750 is the one about the hard- ships a refugee faces concerning food, clothing and shelter. The situation brings to mind some reflections, the first of which is on the strong Western belief that everyone behind the Iron Curtain would come over to the West if he had the chance, because everyone knows that every- one wants freedom above all. It is no doubt true that one does not enjoy much personal freedom behind the Iron.Curtain where the collective is supreme and the indi- vidual is incidental. And it is equally probable. that one does enjoy freedom on this side of the Curtain. But is it true that *everyone wants freedom above all? Anyone who doesn't have freedom can be taught to want it. If the grass on the other side of the fence does not already look green- er, it can be -painted and polished to imake it look greener. But is be always sure he wants to keep it after he- gets it? Very often, after one gets to the other side, the grass looks greener on the first side after all. This may be partly the case with the Communist refugees who defect back. PERSONAL FREEDOM entails personal re- sponsibility. Freedom of action makes one responsible for what.he does. Freedom of thought involves a duty to make one's own decisions and answer for them. Some people, are willing to give up the freedom to avoid the responsibility. Although Western civilization is based on the notion of personal freedom, it contains many people who escape it' and its responsibilities by identifying themselves with groups. Some do so in more respects than others and some to greater degrees. Underneath this phenomenon is a basic flaw in the concept of freedom. Freedom for the individual is not to be denied on the ground that it is meaningless, but the concept does exist in a vacuum. We have the freedom to choose, but no alternatives from which to choose. We must make our own alternatives, unless we choose to surrender a part of our freedom in return for something to believe in. Whether we have to make our own alter- natives or decide how much freedom we can part with and still be mostly free, we are faced with an individual responsibility that many of us are not willing to face. DEMOCRACY itself has become nothing more than a political pragmatism. Where once it was based on a doctrine of natural rights, it is now nothing more than an agreement to disagree within certain procedural rules-at least in the centers of advanced learning this is the view. There is no basic positive focus for agreement, except that everyone be free to choose his own path. An unwillingness to make such a choice may be what sends' one of every four Communist refugees back behind the Iron Curtain. He does not have the chance or the time to recog- nize the full significance of the freedom to which he has escaped, but evidently he tastes enough of it to want to escape from it again. Before the average gets worse, and more than one out of four defect back, perhaps we ought to find something to offer besides free- dom. While we're looking for something for them, we might also see if we can find some- thing for ourselves. -JIM DYGERT, City Editor A --DanIy-John Hlrtzei THE SHADOW OF LIFE : A NOVEL IN ITSELF: Dreiser-'Writer Rvewn Cervan As An Art ,. rtes' A AC .-W Or Sentimentalist? THE BEST SHORT STORIES OF THEODORE DREISER, with an Introduction by James T. Farrell, Cleveland and New York, The World Publishing Com- pany, 1956, $3. By MARVIN FELHEIM DHEODOPEDREISER'S major novels and stories are currently being reissued by The World Publishing Company; prominent among the titles in this volume, "The Best Short Stories." The collection, which boasts an Introduction by James T. Farrell, includes a generous sampling (14 stories) of Dreiser's shorter fiction, ranging from his first published effort, "McEwen of the Shining Slave Makers," through such favorites as "The Lost Phoebe" and "Nigger World Disarmament Law IN 1958, the United Nation's Charter will come upfor revision. Action or inaction taken then by the member nations is important to every citizen of the world. Groundwork for a lasting world peace can be built then. Specifically, this involves the institution of a world law in regard to dis- armament. It must be realized that President Eisenhow- er's "open sky" proposals (if approved) can only reduce the possibilities of another Pearl Harbor; it doesn't deny either the United States or Russia destructive weapons. It Iis simple but true that, in the evolution- ary development of man, he will someday settle his international disputes through litigation, not through force of arms. Between cavemen, between tribes, between cities, and between states, law has evolved the referee. We can't afford to wait for this last step. It bears repeating that the institution of world law in the UN should pertain only to disarmament. The American Legion and other jingoists should remember this before scream- ing that Old Glory will be torn down and that we will be outvoted by the Asians in a 'world government.'I How can this disarmament world law be made effective? a. Membership qualifications in the UN must be diluted. To establish a world peace, you must have the cooperation of all nations- this includes China. b. Power in the UN must shift from the veto-bottlenecked Security Council to the Gen- eral Assembly. Here, representatives would be distributed by pop lation-the U.S., Russia, China, and India having equal power, the Brit- ish and French slightly less. No member would be allowed to withdraw. e. Into the UN Charter must be written a disarmament plan. A period of gradual dis- armament should be planned-say 10 years. In steps, each nation would