On April 25, 1957, the University of Richmond honored Dr. Edward Weeks, editor of The Atlantic Monthly) on the occasion of the magazine's centennial celebration. Upon the conclusion of his address to the convocation, the University conferred upon him the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters . Mr. Weeks has been associated with The Atlantic Monthly since 1924, serving as associate editor, editor of The Atlantic Monthly Press, and finally as editor of the magazine itself. Since its inception one hundred years ago, the magazine has distinguished both itself and its contributors by the high standard of literary criticism which it maintains. Now in his twentieth year as editor-in-chief, Mr. Weeks has manifested the superior principles and aims upon which it was founded. The Messenger takes pride in honoring this distinguished lecturer and journalist.
In anticipation of Mr. Weeks's visit to the University campus, a special exhibit was prepared by the staff of the Boatwright Memorial Library honoring The Atlantic Monthly and Southern Writers. Original manuscripts, procured after much time and effort and exhibited under glass in the Library, included those of Douglas Southall Freeman, Willa Cather, Mary Johnson, and Virginius Dabney. Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Thomas Wolfe were among those featured in a display of Southern writers published in The Atlantic Monthly. The Messenger takes pride in honoring the Boatwright Memorial Library for this truly fine achievement.
Volume LXXXI Spring Number 3
The Messenger
University of Richmond
Editor-in-Chief, Mary Elizabeth Hix
Richmond College Editor, Sam Nixon
Westhampton College Editor, Carmen Austin
Business Mgr., Bill Bedwell ........Art Editor, Eleanor Vosburgh
Faculty Advisor, Miss Joan Corbett
Critical Staff: Rosalind Allen, Ann Clark, Sally Finch, Nita Glover, Virginia Harris, Annette Hasty, John Ogilvie
Art Staff: Jane Cumby, Phoebe Goode, Shirley Smith, Margaret Williams
In This Issue
Short Stories
Through a Glass Darkly ................................Carmen Austin 5 illustrated by Eleanor Vosburgh and Virgin·ia Harris
Some Afternoons on the Bridge ......................John Goolrick 9 illu,strated by Eleanor Vosburgh
Yes, I Knew Shirley ..........................................Sam Holland 41
Essays illustrated by Eleanor Vosburgh
William Faulkner-His Substance of Remembering Rosalind Allen 28 illustrated by Margaret Williams
Aldous Huxley ........................................Mary Elizabeth Hix 36 illustrated by Margaret Williams
A Folio of Poetry and Art ..............................................15
The Cover is an original design by Virginia Harris
THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY
There was no turning back now. I sensed the nearness of truth-an intangible that filled the shadows and leaped out as if to stop me with each added step. The fog continued to rise in a misty vapor form, enveloping me, concealing my identity from the night. The questing mind seeks enlightenment. It becomes a passionate pilgrim, the harbinger of knowledge.
Who can say at what instance an impression is seared into one's mind. From childhood it had motivated my thoughts, lurking in the background awaiting the opportune moment, abdicating when threatened. Perhaps it had provided the stimulus to discover that which in reality I did not wish to know.
Turning my coat collar around my neck I walked along the narrow road. My footsteps were gradual and certain as if familiar with the worn path. I keep reminding myself that I had been here many times-but my mind rejected such fantasy. The familiarity of my surroundings was not from association. Yet the dream was so imbedded within my memory that it was difficult to distinguish between the imaginative and my knowledge of reality. Almost instantaneously I stretched out my hand to ward off the hanging limb whicbi the darkness hid from my sight. The movement was not estranged from intimacy-I had made it many times before in a dream world. What could it all mean? The question repeated aloud echoed in the surrounding stillness of the night.
I pushed back the sleeve of my coat to look at my watch, conceiving vividly as I did so that the time would be 8:30; I seem to be watching myself from afar off, knowing what my next movement would be. Yet as a puppet controlled by an unseen force I could not prevent my rhythmical but staccato actions. I sought to assure myself of my wandering in a tem-
porary, unreal world but this time there were no unlimited distances surrounding me. I would not awake presently from the dream I had come to abhor. There was no turning back, I was now enmeshed in a labyrinth, the abdominable dream became garbed in reality. The kaleidescope pattern fell into placid tranquility.
There hovered above me a cresent piece of moon, tilted on its edge, guarding the light which it offered selfishly as a guide. In the black night it appeared suspended against a dark curtain. On each side of the path enormous trees had entered into an alien marriage with the wild growth of weeds and underbrush. I watched the vines whose tenacles clutched the trees in a defiant manner. As before an insatiable desire to release the trees from the crushing force of the giant-like vines sent seeking fingers to search my pocket for the knife which I knew would not be there-I hurried on.
The urgent lash of the wind reminded me that my destination was near. It was a wind of tempest, whispering loudly in prophetic tones. Only a few steps ahead of me lay the alcove of moss covered trees. Through these my way would be made into the clearing of soft green grass from which I could see the house. I wanted to run, to rush with speed, anxious for the answer which lay behind the heavy closed door of the house. But I could not rush-my breathing became laborious as if I had run a long distance. I felt no fear-only cold fatigue which weighed heavily upon me, a piercing burden of my own unnatural self.
My hand grip on the small doctor's case which I carried relaxed. My fingers fallowed the outline of the gold letters of my name--JAMES DALTON-embossed on the brown leather. I was drawn into the past-living again my life within a few brief seconds-from earliest memories in the drab brick orphanage, through haunting high school jeers which disappeared in college and medical school as scholarship rose above cultural background.
A flash of memory brought to mind the urgent peal of the phone In the doctor's lounge. It reminded me again of this night errand. The road which refused entrance to my car started my venture on foot into the unknown which I suddenly understood with disturbing accuracy. A thrill of expectancy settled over my thoughts. The soft grass cushioned
my footsteps and encouraged me forward. Now within view of the mysterious and silent mansion I hesitated. "I know not how it was-but with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit." A fleeting memory drawn from a childhood many years passed, assured me of a sense of belonging within my present surroundings. The feeling of gloom was soon relieved by my anticipation of understanding the insoluble mystery of my oft recurring dream. Ascending the steps to the porch my mind encountered the prevalent desire to see beyond the dark draperies which hung in shroud-like manner ... guarding well its possessions. I passed through a maze of white columns whose sentinel form permitted my movement toward the great heavy white door. The door which heretofore had blocked entrance now swung open to my first knock. I recognized the kindly face of Mother Superior whom I had not seen since leaving the orphanage. "Come in, Dr. Jim. Your mother is expecting you."
Stepping into the room my eyes mirrored acknowledgement of that which had so long lay buried in the depth of a child's mind. Fleeting memories shrouded in the unsightly garb of a dream awakened. I sensed a great vacuum-filled only with emptiness. Then my vague longing for cherished truth became fused with dignity. At once I was endowed with a new calmness never before experienced. I heeded this summons with which fate, I knew, would now acquit herself.
- CARMEN AUSTIN '57
SOME ~FTERNOONS ON THE BRIDGE
He was an old man who stood in the rain and smoked his pipe upside down to keep the tobacco from getting wet. There were many things I wondered about him then. I wondered, for instance, why he always wore heavy flannel shirts in summer and winter and fall and spring and why he always stood in the rain on the concrete-railed bridge that led out of town to Longstreet Subdivision and watched the rain-splashed Stuart River as it flowed beneath the bridge and coursed in the distance where the river narrowed and looked, if you observed it from a faraway point, as if it would eventully narrow to a tiny eye and run into the willow trees that grew in the mud of its banks. He was an old man who ignored the rain that wetted his gray hair and I wondered why I saw him on the bridge only when it rained and only when no-one else was on the bridge's walkway. No one else but he and I, because I was fourteen then and walked home across the bridge every afternoon. I first noticed the old man in December of the year that I became fourteen but it was not until April that
he spoke to me. It was raining softly and I stopped by the place he stood and without turning his eyes away from the river, he said, "You're always on the bridge, aren't you son?"
