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The Green Room, Winter 1975


ISSUE:  Winter 1975

“MOST of my essays, articles, and commissioned papers,” writes Adda B. Bozeman, “deal with comparative studies of cultures, legal systems, and foreign policies,” and this is proved by “Civilizations under Stress: Reflections on Cultural Borrowing and Survival.” “I was born,” says Mrs. Bozeman, “on the Baltic Sea in Latvia and slowly moved West, until I reached the United States in 1936. My interests in international history and comparative law brought me to Paris, where I graduated from the Section Diplomatique of the Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques, and to London, where I was admitted to the Bar in 1936 as a member of the Middle Temple Inn of Court. Early professional activities as an attorney specializing in private international law were furthered academically by the study of the civil law in Germany and Holland and by enrollment in the Law School of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. The Second World War interrupted my career, and I shifted to teaching history, law, and international relations in the United States, first at Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois, and from 1947 onward at Sarah Lawrence College. The research conducted then was stimulated by extensive travels in Africa and Asia and led to the writing of the following books: “The Future of Law in a Multicultural World,” “Politics and Culture in International History,” and “Regional Conflicts around Geneva. ” “Conflict: Occidental Theories and African Realities” will be published in 1975.”

Jan S. Prybyla is professor of economics at Pennsylvania State University and author of “The Political Economy of Communist China” and of numerous articles on Communist China and the Soviet Union. He is co-author of “World Tensions: Conflict and Accommodation” and editor of “Comparative Economic Systems.” Mr. Prybyla’s special interest lies in comparative economic systems, with an emphasis on the study of centrally planned economies. His travels have taken him to many parts of both the non-Communist world. In addition to China he has recently visited Hungary and the Soviet Union.

The author of “The Sad State of Cultural Life in Moscow (or Peking) as Viewed from Peking (or Moscow)” teaches history at Wake Forest University. Lowell R. Tillett is primarily interested in the non-Russian nationalities, arid specifically in the ways their history has been tailored to meet the requirements of Soviet nationality policy (there must be no violence in the past relations of the members of the Soviet family, only great respect for the Russian “elder brother” and a “yearning” to join the Russian state). Mr. Tillett has published a book on the rewriting of the history of the non-Russian nationalities, “The Great Friendship: Soviet Historians on the Non-Russian Nationalities.” His current article is a by-product of research he is doing on Soviet-Chinese exchanges concerning minority peoples (Kazakhs and Uighurs) along their long border in Central Asia.

John Bovey is a retired foreign service officer living and writing in Paris and in the foothills of the Cevennes. After teaching freshman English at Harvard and spending three sheltered years in the United States Navy, he joined the foreign service in 1045. He served in Rotterdam, Casablanca, Washington, Paris, Oslo, and The Hague. In the last four posts his colleagues and chiefs included such stars in the career firmament as Charles Bohlen and Margaret Tibbetts and the unnamed political appointees of the present article. Both categories are largely responsible for his conclusions in “The Golden Sunshine,” which he finds discouragingly substantiated by the appointments of Presidents Nixon and Ford and by the stormy career of Henry Kissinger.

James Hearst writes of himself: “The people on our side of the Hearst family have always been teachers and farmers. I was born and raised on a farm and my brother and I operated the home farm, Maplehearst Farm, for a number of years as a partnership. My mother saw to it that we had good books when we were growing up—she wouldn’t let us read “trash. ” I had read the Victorian and New England writers before I met them in school—we attended a one-room country school, then drove to town for high school. My college work was sort of hit-and-miss. I even spent two terms at the University of Guanajuato in Mexico. I gave up farming for teaching and am somewhat of an “academic freak,” a full professor with no degrees. I directed a poetry workshop for the Aspen School of Contemporary Art for eight years, but gave it up three years ago. I am still teaching in the department of English language and literature at the University of Northern Iowa and occasionally talk about poetry to high schools for the Iowa Arts Council.”

Ricardo da Silveira Lobo Sternberg is a Brazilian graduate student at the University of California at Los Angeles, working in comparative literature with emphasis on twentieth-century poetry. He has translated a good deal of poetry from the Portuguese and a selection of his translations of Jorge de Lima’s work will soon be published.