reduce its arms and men proportionately to the others. THIS WOULD BE a tense and mistrustful period. To lessen the tension, a world po- lice force (composed of representatives of small, neutral nations-armed with light arms and helicopters) would supervise and inspect. This police force would be the sine qua non of a durable peace. It would be permanent. This plan doesn't eliminate the East-West ideological contest. It does reduce it to a con- test of ideas and not of arms. This plan assumes that all countries desire or can see. the advantages of world peace. The material and human death of a Third World War, the high cost of an armaments race (% of U.S. budget), and the desire of every human to see tomorrow's sunrise, make peace advan- tageous and desirable. This plan will take a lot of selling. People will mistakenly think they are giving the UN a blank check for world government. This plan only buys world peace through world dis- armament law. -JIM ELSMAN Jeff" to the frankly autobiogra-. phical sketch, "My Brother Paul." Although Dreiser's status in Amer- ican letters will probably never depend on his success or failure as a short-story writer, these works nevertheless do provide a point of departure from which we may at- tempt an evaluation of his talent. One wishes, in this connection, that the publishers =had reprinted here some of Dreiser's one-act plays as they, like the stories, would have offered a means, distinct from the novels, of approaching this con- troversial figure and his work. This collection begins and ends with two exotic stories, set in Arabia; the first is "Khat," a tale of the despair of a street beggar, who dies, ragged and despised, un- able to secure any of the precious shrub without which "one cannot endure;" the concluding selection is "The Prince Who Was a Thief," a sentimental story which might well have come from The Arabian Nights entertainment. One is surprised that Dreiser wrote such pieces, which are but pale shadows of Kipling's vivid oriental tales. But they do indi- cate a streak of romanticism in Dreiser, an aspect of his work de- cidedly at odds with the prevailing notion that he wrote only in the naturalistic vein. * * * WITH THESE two execptions, the stories are all of a piece with Dreiser's more ambitious works. "Free" is the story of a successful architect, a typical Dreiser hero, who longs to be rid of his "con- ventional" wife. Eventually she dies, but now he, rich and respect- ed, an artist and a dreamer, finds himself free only to die, a vic- tim of "the innate cruelty of life." "The Shadow," "Convention" and "Marriage-for One" also deal with the theme of unhappy mar- riages, in two cases with unfaith- ful wives and in "Convention" with an erring husbaiid; as in "Free," the philosophical impli- cation is that life is a dirty busi- ness. "The despair, the passion, the rage, the hopelessness, the love," is the way the narrator of "Mar- riage-for One" describes it. The narrator of "Convention" looks upon "the miscarriage of love and delight" with a feeling that is "cold and sad." While the central figure in "The Old Neighborhood," a rich man who once cruelly de- serted his sick wife and left her to die, can only comment: "There is something cruel and evil in it all, in all wealth, all ambition, in love of fame-too cruel." Indeed, except for "The Prince Who Was a Thief," there is not a story in this collection which does not em- phasize "the misery, the loneliness, the shadow, the despair" of life. The two most famous stories are "The Lost Phoebe," the nearest thing to a lyrical mood which Dreiser probably ever achieved, and "Nigger Jeff," his account of a lynching. In the former, an aged farmer, convinced that his wife has not died but has left him because of his querulousness, tries, to find and bring her back. He pursues her wildly, calling her name, Phoebe, one of Dreiser's few poetic sym- bols, until he meets his death just By DONALD A. YATES Daily Book Reviewer T HE above photograph shows a sampling of some of the most current books in the major fields of literature. Biography and general non-f i- tion constitutes one-half of the broadest division of these titles; fiction in its various forms (some of which are shown above to* the right of the non-fiction volumes) accounts for the balance of this arbitrary division. For each of these books after it leaves the presses is written a generally con- siderable and some times vast amount of wordage in the form of book reviews. Granted that this genre of writ- ing is essentially functional and instructive, in that it points ideally toward an informed and perceptive expression of the objective merits of a work as voiced by an author- ity, there is, however, the under- lying purpose of the positive in- fluencing of the reading habits of the reading nation. The book reviewer's influence is surely felt but its moving effect has a rather long time fuse attach- ed to it. We can make a case in point with three of the best-selling books of the past few months. Case 1: Marjorie Morningstar- reviews, lukewarm to favorable; sales, immediate best-seller, gradually dropped. Case. 2: Andersonville-reviews, polite but not enthusiastics; sales, immediate best-seller, not so long as Morningstar. The pattern is repeated many times. Reviewers seem not to affect the public's immediate reaction to 'a well-established name, but over the months they do seem to have foreshadowed, if not formed, the final popular attitude toward the work. The book reviewer, then, takes his place somewhere near the movie critic who will predict the folms that will last and come back, but is powerless to keep the public away from a poor attrac- tion at the entertainment palace. In these columns five books are specially reviewed for The Daily by informed critics. With various material treated here at the hands of five different talents, the reader has an opportunity to perceive the unlimited possibilities of the book review as an art form. INTERPRETING THE NEWS:' Switching Action to the UN THEODORE DREISER ... interesting historical attitudes view the grief-stricken, terrorized mother.