"Yes, sir,I' I said. "Every afternoon."
The old man smoked his pipe and watched the river and did not say another word to me that day. A week went by before it rained and I saw him again. He was standing in the same spot at the middle of the bridge and I walked past him, thinking that he did not want to speak to me. But before I was very far, he said, "Wait a minute son. Come here ."
I stopped and walked back to where he was standing. It was raining hard now and the water hit my raincoat and streaked to the ground. We were the only people on the bridge, though every now and then a car would go by and make a swishing noise against the wet asphalt. The old man turned straight toward me. The pipe was in his mouth upside down and smoke came from it and floated over the river. It was an ordinary pipe made of wood carved into a design on the stem and I could tell that it was very old. He had probably had it for many years, maybe before his face had become wrinkled as it was now and before the backs of his hand became stiff and knobbed with blue veins. I looked at the old man and said meekly, "Did you call me, sir?"
"Do you go to school?" the old man asked me. "Yes, sir," I answered.
"And is that why you come over the bridge every day?" "Yes, sir."
The old man puffed on his pipe and looked at me. "What's your name?'' "Billy."
"And your last name?" "Embrey."
"Where do you live?"
"Over there in Longstreet Subdivision." "That place across the bridge?"
"Yes, sir."
"Isn't that a long way for you to walk?"
"No, sir," "it's not really too far."
I talked with the old man a while longer and he asked me many questions about myself-I answered them, almost forgetting about the rain until it stopped and the clouds over-
bead broke, revealing bits of a soft blue sky. The old man suddenly stopped talking and looked up at the sky. "It won't rain any more today," he said, almost as if he was sorry that the sun would be out again in a few minutes. Then he started walking toward the town end of the bridge and I watched him until he reached the end and turned down Water Street out of sight. But it rained the next day and I saw him again. "Look at the water," he said to me. "It's higher today than I have ever seen it."
I leaned over the concrete-railing of the bridge and looked down at the river; it did look higher than usual because the water had moved up on both banks and now it seemed unnatural somehow that it should be muddy and dirty as it always was. It seemed unnatural because I believed in those days, that the river was the main part of town and should be clear and blue and shining when the sun hit it. "Yes," I said to the old man, "it does seem very high." The rain kept coming in a sprinkle like the sprinkle of a lawn-waterer and because it had not been raining that morning, I was not wearing my raincoat. My shirt got wet and I knew my mother would scold me when I got home, but I stood there anyway and talked to the old man. I knew somehow that he wanted me to talk with him.
"You're a strange boy," he said, almost as if he knew just what I was thinking. "Most boys would not stand in the rain."
"It doesn't bother me," I said. "I don't mind it raining."
"The rain is always clean," the old man said, and then he looked at the river and smoked his pipe and it seemed a long time before he spoke again. "Everybody hates the rain," he said, "because they don't understand it. They don't know that the rain is clean, but I know it. I hate to see it stop. I wish it would rain always, every day, and then every day I could see something clean and stand in it and let it touch me. Do you think that's funny?"
"No, sir,'' I said, ,ii don't think it's funny at all."
"That's unusual," the old man said. "But you are only a boy. Someday you will think it is funny."
I stayed on the bridge a long time after that, much longer than I should have stayed because at five o'clock my father came across the bridge from work and stopped his car by the
curbing of the spot where I stood. It was still raining and my father opened the door of the car and told me to get in. "All right," I said. The old man was facing the river and the wind blew big gusts of rain past his face. "Goodbye," I said to him and he nodded his head and kept looking at the river. I got into the car and my father drove off. "How long were you on the bridge?" he asked me. "You look as if you're soaking wet."
"Since three-thirty," I told him. "Three-thirty? What were you doing?''
"Talking to that old man."
"Since three-thirty?"
"Yes, sir."
"Do you know who that man is?"
"No, sir, Iaon't know his name."
"I don't mean his name. As far as I'm concerned he doesn't have a name. I mean do you know what he is?"
"No, sir."
"He's a tramp," my father said, and he sounded angry. "He lives in a shack down by the river and he doesn't work. He picks up old bottles and sells them to get enough money to live. You know what a tramp is, don't you?''
"Yes, sir, I guess so."
"It's the same thing as a hobo or a bum," my father said, and he still sounded angry. "They;re people who don't work and are just generally good for nothing. I've seem him on the bridge before and I know what Don Tompkins told me about him. He's a good for nothing tramp and I don't want
you talking to him any more. The first thing you know he'll be asking you for money. He must be crazy, to stand out in the rain like that. Now I don't want you talking to him any more. Is that understood?"
"But there's nothing wrong with him," I -said. "He doesn't hurt anybody and I like him."
"You just pay attention to me and don't talk to him any more," my father said. "You'll do what I tell you and if I hear of you talking to him again you'll stay home every night for a month. You understand that don't you?"
"Yes, sir." But still that was not the end of it. That night at supper my father related to my mother the bridge incident. She asked my father about the old man and he told her the same things that Don Tompkins had told him. Don Tompkins worked with my father at the Franklin Plant and sometimes my father gave him a ride home. I did not like Don Tompkins because he treated me as if I were eleven instead of fourteen, and besides that he had a habit of calling me William instead of Billy. I wondered why he should say bad things about the old man and guessed it was because some people always say bad things about people who are not like themselves, whether they had a reason or not. I knew anyway that I liked the old man and refused to understand why my mother and father did not want me to talk to him. Maybe they didn't understand either because when I asked my mother, she said: "You just do as I tell you, Billy. You're not supposed to talk to that kind of person." And that was all she would say.
And then, three or four days later, it rained again. I have wished many times since then that it had not rained on that particular day. And I have wished, too, that I had not stayed late at school to see the science show in the auditorium because it was almost five o'clock when I started to walk across the bridge and saw the old man standing up ahead, looking at the river and smoking his pipe. I walked on and hoped the old man would not notice me or say anything to me because I remembered what my mother and father had said and I knew that my father would be driving home from work across the bridge any minute. But the old man did speak to me. When I got to where he stood, he turned around and smiledit was the first time I had ever seen him smile-and he said, "Come here and look at the water, Billy. There's something I
want to show you."
I stood there and did not move and the old man said, "Come here and look at the water now, Billy. It's all the way over the bank." I stood there and wanted to look over the rail at the bank but I still remembered what my father had said about making me stay in for a month and if that happened I would not be able to play at night for our class softball team; so I did not move. "Don't you want to see the water?" the old man said and he was no longer smiling.
"I want to," I said, "but I can't."
"Oh, you can't?" the old man said.
"No, sir, I'm sorry but my father won't let me."
"Your father will not let you see the river?"
"No, sir, he told me I couldn't talk to you any more. I have to go." Then I turned around and walked quickly away, walking without looking back until I reached the end of the bridge; and then I turned around just for a second and the old man was standing bareheaded in the rain and watching me strangely with the wooden pipe turned upside down in his mouth. And that was the last time I ever saw him. When it rained the next week, he was not on the bridge and he was not on the bridge when it rained the day after that and as far as I know he has never been on the bridge since then. Once I went down to the shack by the river where my father said he stayed; but I looked in the broken window at the dusty-walled little room and it was empty and cold. "He's just drifted off somewhere," my father said that night. "That's what they do; they drift off somewhere and you never hear tell of them again." And I asked my mother why she had not wanted me to talk to the old man and she just shook her head and said, "Someday you'll understand, Billy." And she was right. He was just an old man who stood in the rain and smoked his pipe upside down to keep the tobacco from getting wet; just an old man who said to me once, 'the rain is always clean and pure."' And that has been more than sixteen years ago and I have understood now for a long time. But the old man was wrong about .one thing. I will never think that it is funny.
