ISSUE: Autumn 1975
In 1945, as World War II came to an end, the one-party South remained just that;—a solid bastion of the Democratic Party based on the premise of small vote, sure vote, white vote. Today the one-party, segregated South is at one with Nineveh and Tara. The changes that led from “Intransigence to Transition” are described by William C. Havard, a veteran observer of the Southern political scene. A native of Baton Rouge, he is Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and University Professor at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. His latest book is “The Changing Politics of the South.” “Somewhat against my better judgment,” Mr. Havard writes, “I agreed last fall to become Editor of the Journal of Politics. Thus I am now using up most of the little time I have left for writing finding out how difficult other authors can be.”
A Rhodes Scholar who served as executive editor of The Reporter magazine in the early 1950’s, Harlan Cleveland was Assistant Secretary of State and Ambassador to NATO during the 1960’s. He was President of the University of Hawaii from 1969 to 1974. He is now director of the Aspen Institute’s Program in International Affairs, with headquarters in Princeton, New Jersey. His article stems from an address he made last spring at Ohio State University. He is the author of “The Future Executive” and other works.
Roy C. Macridis has just published “French Politics in Transition: The Years After Degaulle.” He visited Greece in the early fall of 1974. “The Greece I found,” he reports, “was very much the Greece I had visited ten years before and the Greece I had known as I was growing up. It was more urban than before and more prosperous. . . . Many of the old political leaders had died, but a surprisingly large number remained. . . . The only difference I could see was in the remarkable sense of euphoria of the people. The Greeks were enjoying what they had been deprived of for so long—their freedom.” The Lawrence A. Wein Professor of International Cooperation at Brandeis University, he is planning to visit Greece again and write a book on contemporary Greek politics.
James Richardson received his Ph.D. in English from the University of Virginia this spring and is now a member of the English Department at Harvard University. Mr. Richardson’s talents are not limited to poetry; he spent the past summer working as a crêpe cook in a Charlottesville restaurant. He has published more than two dozen poems in such publications as the Yale Review, New American Review, Poetry Northwest, and VQR. “Encyclopedia of the Stones” is part of a book (as yet unpublished) entitled “Reservations.” A second book of poems, tenatively called “The Elegies for Everything,” is in progress.
For Seymour Harold Glazer, publication of his encounter with the ghostly Jeanne de Balzac constitutes a case of literary Rip Van Winklemanship. It is his first article to appear in print in almost three decades, his last published piece being a story called “Mota,” which appeared in the Autumn 1947 issue of Sewanee Review. “I was working on a novel then,” he recalls, “and someone at Houghton. Mifflin had read “Mota” and wanted me to settle down and write. But I had other things in mind. . . . Maybe it was hopes of new adventures that distracted me (“Mota” stemmed from my Navy service in Shanghai), because I wanted to get back to the Far East.” And he did, with an assignment to Saigon in 1948, which ended his “young literary endeavors.” After assignments to such posts as Phnom-Penh, Manila, Casablanca, Rabat, and Paris, Mr. Glazer retired from the State Department at the end of 1973 and is now writing full-time. He is a graduate of Louisiana State University, where “the greatest teacher I had was Cleanth Brooks. . . . I was one of the lucky ones in his class on 20th century poetry.”
Two short story writers are appearing in the Quarterly for the first time, one for the first time in any publication. Making her literary debut is Davye Gould, a suburban Washington housewife. A graduate of George Washington University, Mrs. Gould wrote her first short story in 1973 when she was 32, She is the mother of two sons, ages 4 and 7, and her husband is employed by the World Bank. Her story about an Indian dog was “inspired by my experiences living in Jaipur, Rajasthan, for one year in 1966.”
While he is appearing for the first time in the Quarterly, Ward Just’s fiction has appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, the New Republic, Redbook, and the Washington Post. The son of an Illinois newspaper publisher, he worked until 1970 as a political reporter and war correspondent for Newsweek and the Post. He is the author of a Vietnam memoir, “To What End,” and a study of the U. S. Army, “Military Men.” Mr. Just has written three novels, “A Soldier of the Revolution,” “Stringer” and the just-published “Nicholson at Large” as well as a book of short stories, “The Congressman Who Loved Flaubert and Other Washington Stories.” His stories have been selected as among “The Best American Short Stories” of 1972 and 1973. He is a contributing editor of The Atlantic Monthly and lives in Warren, Vermont with his wife and children.
