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The Green-Room


ISSUE:  Winter 1970
“Here’s a marvellous convenient place for our rehearsal.”

The intention of John H. Schaar in “. . . And the Pursuit of Happiness” is, he declares “modest: to make clear what a dazzling and motley thing the ‘right to pursue happiness’ is.” Mr. Schaar was born in Pennsylvania and, he says, “grew up in a very small town there. Confusing freedom with anonymity, I moved to Los Angeles. It took seven years for me to find my way out of that error, during which time I also took a Ph.D. in political science from U.CL.A. I taught for a while at Mount Holyoke College, served in the Army, and have been at Berkeley for nine years. I taught American political thought and modern political theory. I have written two books, ‘Loyalty in America’ and ‘Escape from Authority.’ I have also written some chapters in a book on Thailand. Also, quite a few articles on such subjects as equality, authority, and rationality. Also, three pieces in the New York Review of Books with Sheldon Wolin on the University of California. I have lived in the South and loved it. If Berkeley were not so close to the splendid hiking and climbing of the Sierras, I would move to Virginia.”

“Twentieth-Century Deterrents and Deterrence” is, George E. Lowe writes, “an attempt to try to explain one of the puzzling issues of our time: nuclear deterrence. I have used the historical framework because I am an historian. . . . I first became fascinated with weapons of mass destruction while visiting the Memorial Museum in Hiroshima in the mid 1950’s. A thirty-year interest in birdwatching has led me to an obsession with the current ecological crisis and to the conviction that Dr. Richard A. Falk of Princeton University was correct when he wrote that ‘there are four interconnected threats to this planet—wars of mass destruction, overpopulation, pollution, and the depletion of resources.’ The essence of our problem, he added, ‘is to find a new formula for relating man to his environment.’ If we are to find this new formula, we must literally re-educate ourselves and our civilization in order to prevent ‘an irreversible catastrophe’ in one or more of the four areas mentioned by Dr. Falk. Indeed, it is not too farfetched to consider as prophetic the protester’s sign at the Berkeley People’s Park, ‘The politics of ecology will replace both capitalism and Marxism.’ My interest in military strategy stems from almost six years as naval intelligence officer (Japan and Hawaii, 1953-1957) and research and speechwriting in the Pentagon (1960-61). Three years in the Foreign Service, mostly in Paris, added a foreign-policy dimension to my general background and interests. Over the past decade I have written ‘The Age of Deterrence’ and published numerous articles on contemporary defense topics. But for the last twenty years since college graduation, above all else I have been a teacher. . . . Currently I am writing a book, inspired by Louis Halle’s classic, ‘Spring in Washington,’ on the interrelationship of the seasons, birds, and contemporary history, hoping to accelerate in some small way the increasing public awareness of the seriousness of our present ecological crisis.”

“The Political Hero in America: His Fate and His Future” was given by Fawn M. Brodie in September as part of the Ses-quicentennial celebration of the University of Virginia. Mrs. Brodie is senior lecturer in history at the University of California at Los Angeles and the author of three bi-. ographies, “No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith the Mormon Prophet,” “Thaddeus Stevens, Scourge of the South,” and “The Devil Drives: A Life of Sir Richard Burton.”

David Baily Harned appears more often as critic than as defender of religion. But he is convinced that secularization also has its ambiguities, many of which seem to go unrecognized by theologians who believe the Kingdom of God is a secular city. Chairman of the department of religious studies at the University of Virginia, Mr. Harned is the author of “Theology and the Arts” and “The Ambiguity of Religion.” “ ‘Secularization’—Plight, Promise, or Nonsense?” forms part of the introduction to a forthcoming volume of essays on secularization that he has edited with James F. Childress.

John Fandel spends the summer on Nantucket for fresh air and quiet . . . and to write. In winter, since 1958 he has taught at Manhattan College in New York. Earlier he was at Portsmouth Priory and taught in the Priory School. His first collection of poems, “Testament,” was published in 1959.

Edwin Honig has returned to Brown University, where he is a professor of English and comparative literature, after a year’s leave which he spent abroad, mainly in Portugal and England. Mr. Honig is the author of “Dark Conceit: The Making of Allegory” and of several volumes of poems, including “The Gazabos,” “Survivals,” and “Spring Journal.”

Stanley Plumly is currently conducting a poetry workshop at Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge. He has published poems in a variety of journals and has just completed his first book of poems, “In the Outer Dark.”