- JOHN C. GOOLRICK '58
A Folio Of Poetry And Art
Nita Glover
Fred McCoy
Sam Nixon
*John Nixon
Sally Satterfield
. h Art Selections By Wit Eleanor Vosburgh
Margaret Williams
The sea rolls in Jm-pulsivewaves, Striking at creative life, Ignoring the pleas, Deaf to the cries of manHearing only Neptune . . . "Carry him away .. Let him die with me .. . We will make him ... sand ... Free from human compassion, From conformity ... " Deviating, shifting sand . . Rolling onward ... tide of life Man is caught in its undercurrent.
- NITA GLOVER '58
SEASONAL SYMPHONY
Fall preludes
The song of winter ... Its melody of shades Dancing on the strings of wind. Our hearts ... Love's musical duet.
Spring preserves Retired tones of summer. A tender ending Postludes the beginning. Love's rhapsody has no harmony. The song of summer is a solo.
-NITA GLOVER '58
REJECTIONSLIP
Using a star to light His cigarette And letting meteor-ashes fi,utter down The literary night) the Editor) Feet propped upon the empyrean desk) Tackles a cloud of manuscripts.
These are
The ones the winged postman tugged upstairs This morning and nobody found the time To read. Always the Editorial staff Is overworked-even when relatives (Including) some aver) the Editors Mother) assist.
Yawning) the Editor
Scans faulty story after story) vows To have that fi,uorescent moon replaced) Regrets He ever fostered literature.
The Editor is blue-penciling souls.
- JOHN NIXON, JR.
Editor's Note: The author of this poem is a successful writer, having published in the Atlantic Monthly and several nationally known poetry magazines. By permission of the author, we present the above original and unpublished work in this issue.
ULYSSESAT THE DOOR
Ten years have heavily rolled since last I treaded on sweet Ithacan soil, Much have I seen and known, Wander lusted and sore inquiring, Many times have I stopped, But soon bored ( and so-fated) have game.
Experience weights my pace heavy in the night, And eager pants my breath at the door of home. But I am not seen the sway-backed battle horse, A golden cornu imagined on my bowed head Makes me seem the fleeting myth, to menBut Penelope! ... does she recognize me by day1
- FREDMcCOY'58
TO THE ROMANTICS
Voices on a Greek vase will sing, The West wind will whisper, The albatross continues on wing, La Belle Dame-who will kiss her?
Michael's Sheep-Fold will surely keep, Childe Harold in search of a land, Isabella (sad maiden) will weep, Ozymandias, lie there in the sand! -SAM NIXON '57
TOUCHSTONE
Peace, silent stealer of souls, Healer of wounds past and present, Guardian of sacred joy-Blessing efflorescent!
Fill quickly the bloody cleft, Abysmal in its own emptiness, Bo terribly, utterly dark-even now Blind recruits of a sightless generation Stampede to receive you in ARMS!
Touch our eyes, ETERNAL TOUCHSTONE!
-SHIRLEY SATTERFIELD'60
THE MANDARINS
The Mandarins. By Simone de Beauvoir. 610 pp. New York: The World Publlsblng Co. $IS.
The Mandarins is a lengthy novel concerned primarily with the political and psychological dilemmas of the French people following the last war. It is a direct reflection of the cynicism, amorality, and governmental confusion in that country which had become only too apparent to the rest of the world during the last ten years; but, more important, it brings to light and focuses attention upon the minds which have created this confusion.
It is the story of a French intellectual circle in Paris; most of the characters are writers for a political paper, and all are deeply affected by the rising tide of Communism, particularly when the latter publish scathing articles about the anti-Communists in their own political papers. This group Indicates a kind of French person hitherto largely unrecognized-that of the intelligent person who realizes that his country is in chaos, even knows why, and is fighting a desperate battle to lift it out of that chaos-as opposed to the ordinary little man-of-the-streets who may recognize chaos when he sees it, but ignores its foreboding possibilities as long as his private world remains intact. Yet in spite of the clear thinking which we might not have expected, the novel confirms baldly the decadence Into which France has long fallen; whether France's turbulent circumstances have arisen out of that decadence, of whether the reverse is true we are still unable to judge. De Beauvoir being quite French, we may very naturally expect to find the reverse implied.
Individually, the group is wretched in its personal life, for each member is idealistic in the search for happiness, and that happiness is so elusive that even the seeking is bewildering. This frantic search without reward perhaps explains why the principal character, Anne, who writes a great part of the book in the first person, is devotedly attached to her husband, Robert, yet finds an ecstatic if transient glory in having an affair with a man in Chicago; why Nadine, Anne's daughter, wavers in her affairs from one man to another, inor-
dinately disliking them all; why Henri persists in his relations with the neurotic and demanding Paula long after love, physical desire, and even sympathy have perished.
The Mandarins is unquestionably an outstanding work. It is beautifully written, and indeed de Beauvoir's fine style and empathy make the book as compelling as it is. She handles involved discourse with a skill seldom equaled, fortunately, for the conversations, extremely long and involved, having to do primarily with the politics. She has an excellent insight into mind and action of her characters, and draws them with a highly realistic pen. In fact, the book is so well written that I cannot understand why the author felt it necessary to include many of the coarser details of intimacy which are recorded with scrupulous care. In my opinion, The Mandarins could stand beautifully on its own merit without what Beauvoir must believe are an addition to the bare facts but which most people consider superfluous and at times unnecessarily vulgar. However, the public loves a "dirty book", and the novel is, after all, a best seller. Certainly it has brought this very great French writer into the prominent light of the public eye. - KENTDARLING '57
THE FALL
Inscribed on the dust-jacket of Albert Camus' new bestseller are these words: "A new and major work of fiction by the man who, since the death of Thomas Mann, is in our opinion Europe's greatest living writer." Since the publication of The Stranger in 1942, Camus has enjoyed increasing popularity throughout the literary world. In this first work of fiction since The Plague, Camus has chosen a tricky and hazardous subject-that of a man, caught in the toils of his conscience, who indulges in a calculated confession designed to alleviate his personal burden and at the same time introduce a harsh and introspective expose of humanity. The fact that Camus succeeds in this Herculean attempt is proof, if any be needed, of his superior gifts.
The Fall. By Albert Camus. Translated from the French by Justin O'Brien. 147 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $3.
It is perhaps the style, or the medium, which accounts for the enormous mental impact which the book has. Set in an Amsterdam dive, Camus has created a character whose intense introspection is an examination of the human race as a whole. In the brief tour de force, this former Parisian lawyer and acknowledged libertine-now judge-penitent of the Amsterdam bar, recites in a carefully controlled monologue the terrible and inescapable truth of man's nature. Evil is set against innocence in a masterful arrangement of sentences, each piling irony upon irony, until the reader is suddenly aware that justice is an ambiguous thing, seized by man to justify his own sordid failures. In that realization lies the core of moralistic justification: no man is innocent and no man therefore may judge others from a standpoint of righteousness.