Judith Johnson Sherwin is a native of New York City and a graduate of Barnard College. A prolific poet and short story writer, she is the author of “Uranium Poems,” winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize in 1968, and “Impossible Buildings.” A book of short stories, “The Life of Riot,” was published in 1970. Not being busy enough, Mrs. Sherwin has also written a number of plays and hitchhiked from New York to California and from Mexico to Alaska. She and her husband James have three daughters, Miranda, Alison and Galen. She is President of the Poetry Society of America.
Anne Winters is deeply versed in Greek literature and draws upon that knowledge for one of her poems in this issue. She says that “The Illustrated Gazetteer” was written when she was “saturated with the mild universal wanderlust of late antiquity.” Her poems have appeared in such magazines as Poetry, Kenyon Review and Chelsea, and she has completed an as yet unpublished novel, “An Iron Year.” She and her husband, Alan Williamson, are now living in Europe, “where we plan to write, read and explore as much as the world’s economy and general precariousness may permit.”
John Alexander Allen received his training in literature as an undergraduate at Swarthmore and Oxford and did his graduate work at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is now in his 20th year at Hollins, where his fields of special interest have been Shakespeare and the writing of poetry and fiction. His essay on Eudora Welty’s fiction was delivered as part of a celebration for Miss Welty at Hollins in 1974. Together with a long-standing admiration of Miss Welty’s work, it reflects his continuing interest in myth and in the feminine point of view in literature. Mr. Allen agrees with William Golding that a society which has lost its myths is doomed; and he would add, more cheerfully, that a society which reclaims, understands and amalgamates the mythic heroism of both sexes could be enroute to the most fully humane civilization the world has ever known.
Dante Germino, a native of North Carolina, received his M. A. from Duke and his Ph. D. fgrom Harvard. After teaching at Wellesley College for ten years, he joined the Rockefeller Foundation Overseas Field Staff in University Development and went to the Philippines. He came to the University of Virginia as a professor of Government and Foreign Affairs and member of the Center for Advanced Studies in 1968. Next year he will go to Rome as a Guggenheim Fellow to work on a book entitled “The Idea of The Open Society.”
James R. Sweeney is a history professor and the University Archivist for Old Dominion University in Norfolk. He received his doctorate from the University of Notre Dame in 1973, having written a dissertation on “Byrd and Anti-Byrd: The Struggle for Political Supremacy in Virginia, 1945—1954.” A specialist in 2oth century Southern political history, he is planning to develop his thesis into a full length biography of the late patriach of politics in Virginia, Senator Harry F. Byrd, Sr.
Anne Hobson Freeman’s first published short story won the Mademoiselle College Fiction Contest in 1956, the year she graduated from Bryn Mawr. Her busy career includes stints as a newspaper stringer in London, Russia and Eastern Europe, editor of the Virginia Museum’s Members’ Bulletin and currently as a teacher of undergraduate fiction at the University of Virginia and the University of Richmond’s School of Continuing Education. The wife of George Freeman, a Richmond lawyer, and mother of three children, Mrs. Freeman has published short stories and articles in such magazines as McCall’s, Cosmopolitan and This Week.
M. Glenn Abernathy has been a member of the faculty of the University of South Carolina since 1951. He received his doctorate from the University of Wisconsin in 1953. He is now a professor of Government and International Studies and author of “The Right of Assembly and Association” and “Civil Liberties under the Courts.” He describes his primary teaching interests as public law and American political theory.
A native Californian, William Kerrigan received his B.A. degree from Stanford in 1964 and his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1970. An assistant professor of English at the University of Virginia, he is the author of “The Prophetic Milton” as well as articles on Donne, Jonson and Milton. “I am currently at work on a psychoanalytic treatment of Milton—the first to be attempted—with the working title “The Psychogenesis of Paradise Lost,”” he reports.
THE VIRGINIA QUARTERLY REVIEWStaige D.BlackfordEditor
Advisory EditorsWilliam S. WeedonIan StevensonW. W. AbbotRobert Jennings HarrisJ. C. LevensonRoger ShattuckElisabeth R. Aaron, Business Manager
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