William Dickey was born and brought up in the Pacific Northwest, twenty miles from the Pacific and twenty miles from Canada. He was educated at Reed College, Harvard, Iowa, and Jesus College, Oxford, and for the last dozen years has been teaching at San Francisco State University. His teaching includes writing courses and courses in eighteenth-century English literature, and he is particularly interested in Swift. He has published four books of poetry, the most recent of which is “More under Saturn,” and he is well advanced on a new collection, called at this point “The Rainbow Grocery.” “I am at work at the moment,” he writes, “on a long poem that starts out from a digital clock-radio—an improbable subject, but I like to look for poems in places that seem initially inhospitable to them. I am also interested in cooking and calligraphy.”

Barbara Friend writes: “I began to write poems in earnest two years ago, after having been a professional actress for some time. I had taken a course with Anne Sexton at Colgate University and discovered suddenly that I really did care about the perils and pleasures of writing. The impulse to put words together was a fortunate one, since it allowed me to pursue something I cared about regardless of location, a factor which had become increasingly frustrating to me as an actress. . . . At the moment, I live in Hamilton, New York, with my husband (a free lance art dealer and restorer) and two children. I act and write when I can, enjoying both equally. I am impressed by the amount of good poetry being written—its energy and scope —and am in the process of selecting a group of poems by eight women, which I will give as a reading.”

Wallace Fowlie has been teaching for ten years at Duke University, where he is James B. Duke Professor of French. “A Return Visit to Paris” is from his memoirs, which he is now preparing for publication. The book is about his experiences at Bennington, Yale, and Duke, but primarily about his lifelong, somewhat scandalous love affair with France and French literature. He is the author of monographs on Rimbaud, Stendhal, Mallarmé, Gide, and Lautréamont.

“The Neutral Love Object” is by Maxine Kumin, poet and novelist. Her fourth collection of poems, “Up Country,” won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973. Her fourth novel, “The Designated Heir,” was published last summer. A new collection of poems is forthcoming in the spring, to be called “House, Bridge, Fountain, Gate.” “I was born in Philadelphia,” she says, “have AB and AM degrees from Radcliffe, and am for the most part on the lam from the city, spending more and more time at our farm in New Hampshire, an epicenter to which various grown and married children return.”

“Christmas Dinner” is the first of Joyce Colony’s stories to be published. “What is interesting about me,” she writes, “is not me, but rather what interests me. Chronologically, that would include by lifelong education, my career as a musician, my family, and now, unexpectedly compelling, this writing. I write when I get the time, trying to spend a certain number of hours a week at my desk. This is not difficult to do, once I have made it to the desk, for I have spent many years practicing at the piano and enjoy the self-discipline. I have written more poetry than fiction, probably because the shorter form seems tailored to my abbreviated work periods. . . . The principal discoveries I have made in putting myself to work in a new discipline are that maturity counts, that skills learned in one field can be applied to another, and that one’s life can be immeasurably enriched by the exploration of previously dark areas of creativity.”

Since 1970 Walter Berns has been professor of political science at the University of Toronto. Earlier he taught at Louisiana State University, Yale, and Cornell. He is the author of “Freedom, Virtue, and the First Amendment” and “Constitutional Cases in American Government.” Among Charles Burton Marshall’s books may be mentioned “The Limits of Foreign Policy,” “The Exercise of Sovereignty,” “The Cold War: A Concise History,” and “Crisis over Rhodesia: A Skeptical View.” He is Paul H. Nitze Professor of International Studies in the School of Advanced International Studies of The Johns Hopkins University.

Cecelia M. Kenyon is Charles N. Clark Professor of Government at Smith College. This year she is James Pinckney Harrison Visiting Professor of History at the College of William and Mary. Whittle Johnston, professor in the department of government and foreign affairs at the University of Virginia, recently completed a manuscript on “Wilson, the War, and the Balance of Power.”

William S. Weedon is University Professor of Philosophy at the University of Virginia. He teaches a course in Far Eastern Art and Architecture. During his time as a naval officer he made numerous trips to Japan and China. Allen Grossman’s latest book is “And the Dew Lay All Night upon My Branch.” He is also the author of “The Recluse” and a book on Yeats, “Poetic Knowledge in the Early Years.” He teaches English at Brandeis University.

THE VIRGINIA QUARTERLY REVIEWCharlotteKohlerEditor

 

Advisory Editors William S. Weedon Ian Stevenson Fredson Bowers Robert Jennings Harris W. W. Abbot J. C. Levenson Bernice C. Maddox, Business Manager

 

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