Closely allied with Sartre until 1953, Camus has chosen this greatest of his novels to expound, in elaborate detail, the existentialism of modern France. Born in Algeria in 1913, the son of a working family, Camus worked his way through the University of Algiers, then turned to journalism as a career. As one of the most important writers for the Resistance, he gained a certain eminence that was to flare into international prominence in 1951 with his publication of The Rebel --"an essay on man in revolt." In The Fall, the moral condemnation that begins in the reader's mind with the first of many questions spirals into a tighter and tighter matrix, into which the individual is shut . . . the "little-ease" of modern conscience. The immensity of this work lies in the fact that it dwells so absorbingly on the conveniences that man builds about himself to protect his ego from the fall of self-knowledge. From what Camus calls a full and happy life, Clarence, the narrator (about whom one is never sure) drags his listener through the uncertainities that first assailed him when he heard the sound of derisive laughter on the quays of the Seine, to the brothels of the Left Bank, his imprisonment by the Germans in North Africa, and finally his escape into Holland • . . where he now lives, repeating his story to whomever will listen, watching their uneasiness and mute denials, and finally, in complete triumph, listening to their confessions, his role as condemned and condemning fulfilled. Throughout this in• sidious and subtly logical discourse, one is vaguely aware of
his own involvement, and finally his attachment to these same ideas and complexes which Camus tears down with such finesse. In his role of moralist and existentialist philosopher, Camus has created a novel which holds, in its essence, the soul of modern man.
-MARY ELIZABETHHIX '57
THE UNICORN
Anne Morrow Lindbergh. The Unicorn and Other Poems. New York: Pantheon, 1956, pp. 86.
Mrs. Lindbergh's poems are conservative in both form and content. In pieces for the most part metrical she reveals her responsiveness to the seasons, to leaf and flower, cloud and star, tide and seashell.
Though capable of an occasional trenchant metaphor ("A sail, spark-white upon the space of sea-Can pin a whole horizon into place") , she too often settles for unimaginative lines that are almost banal. Nor is she above inversion ("should one choose---A mermaid's careless liberty to lose") and elision ("A harp on which another's passion, blow").
Of the thirty-five poems in this collection, perhaps the most impressive is "The Unicorn in Captivity," a seven-page offering in irregular rhyme, inspired by a tapestry in The Cloisters. Somewhat reminiscent, structurally, of Amy Lowell's "Patterns, it is rich-textured and romantic:
He could leap the corral, If he rose
To his full white height; He could splinter the fencing light, With three blows
Of his porcelain hoofs in flightIf he chose.
He could shatter his prison wall, Could escape them all-
If he rose,
If he chose.
Unluckily, the author, like her unicorn, frequently fails to "leap the corral," so that many of her verses prove pedestr ian-when indeed they are ambulatorY at all.
--~ I . .i.' .
William Faulkner
WILLIAM FAULKNER
His Substance of Remembering
Quentin's father gave him the watch-it had belonged to his grandfather before him. When his father gave it to him, he called it the "mausoleum of all hope and despair," then went on to say: "I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won. . . . They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools." Times goes on, in William Faulkner; yet time-the time of chronology, of sequence, of logical order-is laid aside in order for the past, present, and future, even, to be interwoven into Faulkner's coherent, and at times, incoherent, form. With that in mind one may enter the field of man's "folly and despair," and see that out of man's forgetting comes his remembering-not chronologically; but in continuum.
Benjy, the idiot, the thirty-three-year-old child narrator of the first section of The Sound and the Fury, provides the basic key to understanding Faulkner's time treatment. The very fact that Benjy, thirty-three years old physically, is in reality three years old mentally makes it obvious enough that as narrator he cannot recount past events in normal sequence . Benjy lives in the present; yet hearing the men playing golf (in what used to be his pasture) say the one word he understands-"caddy"-has meaning for him only in calling to remembrance his sister Caddy or at least the loss of her.
The use of Benjy as narrator of the first section rather than one of the other three is essential to the organization of the book as a whole. The date of his section, April 7, 1928, significantly his thirty-third birthday, is the middle day of three consecutive dates Faulkner uses for his sections-April 6, 7, and 8. Purposely upsetting the chronology of his dates in this way enables Faulkner to go back in time effectively, back eighteen years, for his second section, Quentin's section, June 2, 1910--the day Quentin committed suicide, having to
do it, having to kill himself in an effort to expiate his sister's sin, yet waiting until that very day to get the full benefit of his Harvard tuition.
Quentin's "day" began when he knew it was time to get up by the shadow of the window sash, and Shreve, his Harvard roommate, crune in, asking if he was going to take a cut because the bell would ring in two minutes. Then he heard his watch-the watch his father had given him-ticking away on the dresser, and the clock began to strike, and he thought about Caddy-"One minute she was standing in the door .... "
Time had thus become the all-important factor on this, Quentin's day. Quentin felt the urgency of the time in the striking of the clock, the ticking of his watch (which, when his father gave it to him, he told him it was for forgetting the time); he felt the pressure of the time, the day, because he knew what he must do in that day. And so he recorded: "I went to the dresser and took up the watch, with the face still down. I tapped the crystal on the corner of the dresser and caught the fragments of glass in my hand and put them into the ashtray and twisted the hands off and put them in the tray. The watch ticked on. I turned the face up, the blank dial with little wheels clicking and clicking behind it, not knowing any better."
Lawrence Bowling, in an analysis of The Sound and the Fury, points out the importance of Quentin's rememberingremembering the time Caddy got her dress wet and pulled it off in front of the other children to dry. Worried at this, Quentin slapped her, and she fell back in the water and got her drawers wet. Then, feeling partly to blame, Quentin promised not to tell; but Jason, the other brother, had to be bribed to silence. Bowling parallels this remembrance of Quentin's to Caddy's later staining of her honor, Quentin again assuming the responsibility, and committing suicide to expiate her sin. And Jason, the other brother, blackmailed her for all she was worth. The whole of Quentin's "day" was as much a part of the past as of the present.
Miss Emily, of "A Rose for Emily," is, in a way, the per- ' sonal embodiment of Faulkner's whole idea of time continuum. When free postal delivery was initiated in Jefferson, Miss Emily would not hear of having a house number and a mail-
box. The sheriff came, demanded she pay truces, and Miss Emily said, "See Colonel Sartoris." (He had been dead ten years-but she refused to accept the fact of her father's death.) She refused, too, to accept the fact of her lover's death-Homer Barron. So when Miss Emily died herself, and people from Jefferson entered her house again-which had been closed to visitors for years-entered her bolted, rosevalanced bridal chamber and found in the bed what was left of her lover, "rotted beneath what was left of the nightshirt," they found on the pillow beside him the indentation of a head and a long strand of iron-gray hair-Miss Emily's hair. She, living, had lain there in the bed beside her dead lover, her present encompassed in her past.
Charlie, the boy, going rabbit hunting with Aleck Saunders and the Edmonds' boy when he was twelve, fell in the creek-and Lucas Beauchamp, Negro protagonist of Intruder in the Dust, took the boys back to his cabin, had Charlie "en• veloped in the quilt like a cocoon, enclosed completely now in that unmistakable odor of Negroes." But, and this is the significant part, the smell did not mean anything now, an hour before it happened (it being the debt established for Charlie by Lucas when he refused payment for the "nigger food"just seventy cents Charlie tried to pay him, but because he could not make Lucas take it, the debt was established for once and all), four years before he would realize all the rami• fications of it ( because four years later Charlie was compelled to go out and dig up a grave for Lucas, still trying to pay for the meat and greens). The whole plot of the novel becomes meaningful only in light of the past debt-the debt which assumed gigantic proportions in the "black vault" of Charlie's anguish. Charlie's uncle-the lawyer-Stephen Gavin-explained it all to him-that ('yesterday today and tomorrow are Is ... It's all now you see. Yesterday won't be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago."