Brian Swann is currently an instructor in English at Princeton, He is a graduate of Queen’s College, Cambridge, who was later a Procter Fellow at Princeton, then an instructor there and at Rutgers, and who then left the United States to write a novel at the Foundation Karolyi at Vence, France, and to spend a year in Italy.

“Frontiers of Criticism: Metaphors of Silence” was written by Ihab Hassan for presentation at the Third Symposium on Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California last April. Mr. Hassan is currently director of the Center for the Humanities at Wesleyan University, but next year he will become Vilas Research Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He is the author of “Radical Innocence” and “The Literature of Silence” and is at present completing a work on post-modern literature to be entitled “The Vanishing Point.”

Virginia Layefsky, the author of “Jennifer,” says that her life has been what she considers the majority of lives to be, interesting in small details but not very eventful in any large way. “I was born,” she writes, “in Seattle, Washington, about the time when Amos and Andy were popular on the radio. I lived there until I was twenty when I went to New York to study at the Juilliard School of Music. All my formal education has been along musical lines—I am a pianist—I have written short stories just for myself since I was very young, but in succeeding years my serious study was concentrated on musical composition. . . . The study of composition was helpful to me as a writer, though, since it entails a certain amount of discipline and an awareness of form.”

William A. Koelsch has taught American history and geography at Clark University since 1967. Earlier he taught at Florida Presbyterian College at St. Petersburg. “Freud Discovers America” grew out of Mr. Koelsch’s interest in the history of higher education and specifically from research in progress on the history of Clark University, during the course of which many interesting things like the Freud letters are coming to light.

“Why Study Birds?” is a chapter in an almost-completed book to be called “Born to Sing.” “My profession,” Charles Hart-shorne writes, “is teaching (and writing about) philosophy, but I have studied birds for over fifty-five years; and have read papers at ornithological meetings and congresses and published in a half dozen ornithological journals, including Auk and Ibis. I have taught at many universities in this country, Australia, Germany, India, and Japan, always philosophy, but finding opportunity to learn many of the birds wherever I was. My chief connections have been with Harvard, the University of Chicago, Emory University, and the University of Texas, where I now teach part time.”

Richard Walser is professor of English at North Carolina State University at Raleigh. In 1953 he edited a group of biographical and critical selections entitled “The Enigma of Thomas Wolfe,” then in 1962 wrote “Thomas Wolfe: An Introduction and Interpretation.” In the spring of 1969 he read a paper, “The Angel and the Ghost,” at a Thomas Wolfe symposium, the entire proceedings of which will be published as a book. James M. Cox is professor of English at Dartmouth College. He is the author of “Twentieth Century Views: Robert Frost” and “Mark Twain: The Fate of Humor.”

Herbert J. Muller is professor of English and government at Indiana University. He has just completed a book tentatively entitled “The Children of Frankenstein: A Primer of Modern Technology and Human Values.” His earlier books include several on the nature of freedom as well as “The Uses of the Past” and “The Individual in a Revolutionary World.” Dank-wart A. Rustow is professor of international social forces at Columbia University. He is the author of “A World of Nations: Problems of Political Modernization” and editor of a forthcoming volume, “Philosophers and Kings: Studies in Leadership.”

Charles A. Barker is professor of American history at the Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of “Background of the Revolution in Maryland”, and “Henry George” and editor of “Problems of World Disarmament.” A new book, “American Convictions: Cycle of Public Thought, 1600-1850,” will appear this spring. Dante Germino is professor of government and foreign affairs and a member of the Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Virginia. His publications include “Beyond Ideology: The Revival of Political Theory,” “The Italian Fascist Party in Power,” and various articles on political theory. Samuel H. Barnes is professor of political science and a research associate in the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. He is a graduate of Tulane and Duke Universities, has studied at Montreal, Toronto, and Paris, and has been a visiting professor at the University of Florence and the University of Rome. His field is political behavior of industrial societies, especially Western Europe, and he is currently writing a book on Italian political behavior based on three sets of interviews, including 2500 with a national sample, 400 with a sample of local governmental officials, and 102 with members of the National Chamber of Deputies. Dewey W. Grantham is professor of history at Vanderbilt University and is primarily interested in twentieth-century United States history. He is the author of “The Democratic South,” “The South and the Sectional Image,” and the American Historical Association’s Service Center pamphlet on “The United States since 1945.”

John William Ward is professor of history and American studies at Amherst College. His most recent book is “Red, White, and Blue: Men, Books, and Ideas in American Culture.” He has also edited Frederick Grimke’s “The Nature and Tendency of Free Institutions.”

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