ISSUE: Winter 1941
“Hoe’s a marvellous convei
With the indignation of a Patrick Henry excoriating the gentlemen who cried “Pence! Peace!” when there was no peace, Herbert Agar reviews the recent Presidential campaign and denounces it as a “three-months holiday from serious thinking.” Notwithstanding that lie is editor of the Roosc-velt-snpporting Louisville Courier-Journal and notwithstanding that lie feels strongly that the best man won, he vigorously condemns the Democratic, as well as the Republican, politicians for “bandying false promises about an impossible peace.” Widely known as a journalist and correspondent, Mr. Agar is the author of several volumes of political and historical import, among which is “The People’s Choice,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for American history in 1933. “The Politicians Cried Peace” is the first nrticle which he has written for the Virginia Quarterly.
“The Dilemma of Modern Democracy” forms part of the third of a series of three lectures delivered by Carl Becker at the University of Virginia in November, 1910, under the Page-Barbour Foundation. The Virginia Quarterly gratefully acknowledges indebtedness to the University of Virginia for permission to publish this distinguished essay and to the Yale University Press, which will in the spring bring out the three lectures under the title “Modern Democracy.” Two of Dr. Becker’s more recent volumes arc “The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers” and “Progress and Power.” He is Professor of History at Cornell University.
“I am an Austrian by birth and education,” Peter F. Drucker wrote us
lent place for our rehearsal”
recently, “which means that I look upon the Prussian Army traditionally somewhat in the manner in which a member of one of the old Charleston families looks upon the Yankees.” However, five years experience as a newspaper writer in Germany, three years as an economist for an international banking house in London, and four years in the United States as a free-lance journalist, a lecturer, and a teacher, have separated Mr. Drucker from the land of his birth. The first two articles which he published in this country appeared in the October, 1935, and the January, 193(5, issues of this magazine.
Ernestine Evans, a professional journalist and publisher’s representative whose intelligent curiosity has often carried her to interesting places at crucial times, spent the winter nnd most of the spring of 19M) in Finland, Sweden, England, nnd France. “Now That One Looks Back” is an impressionistic record of her experiences during this smoldering time in many places and among nil manner of people.
Karl A. Menninger, psychiatrist, author, and educator, is head of the famous clinic which bears his name. Of his most recent volume, “Man Against Himself,” he says: “I outlined the way in which the self-destructive tendencies of human beings cause them pain, unhappiness, and death; I am now at work upon a book showing what resources exist within the individual to combat these tendencies.”
The poets in this issue, Robinson Jeffers, Babette Deutsch, and Jesse Stuart, are widely known in general and in particular are known to readers of the Virginia Quarterly, to which they have all contributed before. Mr. Jeffers’s most recent volume of verse is “Such Counsels You Gave to Me”; he has just received the Helen Haire Levinson Prize for poems published during the past year. “One Part Love” is the latest volume of poems by Miss Dcutsch; “Heroes of the Knlcvala,” her retelling of the Finnish saga for boys nnd girls, has also been published recently. Mr. Stuart’s latest work, a collection of short stories entitled “Men of the Mountain,” will be published in January. “It is a pleasure to be with you again,” writes Mr. Stuart, “in the magazine that is responsible for the publication of my first book.”
John Bassett Moore, universally recognized as one of the world’s leading authorities on international law, was for seven years a judge on the Permanent Court of International Justice, from which he resigned in 1928 in order to devote his time to writing.
“Sometime,” writes Peter Gray, “I shall write a story that will show the effect of Aveather on magic in Greece. You hear little or nothing about magic during the long, crystal-clear, cloudless summer. It begins in the fall with the first rain when the sky darkens nnd the atmosphere becomes murky. Then pretty girls take precautions against the evil eye, peasants sit around braziers and hearths telling fairy tales, witches gather herbs nnd make charms, priests exorcise devils from the earth, men read fortunes in the shoulder blades of roast sheep and in cloud formations nnd the flight of birds, women study coffee grounds, cats speak, vampires leave the graveyards, God strikes trees with lightning, and around Christmas time housewives see frightful centaurs in the chimneys.” “The Swallow” is Mr. Gray’s
first short story about Greece to be published in English; last year two were published in Greek in an Athenian magazine.
In suggesting “The Lady nnd the Tiger” as the title for his double-barreled article on Edith Wharton and Theodore Dreiser, Alfred Kazin writes, “I suppose there is one serious objection to it. Mr. D. is not a tiger; he’s a bear.” This article—its framework the “arrested energies” of the cightcen-ninctics — has grown out of Mr. Kazin’s study of American prose from 1890 to the present.
John Calvin Metcalf is the author, among other things, of a recent biography: “De Quincey, A Portrait”; he has been an advisory editor of the Virginia Quarterly since its inception in 1925. Philip Van Doren Stern is the editor of “The Selected Writings of Thomas De Quincey,” the author of a detective novel, a book on typography, and, most recently, of “The Life nnd Writings of Abraham Lincoln.” Hamilton Basso, novelist, biographer, essayist, and short story writer, last year received the Southern Writer’s Awnrd for his novel, “Days Before Lent.” He is at present engaged in writing another nov el. R. K. Gooch is one of the authors of the recent volume “Governments of Continental Europe,” for which lie also wrote a supplementary pamphlet presenting a translation of the new French constitution, with explanatory notes. He becomes, with this issue, an advisory editor of the Virginia Quarterly. Wyndham B. Blanton, Clinical Professor of Medicine at the Medical College of Virginia and editor of the “Virginia Medical Monthly,” is the author of “Medicine in Virginia in the Seventeenth Century,” and of two similar volumes for the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Robert P. Tris