Quentin, reading the wistaria-cigar-scented letter from his father in his sitting-room at Harvard, was not only reading, but listening, and seeing too, that earlier story-the one Miss Goldfield had told him-and seeing not only his letter, but the earlier letter, the one from Bon to Judith, and he remembered what he already knew-that Henry, Judith's
brother, killed Bon-a brother of them both, but with only the one difference, that he had Negro blood-killed him to protect Judith and not only her, but what was left of the family. And to Quentin this act was important-it was not merely part of a past tragedy-it was a part of his own compulsion to expiate his sister's (Caddy's) sin.
Quentin, hearing the Sutpen story, the story he had heard so many times before because it was a part of him, realized what was true not only for him, but for all the characters involvedin Faulkner's substance of remembering: "You were not listening because you knew it all already, had learned, absorbed it already without the medium of speech somehow from having been born and living beside it, with it, as children will and do: so that what your father was saying did not tell you anything so much as it struck, word by word, the resonant strings of remembering."
"They endured." Dilsey, the ageless Negro servant of generations of Compsons, did not say it exactly, but she knew it. Caddy had been talking to Dilsey about Benjy-whose name was Maury in the beginning, but was changed to Benjamin, a Bible name, when it was discovered that he was an idiot. And Dilsey said: "Name aint goint to help him. Hurt him neither .... My name been Dilsey since fore I could remember and it be Dilsey when they's long forgot me. How will they know it's Dilsey, when it's long forgot, Dilsey, Caddy said. It'll be in the Book, honey, Dilsey said, Writ out. Can you read it, Caddy said. Wont have to, Dilsey said, They'll readit for me. All I got to do say Ise here."
In striking contrast to Dilsey's assured hope, her endurance and the endurance of all her people, stands the Compson disintegration and decay, symbolized in the person of Benjy first of all, being an idiot and thus never having a real existence at all; in the brother-sister relationship of Quentin and Caddy which finally resolved into moral destruction of one and physical, life-repudiating destruction of the other; back even in the relationship of the two brothers, Charles Bon and Henry Sutpen, Henry, having to destroy his own brother because he had Negro blood in order to try to save something of the family's honor and pride.
The signs of decay were seen not only in the family, the
members of it, but •in the deeper symbol, the land itself which tied the family strands together from one generation to the next. The land-the South-was striving to endure out of it all; yet it, as much as the human characters if not more so, was helpless in the mesh of time, past into present, old and new interacting-the same land evolving yet changed to the very core of its being. The characters, in their decay, decayed the land along with them, neither of them separate from what had and would happen. As Quentin expressed it, "Maybe nothing ever happens once and is finished. Maybe happen is never once but like ripples maybe on water after the pebble sinks, the ripples moving on, spreading .•.. "
Shreve, the roommate, the Canadian, heard Quentin tell the story about old Sutpen, and not just about him, but about the whole South, and he said: "Jesus, the South is fine, isnt it. It's better than the theatre, isnt it. It's better than Ben Hur, isnt it." He could say that, the outsider, the foreigner, looking on, being fascinated. But for Quentin, even in his Harvard sitting-room, overcoat on over bathrobe, New England cold, there was no coming away from it--even telling it, he was not away from it-because he was the Southerner, he was the South and always would be, just as much as Sutpen, and partly because of Sutpen.
But the story-it was more than a Southern tragedy, it was more than a tale about a man named Thomas Sutpenthis was the realization which came to Quentin's grandfather when he heard the story straight from Sutpen's lips, both of them before the campfire, drinking whiskey-it wouJ.d haye been the "same story if the man had had no name at all, if it had been told about any man or no man." Because the story itself was life itself-that was the important thing. This was the same truth that Quentin and the others had learned from their father-"teaching us that all men are just accumulations dolls stuffed with sawdust swept up from the trash heaps where all previous dolls had been thrown away .... " No man anywhere--not just in the South-is separate from his sawdust past-the stuffing continues from past into present, generation into generation, father into son.
There was once a "tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." Faulkner did not tell the tale; Benjy
and others told it-a tale enveloped in all the empty, meaningless sounds of decay and disintegration and repudiationthe sound symbolized not only by Benjy's incomprehensible wailing, but by the "fine dead sound" of Harvard-the pasture sold for a dead sound, symbolized too in Boon's frenzied hammering of gun barrel on gun breech, protecting his deadLion and Sam, the dog and the man. "Then Benjy wailed again, hopeless and prolonged. It was nothing. Just sound. It might have been all time and injustice and sorrow become vocal for an instant by a conjunction of planets." The sound in time, the time in sound-out of both of them came the hearing and the feeling and the sensing of the tale.
The tale signified nothing-nothing meaning more than something because it meant disintegration into nothing, into ultimate ruin, into empty death. But Faulkner does not stop here, with the nothing. Pessimist though he may seem at times, he can still remember out of the past the glory and pride and honor; he can still believe in endurance, not only Dilsey's and that of the other Sambos, but the endurance of mankind. In accepting the Nobel Prize Award in 1950 Faulkner said: "I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure; that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the lost worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny, inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure; he will prevail .... It is his (the writer's) privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past." Out of Faulkner's substance of remembering comes his hope, his work. Just as the "wistaria, sun-impacted on the wall," distills the room-Faulkner's wistaria-scented remembering still penetrates his printed page.
- ROSALINDALLEN
'57
Aldous . Huxley
ALDOUS HUXLEY
In an age of economic and social decadence, the corruetion of traditional standards of value, influenced and cast by scientific and psychological thought, has been taken by certain authors to mean a type of renaissance in thinking. In leaving the traditional or conventional, they become more personal, even individualistic, in their method of selecting events in fiction. This transition led to new attitudes and techniques which characterized a change that was both aware of the old, yet detached from the new. As a result, the transition became a nominal one, liberating writers from the traditional standards without binding them to the innovations of their own century.
A parallel may be drawn, although not a close one, with Swift who, like Aldous Huxley, was disgusted by the behavior of his class. Both wrote satiric pictures of life, not out of a feeling of cynical indifference, or amused contempt, or superiority-not like Shaw in some of his plays, or H. G. Wells in many of his novels-or Evelyn Waugh in Handful of Dust -but out of feelings of horror, of intense disappointment, of frustration.
There is another type of writer who would be likely to turn to satiric observation: this is the traditionalist, the classicist, whose thinking would inevitably be revolted by the lack of order or purpose in contemporary life. These modern thinkers, if they may be called that, share a disappointment, a nostalgia for the orderly coherence of past ages, that compares graphically with the futility and chaos that marks our own century. Not only is it a breakdown of personal standards of integrity and morals, but it springs from the far deeper indignation of an author to shun the portrait that is painted in vivid comparison to an age of unlicensed morality. T. S. Eliot, in his Wasteland and The Hollow Men reechoes the futile imaginings of Huxley's earlier novels. Eliot is a classicist whose frustrations are like those of Huxley's thwarted romanticism. Their differences are merely differ• ences in approach. Eliot deplores the lack of purpose in a civil-
ization while Huxley emphasizes a lack of direction and worthwhileness in the individual. They both find a partial solution, Eliot in the Anglican church, Huxley in the mystical pacifism of Eastern religions. They are complementary elements of the same problem. Despite the fact that both of them feel a wounded sense of tangible order in an otherwise orderly universe, they avoid the issue. Their refuges are escapes in the sense that they provide a personal compensation instead of seeking an alteration that will stabilize and evolve a society that will have meaning, order, and harmony. The principles of ethical philosophy are far easier to recognize than to remedy.
Aldous Huxley's continual search for solvency, for metaphysical attachment, has led him to seek in the philosophies of many religions an acceptable answer to the problems of modern civilization. His solution is necessarily verbal and for that reason exists in theory alone. By attempting to erect a value that remains independent of the positive, he insures its continual application to the changes of society. Although he has become in the last few years principally an essayist, it is his novels that most clearly evolve the thinking of a modem universal.