*:, "The night, the tragedy, the grief, he saw it all. But also with the cruel instinct of the budding artist that he already was, he was beginning to meditate. on the char- acter of story it would make-the color, the pathos. The knowledge now that it- was not always exact justice that was meted out to all and that it was not so much the business of the writer to indict as to interpret was borne in on him with distinctness by the cruel sor- row of the mother, whose blame, if any, was infinitesimal." Mat- thibssen quotes, apropos this end- ing, a statement Dreiser made about his own early experiences as an excess of sympathy, wonder, a reporter: "I was swelling with respect, even awe." And then Matthiessen adds, "The four quali- ties he enumerates will run like a plain song through his best fic- tion." But one wonders exactly where Matthiessen sees the sym- pathy and respect here. What emerges, rather, seems to be a cer- tain ' amount of cynicism and a sense of irony and a fascination with the cruel "business" of be- coming a writer. IN HIS INTRODUCTION, Mr. Farrell expresses typical adulatory praise of Dreiser, "a great writer of our century." "These tales," he continues, "fully bear the mark of his greatness, his sincerity, and his genius ... They belong to our literary tradition and they should long stand among the major short stories written in twentieth-cen- tury America." But the reader of this review will by now have realized that the writer of this article does not share this attitude. There are, of course, the standard attacks one can level against Dreiser; Alfred Kazin, in "On Native Ground," has sum- med them up: "his proverbial slo- venliness, the barbarisms and in- congruities whose notoriety has preceded him into history, the bad grammer, the breathless and pain- ful clutching at words ... " Kazin lists these faults only to dramatize his praise of Dreiser's "genius" ("It is by now an established part of our folklore that Theodore Dreiser lacks everything but gen- ius") and "victory." "An artist creates form out of what he needs; the functions com- pels the form,"'is Kazin's answer Popular Approach CERVANTES, THE MAN AND HIS TIME. By Sebastian Juan Arbor. Translated from the Spanish by Ilsa Barea. 261 pp. New York: The Vanguard Pres. By JOHN B. DALBOR IT IS UNFORTUNATE but true that among readers in the United States there is a certain lack of knowledge and interest in Spanish letters. Such European literary masters as Shakespeare, Milton, k DETECTIVE STORY: ALittle AToo Genteel By RICHARD C. BOYS "A CAPITOL OFFENSE" by Jocelyn Davey (Knopf) is a well written detective story of more than unusual interest. The story has to do with hanky- panky at the British Embassy in Washington, though the murder is not the most important part of the book. Espionage and counter- espionage are woven throughout the story, against the backdrop of an eccentric ambassador who got his job through a clerical er- ror in the Prime Minister's estab- lishment. Ambrose Usher, the hero of the book, is a terribly refined gent who is constantly quoting literary gems, especially to the horror of the stereotyped members of the, Washington police force. Usher, a latter day Lord Peter Wimsey, is actually a university don among other things and as such reflects the academic tone of "A Capitol Offense;" he thus joins the com- pany not only of Dorothy Sayers, but , of Nicholas Blake (who is really C. Day Lewis, the poet). The book contains some rather amusing satire on officialdom and international relations, though at times it approaches the kind of burlesque we find in Elliott Paul's works. It is an awfully genteel detective story; in fact, it is a little too genteel and makes us long for a heady draught of Mickey Spillane to wash it down. (-Richard Boys is an associate professor in the English depart- ment.) I Goethe, and Dante are all fairly well known and receive their share of acclaim in "great books" cours- es in universities .and in package book deals. . Yet a figure like Cervantes, the prince of Spanish letters and as- suredly of the stature of those mentioned, occupies a vague "dus- ty shelf" position in the literary adventures of most American read- ersers who are neither scholars nor Hispanophiles. While it is true that most Amer- icans have at least heard of the exploits of don Qui jote (especially the windmill incident), it is pro- bable that few have actually read Cervantes' masterpiece in its en- tirety (undeniably a yeoman task because of its some thousand pages) or even seriously perused any of its delightful passages. To be sure, Americans have the hazy conception of a ludicrous and anachronistic knight-witness our word "quixotic" - yet few have taken the time or effort to at- tempt to grasp the rich and pro- found philosophical significance of the Knight of the Sorrowful Coun- tenance. FOR LOVERS of Spanish liter- ature this is a lamentable situa- tion, which has many causes. One of the obvious ones is that Ameri- cans, great lovers of biography about anyone, good or evil, have never had a chance tp find out for themselves what kind of a person, much less writer, Miguel de Cer- vantes was. Until recently the