Born in 1894 of the distinguished aristocratic family that produced Thomas Henry Huxley, Matthew Arnold, and Julian Huxley, Aldous Leonard Huxley became, through no choice of his own, an inevitable hobgoblin of the family fortunes. Partially blinded in 1908 by the devastating effects of beratitis, Huxley after a lapse of eight years was graduated from Balliol College, Oxford (aided by a magnifying glass) with First Class Honors in English Literature and philology. Working as a jack-of-all-trades during and immediately following the war, he developed, partially from his disability, and partially from his immense creative genius a lasting bent for the reflective life. "My ambitions and pleasure," he wrote, "are to understand, not to act." Huxley probably suggests this mental aestheticism best in the synthesis of Point Oounter Point. Never an emotional writer, he is seldom sympathetic; his is more the approach of a 'colossal intellectual vitality' which expends itself in the amusing denunciation of earthly paradises. He is an idol-smashing Moses whose analyptical mind completely eradicates the materialistic, mundane seek-
ing of a careless world. He is able to see far beyond the actual potents of a situation into the underlying psychological and spiritual abnormalities which force individuals into a mold of mass conformity. Rebellious to the point of eccentricity, the wreckage that he leaves behind points to a maturity of concept which few people achieve in a lifetime. His fiction involves a far deeper thought process than the world can absorb without completely unbalancing the multiplicity of its own confused complexes. Such a phenomena is evident in the suicide of Mr. Savage (Brave New World), whose internal combat is inexpertly meted against the overwhelming odds of a universe completely dominated by the sensuous expecta. tions of controlled existence.
Modern readers know Huxley by his two most successful novels. Despite the fact that his bibliography contains forty-seven titles to date, Brave New World and Point Counter Point are perhaps the best products of his satirical ingenuity. Parodies of the age that 'invented Peter Pan and raised that monstrosity of arrested development to the rank of an ideal,' both the political and social satires reflect the indignation of a mind revolted by the despicable proportion of human activity. Before the death of Lawrence in 1930, Huxley spent much time on the latter's ranch in Taos, New Mexico. With his extremely sensitive face, bespectacled eyes, and intelligent school-boy's grin, he has been called, with a good deal of accuracy, the universal man in a disorganized age. After his arrival in America (1929) he produced seven of his ten published novels; out of these the most shocking revolutionary was Brave New World (1932). The suffering and death that produced a melodramatic effect in P<oint Count.er Point, framed in political satire, approaches closer the idea of escape from the 'wearisome condition of humanity.' There are no human beings in Brave New World. Machinated by test-tube regeneration, The Central London Hatcherys slide noiselessly through the daily task of creating human life. Man, full grown at two, with the body of stunted Gammas, Deltas, Epsilons, is a machine, to build society into a perfectly mechan• ized, social stability • . . with drops from this syringe and in· jections from that hypodermic, the world is blessed with ten thousand more degraded automations, taught to lust without love, and feel without emotion. It is another monster slave
state, an Oceania of mindless robots, of animal degeneration that is taught fictional propaganda and surt'eited with sensualism.
Similar in many respects, to Brave New World, Point Counter Point is the finest innovation of Huxleyian genius. The amphibious nature of the writer, the rapid conditioning of the read~r, and the basic truth of his prophetic nature combine to produce a striking orchestration of characters whose stereotyped features, eminent in previous novels, reach their consummation in this command performance of dramatic ideologicai conflict. A caricature of life, it is the indecency of modern society to seek in intellectual corruption the paradoxical truth of 'psychological freedom.'
In the recurrent chaos of thought patterns, it is often difficult to follow the essential development of a preeminently seeking thinker. This is true of Huxley, particularly in the changing and often contrapuntal enigmas of his theological and philosophical evolution. His work, however, may be said to fall roughly into three phases. The first of these, loosely termed the 'mystical' period, deals with the earlier social sat-:ires, written in the twenties and deeply influenced by the degeneracy of post-war morals. Among these Antic Hay, Those Barren Leaves, and Crome Yellow received instantaneous, if shocked, applause from the licentiously unstable world. The limitations however that a specified field forced upon such a writer, a 'fin de siecle' unsatisfying at the onset, soon gave way to a growing preoccupation with ethics, psychology and philosophy. As a popularizer of scientific and philosophic aestheticism, his Freudian involvement would seem normal, arising as it did out of a system that was chaotically broken with war, and weighted with unnatural inhibitions that were destroyed by a rigorous amorality, constructed as a way to freedom. Out of these effects, the second phase initiated Huxley into the role of prophet-teacher, one in which he seriously and accurately pointed out the inadequacies of society, jutaposing itself upon a still more inadequate symbol of modern man.
Accepted as a direct testament of Huxley's personal religion ("arrived at by direct experience and therefore immune to sceptical erosion"), Eyeless in Gaza is more than a pacifistic statement of ascetic spiritualism. Despite its strange, almost clumsy, construction it foreshadows the conflict of good
and evil which grows out of Huxley's increased preoccupation with spiritual constructivism. A religion must be practical to be applicable. Huxley, in his attempt to disseminate and purify thought, has produced one of the shocking and incJis. pensible arguments in modern philosophical study.
Recently engaged in a search for what the Eastern mystics call 'shantih', the peace that passeth understanding, Huxley's particular articulateness and amazing erudition have struggled for adequate expression to this highly philosophical and religious problem. It is obvious that there are no panaceas and no shortcuts. Man is an amphibious being who lives simultaneously or successively in several universes . . . in the world of matter, the world of mind, the world of spirit; in the individual world and in the social world. Peace, if it is to be obtained, must be sought on all of the levels of man's multiple existence. Aldous Huxley, like many of his contemporaries, feels that the only solution to this multiplicity of elements is necessarily a religious one. Shocked and horrified at the deliberate brutalities of his fellow-men, he has retreated into what he considers an answer to his own, and perhaps others, problems. In seeking to apply Hinduism to western culture, the interpretation of peace becomes more than a mere matter of political and economic arrangements. Because man stands on the borderline between the animal and the divine, the temporal and the eternal, peace on earth possesses a cosmic significance. Consequently every violent extinction of a human life has a transcendent and eternal significance. Moreover the mind of the universe is, among other things, the peace that passes understanding. Man's final end is the realization that, in his essence, he is one with the universal mind. Metaphysically it is an adequate answer; practically it entails the neces• sity of learning to live in the peace that does not pass under• standing. In both mediums man must work, within himself and outside of himself, to secure for his own life and those of his fellow-men the elusive quality of 'shantih'.
YES, I KNEW SHIRLEY
Since it happened many people have asked me if I knew her. It's a hard question to answer, although I always answer in the affirmative. Even then, though, I don't look them in the face when I answer. It's hard to say that I knew her, much less give any details about her; instead, I look off into the distance and nod my head "yes", all the while trying to blot out of my memory the thought of her blonde hair, her clear, well-defined features on an otherwise thin face, her slim body and its attractive proportions.
No, I should try to remember those characteristics, for they were the characteristics of the Shirley I knew. Blotting out the thought of Shirley entirely had almost become a practice, for the prevalent memory of her was the way I saw her last. She wasn't pretty then.
I met Shirley a little over a year and a half ago. She was working in one of the three drug stores in my home town, the one in which the high school crowd always met after school in the afternoon. I had gone in the store with my brother, doing nothing in particular, just killing a little time on a Saturday morning. Shirley greeted my brother when we walked in, for she already knew him. Following his lead, we started to give her a "line" before I told her who I was ... telling her that I was married, that I was older than my brother, and a general bunch of like stuff. Here came Shirley's weak point, for she would believe anything which had the slightest air of possibility. Now don't get me wrong at this point, for this fell in the category of general kidding. After speaking to her for two minutes one could feel the warmth and friendliness which hung over Shirley like an aura; an honest effort at deception could not be made if a feeling of true friendship were to be maintained.
The next day I dropped by to see her and tell her that we had been handing her a line. It really wasn't necessary, for one of the other employees had told her just after we had gone. I really expected to get a cold shoulder when I discovered that, but that wasn't the way Shirley was. Instead, all was forgiven and we were old friends as far as she was concerned.
During the two weeks that I was home I got to know Shirley quite well. It got so that on the nights when I didn't have anything to do I would go down to the drug store ... Shirley would fix a Coke for me the moment she saw me coming . . . and sip on a Coke until closing time. She enjoyed these conversations and it gave me a pleasant bit of time to spend on otherwise dull evenings. Neither of us expected anything of the other except a smile and few words to pass the time.
By the time I had to go back to school I had developed a close friendship with her, one of these brother-sister-but-notquite-as-much-so relationships. She and I found it easy to be content with each other on that basis, so when I left for school we both knew where we stood.
Needless to say, while the cat was away, the mouse got a chance to play. By the time Christmas vacation rolled around Shirley was engaged, and she didn't even write to tell me. I was happy for her, nevertheless, and prayed that she had done the right thing. For all intents and purposes it seemed that she had, for the following spring she got married. When I saw her during Spring Holliday she was happy and radiant, complaining good-naturedly about married life and saying that I should find a wife and settle down. The latter I dismissed with a laugh, but the former I discussed with her at length. She and her husband had their differences, but, all things taken into account, she was sure that she hadn't been too hasty. Of course, this made me very happy for her. The only thing that marred the conversation was when she told me that she was going to stop. working there and start keeping house about five miles out of town. This, naturally, meant that I wouldn't be seeing J.,,qrunless we happened to run into each other on one of her 11tfrequent trips to town. I figured that I would see her every now and then, even though she wouldn't be in town.
At any rate, I didn't see her after I got out of school in June. I went to work for my father, who is a mortician. To me was delegated the job of general helper, office clerk, flower handler, death call handler, embalming apprentice, and the questionably pleasant job of ambulance assistant. Having been in and out of the office all of my life, I fell right into the job and learned what the ground floor was like. It was hard work, the kind that taxes both the mental and physical abilities of a person. Being constantly on the go, jumping whenever the telephone rang, rushing to be in three places at one time ... they were all in a day's work.
The summer days passed quickly and I didn't see Shirley at all. The thought of her would come to my mind quite often, especially when I would drop by the drug store and see a new, expressionless face behind the counter. Somehow the store didn't seem the same without Shirley to greet everyone-and she knew most of the customers by name-as they came in. I often wondered, also, if she was making out all right as a homemaker, if she generated the same warmth in her home that she always seemed to generate in the store. Then, as other things would occupy my mind, the thought of Shirley would fade into the background.
Then, one Sunday morning as I was reading the news- paper prior to going to church, the telephone rang. Personal call or business call, I could not tell; I automatically did what experience had taught me: laid down the paper, picked up a pad and pencil, then lifted the receiver.
The caller sounded hoarse, in a hurry. He managed to say that there had been an automobile accident and the am- bulance was needed right away. I asked him where it had occurred, and after he gasped his answer I told him that we would be right out. I called Jim, who usually drives the am- bulance. His wife, however, told me that he was at church and couldn't be contacted without disrupting the church meet- ing. That left me with only one alternative, for my father was at church also. Knowing that every second was precious and could literally mean the difference in life or death for someone, I realized that for the first time I would have to take the ambulance out alone.
Without bothering to change clothes, afraid of losing a little span of precious time, I ran headlong two blocks to the 44
office, opened the garage, pulled the Cadillac ambulance out and headed for the town limits. The wheel responded easily to my touch, too easily for one who was scared and numb, driving almost by instinct. Faster, faster, damn it!
The car had gone off the road and down a forty-five degree embankment. It had stayed in an upright position, but a good part of the motor was pushed back into the front seat. There had been two people in the car, a man and his wife: he was sitting on the shoulder of the road, no visible external injuries save for a long gash on his forehead; she ... well, she wasn't the prettiest sight I ever saw. Her face was an unrecognizable blotch of red over white. She was stretched across the front seat, her head and shoulders extending over the end of the seat and out of the torn-off door. Her head was being held by a half-hysterical woman who was weeping and yelling to us to hurry. Her breathing was harsh and heavy, each gasp reaching for more air that it could obtain.
Gently, gently, get her onto the stretcher without causing any internal injuries.
Calling for aid from some of the bystanders, we managed to get the girl on the stretcher and into the ambulance. I put the half-hysterical woman-her sister-in with her and took the husband up front with me, turned around, and headed for the hospital.
Damn, damn, damn! Can't this go any faster?
The emergency room was ready and waiting as I pulled into the hospital. The doctor was on his way, and an intern was there to supervise until the doctor's arrival. I had done my job ... they were now in capable hands.
I sat down, lit a cigarette, and tried to relax. I could see the nurses flying back and forth to the emergency room, ever aloof and efficient. I stopped one of them and inquired about the names of the patients, but she didn't know. An orderly asked me if I would go outside and cut off the red blinkers on the ambulance. I said sure, walked through the door and almost got knocked down by a group of relatives who had just received word of the accident. One of them-the woman who seemed to be the mother of the group-looked familiar, but I dismissed the thought for I know most of the people in town by sight but not by acquaintance.
Then came the blow, the sledge-hammer, the pile driver. I heard one of the relatives speak the girl's maiden name. I couldn't move, my mind went blank, my eyes went blind. Under that blotch of red, the unrecognizable face toward which I had felt as coldly impersonal as would a doctor who performs an operation on a total stranger, the mangled bit of humanity which I had pulled from a devil of man's own invention .... Shirley .... Shirley ....
Shirley lived a little over twenty-four hours after the wreck. At 11 :30 the following morning she quickly slipped away into the vast unknown without regaining consciousness. She never knew what happened.
Now do you wonder why it's hard to say anything when people ask me if I knew her? Do you wonder why I turn away and nod my head, hoping that the conversation will be dropped there?
Yes, I knew Shirley.
WHO'S NEW
Making his first appearance in the spring issue of The Messenger, John Goolrick, a junior at Richmond College, is author of the short story, "Some Afternoons on the Bridge." He is backed by three summers of journalistic work on the staff of the Fredericksburg Freelance-Star and the critical experience of University writing courses. It is probable that he will continue to write after he has received his degree in English from the University.
Fred McCoy, a psychology major in Richmond College, is author of the poem "Ulysses at the Door." Although only a junior this year, Fred is a professional journalist and freelance writer.
As the author of two poems appearing in the Folio section, Nita Glover makes her publication debut. A junior English major at West- hampton, Nita has worked this year on the magazine's critical staff.
Samuel Holland, a Graduate School student, is author of the vivid story, "Yes, I Knew Shirley." After finishing Richmond College in 1956, Sam returned this fall to complete the requirements for a Master's De- gree in History. His clear and frank portrayal of this human drama makes it one of the most shocking stories to appear between the covers of The Messenger.
Shirley Satterfield is making her first appearance in The Messenger with her poem "Touchstone". Shirley is Secretary of the Canterbury Club, took part in the Religious Emphasis Week play, Everyman, and is Di• rector of the Freshman Project Play-unusual accomplishments for a freshman.
"TOWARD FREEDOM"
I am India. Today I stand before the world as an old man of five thousand years and also as a young child of nine. I have both the wisdom of great age and the inexperience of a child. As an old man, I sometimes feel alone and sad looking back upon my past glory, as old men often do. As an earnest child, I am more often hurt when I feel that people confuse and misunderstand my motives. Thus, I stand before you today.