majority of works on Cervantes havenot only been of, a "highbrow" and schol- arly nature, but have not been translated into English. Now, at last, American readers have available in their own lang- uage a lively and informative por- trait of the Spanish genius and his times in "Cervantes", written by Spanish novelist Sebastian Juan Arbo. Rather than an accumulation of footnotes and literary interpreta- tions, the reader finds a forceful narrative, treated with the so-call- ed popular approach. The lay- man, who has neither a particular interest in Cervantes, Don Quiote, nor Spanish literature, will find both enjoyment and instruction in this presentation of Cervantes' life, a strange alteration of successes and frustrations, joys and sadness -truly a novel in itself,' no less interesting than the life of his own beloved creation. Arbo, like most good Spaniards, feels veneration and sympathy for Cervantes. He makes little at- tempt to hide this and, in fact, succeeds in communicating it to us. * * * THE AUTHOR maintains a fair- ly close chronological order, but intersperses the narrative of Cer- vantes' life with the historical in- terludes. Occasionally the reader is somewhat peeved at being snatched from the trials and tri- bulations of the hero only to be introduced to such figures as the valiant don Juan of Austria, Phil- lip II, King of Spain, and Antonio Perez( his evil, scheming counsel- lor. Yet this period in Spanish his- tory-a few decades before and after the disaster of the Armada in 1588-is so romantic and color- V A I , '4 By J. M. ROBERTS Associated Press News Analyst IN HIS PROMISED reappraisal of America's foreign aid policy, one of the first things Secretary Dulles will need is a recapitulation of just what the nation is trying to do. For nearly 10 years now the chief emphasis of American foreign policy has been on de- velopment of a system of alliances, political, economic and military, with which to insure that the post-war tide of Russian expansion will rise no higher. The nation is now carrying global commit- ments, through the Western Hemisphere Pact, NATO, SEATO, and bilateral agreements. It has become an active participant in the eco- nomic phases of the Baghdad Pact. Hardly a- nation anywhere but has received some form of American aid since World War II. Yet 'a number of nations remain uncom- mitted in the cold war, either by treaty or by sentiment, and some of them, like India, are of great importance. TN THE BEGINNING, American aid was ex- tended through the United.Nations, UNRRA. Then came the Marshall Plan, the first great unilateral action by the United States designed finnran n mmim4ieNvv v. 1'I 4-nv.nn, ;.in trn .. not over when develppments in Europe and Asia, particularly the Korean war, shifted American aid emphasis from the economic to the military. And there it has stayed until Russia, taking a page from the American book, adopted the lessons of the Marshall Plan to her own use. Through all these meanderings there has been a tendency in ,the United States-a ten- dency frequently criticized by foreigners who have not been heard very well amid the din of the American-Russian quarrel-to let fun- damental objectives drift into the background. THE FUNDAMENTAL INTEREST of the. United States' is not to create a system of alliances which will deter the Communists from making war and prevent their expansion by other means. That is a tactic. The strategic interest of the United States is in creating a world situation in which a system of alliances will not be necessary. There is a grave question whether unilateral, bilateral or even multilateral economic and military agreements can attain this end. Even the committed nations are constantly either looking for the strings to American aid or actually feeling them. There has been re- sentment on this score even from America's BEST SHORT STORIES: An Eye For The Americani Scene THE O. HENRY AWARDS: PRIZE STORIES OF 1956. Paul Engle and Hansford Martin, eds. New York: Doubleday & Co. By ROBERT F: HAUGH THIS IS THE thirty-sixth volume of the 0. Henry Memorial Award series. The editors, fourth in a line that began in 1919 with Blanche Colton Williams, speak of the "vitality" and the "closeness to reality" of the stories chosen. It is true that for many years, the collection was dominated by stories involving tormented inner monologs of the sensitive and lost young man or woman. The author's here represented do look at the world about them, have an ear for the idiom of individual speech, and have an eye for the American scene. First prize was given to John Cheever for his story, "The Country Husband," a delightful story which first appeared in The New Yorker. Into Suburbia and the life of Francis Weed comes a strange sequence of events beginning with a dream-like forced landing of an airliner. It seems then as if the gods had come down from Olympus to take human forms and to touch with disturbing effect the commonplace lives of Weed and his suburban neighbors. Images of Atlas, Jupiter, of Circe appear in odd moments. While waiting on the platform, Weed sees in a passing train window a beautiful woman, sitting naked and combing her long golden hair. He has a passionate, impossible love affair with a refugee girl new to the neigh- borhood. So Weed goes through an enchanted phase, as if the Golden Age had transfigured his life. 'It's "Sweeney Among the Nightingales" in a -way, but done with a delightful verve and in Cheever's sardonic, tongue-in-cheek style. * * * * OF THE OTHER STORIES, I found the work of the Old Profession- als most worth reading. Faulkner is represented with "Race at Morning" ,I I '4 c. 4.