Since you are of the West, let me explain that I'm not here to talk about snakes, fakirs, rope tricks and of the Western conception of a yogi. Rather I am here as an old man to tell you the stories of my youth and to sing in cracked voice the ancient songs which I remember. As a youth, I will tell you of my hopes, as all young people are bound to do.
More than five thousand years ago, I who am known to my people as Bharat, saw the rise of a great civilization. My country, in those early years of growth, became the home of a vast medley of people.
As in most cases when darker and lighter peoples are thrown together, their own delusion causes conflict. It is therefore possible that the light-skinned Aryans subjugated the aborigines to form the beginnings of a caste system. It is interesting to note that the Sanskrit word for caste, varna, also means color.
As I stand here now, I see in my mind's eye a lone man sitting beside the Yumma River early on a morning almost lost to memory. He is a sadhu--0r holy man-and to the discipleat his feet he chants thus. in Sanskrit:
Ne kancana vasatau praty-acaksita
Tad vratam tasmad yaya kaya ca vidhaya bahv annam prapnuyat. Aradhy asma annam ity achaksate. Etad vai mukhate annam ruddham. Mukhate -sma annam ruddham. Mukhate -sma madhyate -mnan raddham. Madhayto -sma annam radjyate Etad va antato raddham. Antato radhyate. Ye evam -mnam -sma annam Veda. Ksema iti vaci. Yoga ksema iti prana apanaych.
What he has chanted is a part of the Krishna Yajur Veda -one of the most ancient of all religious writings. He instructs his disciple in simple morality in the first several stanzas; then he goes on to instruct him in esoteric symbology. The reason I tell you this is because, when your Aryans came to me, they brought with them knowledge which was to enable them to evolve the most profound set of metaphysical scriptures in the world. These are known as the Upanishads. To go on with my story, I must tell you that in spite of great development in architectural and religious forms, the centuries brought with them changes which were finally to result in my first great slough of despond. Politically, geographically and linguistically, I was terribly divided, and the many kingdoms in my midst were constantly engaged in fratricidal wars. Organized religion and society reached its peak and began to decline. During this dark period, I was sustained by two men and a book.
The first of these men was Gautama Sidartha, known as Buddha, the enlightened. He reformed religion by laying stress upon pure living for the attainment of man's highest goal, and not upon rituals. His religion weaned many followers from the Hinduism which was at that time struggling to maintain itself.
The second man to carry me through the slough was the great king Asorka, who, for the first time in my history, united by conquest all my kingdoms under a single ruler. Greatly saddened by the ravages of his conquistadorial wars,
he finally renounced violence and adopted Buddha's peaceful way. During his wise rule he built roads, and encouraged education to a point never undertaken before and just recently since. No wonder that my flag today bears his royal seal, the Dharma Chakre or Wheel of Law.
Now, I come to the third thing which held my head above the water during these trying times. This was the book, called in Sanskrit, Bhagavad Gita, which in English means the Song of God. Written by an unknown poet some five-hundred years before the birth of Jesus, it presents a synthesis of every major idea found in the Vedas and Upanishads. It is a discourse between Arjuna, an Indian warrior prince, and God, in the human form of Krishna. The setting is a battlefield on which Arjuna is sickened at the thought of fighting his usurping kinsmen, arrayed against him, and his army. Krishna tells Arjuna not to shirk duty but to fight with no hate in his heart, realizing that the souls of his adversaries are indestructible.
Near the end of the Second Chapter of the Gita, Arjuna asks Krishna a question:
arjuna uvaca: sthitaprajnasya ka bhasa samadhisthasya kesava sthitadhihkim prabhaseta kim asita vrajeta kim.
In these three verses lie the essence of Gita and the highest goal of Hinduism. The question which Arjuna asks is simply, "What is the mark of a wise man?" Krishna replies that a true sage is one who puts away desires for transitory things and gains comfort not from outward circumstances which cause sorrow and joy, but from knowledge of one's divine soul.
After these times of turmoil, colored by the Moslem conquests, I slowly became myself once more. It is true that there was little or no sense of national unity, but only certain common bonds of religion and society which bound cliff erent language groups in an essential unity.
A renaissance of religion swept the length and breadth of my great land at the coming of the fourteenth century. At this time many poets-both men and women-renounced the world and became wandering mendicants, singing praises to God in "ecstatic terms." Today a body of the hymns composed by such poets as Chandi Das and Mirabi survive and are sung in much the same manner as of old.
The period of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries encompassing this religious renaissance is called the Bhakti movement. Bhakti is a Sanskrit word meaning "devotion" and usually implies devotion to God. But the Bhakti movement was more than a mere religious awakening; it was also the period in which Hindi, my present national language, received a great impetus. Much literature of high quality and several of the greatest hymns were written in this pure language-pure because it drew almost completely from Sanskrit for its vocabulary.
There followed in the great gulf of four hundred years the period of foreign conquest. Through years of conflict and internal revolution I watched my people struggle to gain their sovereignity. It was in the latter part of this era that the hopes of Indians found a leader in Mohandas Gandhi, a lawyer who fought their cause through an organization of his own founding, the Indian National Congress. In Africa and upon my own soil, he fought the British through legislation and "satyagraha," or "non-violent resistance." The stories of his struggles are held dear in the hearts of Indians today, and his many years in British jails testify to his unfaltering devotion. Largely through Gandhiji's efforts, the British officially withdrew from my soil in 1947, leaving my destiny in the hands of Indians.
I no longer speak to you as an old man but as a child. As a democracy I am now nine years old. In an unbelievably short space my people have peacefully transformed me from a subcontinent of five hundred fifty-two independent mon·
archies to one country. The caste system is abolished by the Constitution. Every Indian man and woman may now vote. Hindi, spoken by already fifty per cent of the people, is now a national language by the Constitution. Terrific efforts are being made to industralize the country, educate the people, and in every way to bring about a material and spiritual balance. Yet, I am but a fox who is pursued by wolves. When a lion offers me protection, I cannot accept it, for fear that same lion would make a meal of me when it got hungry.*
My dilemma is therefore, many-sided. Internally, I am torn by the growing pains which have beset every new country from America on down. Externally, I am torn between the lion and the wolf, each of whom wants me among his own brood. I need time--time to get the wheels of my democracy running smoothly. My people are crying for food and education and jobs, and a higher standard of living; and I, painstakingly, by the means of parliamentary procedure and the vote, must give them these things-without delay!
This is part of my problem which I ask you to understand. And if you would further understand me, realize that without peace among the great nations of the world, my internal progress will suffer and perhaps even fall away under the tremendous burden which it already carries. But if peace is today my chief concern, so also is it one of your chief concerns and one of the world's chief concerns. It is true that there are many obstacles in the way of attaining this common goal. But, in this regard, I would put before you the words which the Indian saint Vivekananda spoke as an appeal to my people while I was still under the British, and which expresses that tenor of national spirit which has led me already into the path of great sacrifice:
"Have faith that you are all, my brave lads, born to do great things. Let not the barks of puppies frighten you, no, not even the thunderbolts of heaven, but stand up and work ... Arise, awake, and stop not till the goal is reached."
*This is one of the fables of Sadar Patel, the father of Indian unity, who traveled about India in the time after 1947, admonishing Indians to sacrifice sectional differences for the cause of national unity.
Editorial Note: Submitted by an Indian student, the essay appearing in part here is one of the most comprehensive to come to the attention of the Editors. Written by a sixteen-year student, it is printed here as a part of the magazine's policy to give young writers a chance for Publication. The title, given it by the Editorial Staff, was taken from the autobiography of Jawaharlal Nehru .
