The Green Room, Winter 1979

A lifelong student of international relations, Adda B. Bozeman is concerned by the tendency among Americans in general and American political writers in particular to “assume, without supporting evidence, that one of OUR morally preferred words and convictions carries a universally accepted truth.” Particularly is this so, she observes, “in the case of “Peace,” “Law,” and, in more recent years, of “Human Rights.” ” Yet Mrs. Bozeman notes there is no common consensus on the meaning of such words and no way to make the world safe for democracy when the bulk of the globe’s governments are “associated with authoritarian regimes.” Since “the quest for peace is not a morally shared concern,” she concludes, “its furtherance thus depends upon diplomacy.” Mrs. Bozeman is a professor emeritus of international relations at Sarah Lawrence College, where she taught for 30 years before retiring in 1977.She was among the founders of the Committee on the Present Danger and is the author of several books, including Conflict in Africa: Concepts and Realities and The Future of Law in a Multicultural World.

The multicultural world from its beginnings was the subject of Louis J. Halle’s magnum opus, Out of Chaos, reviewed in VQR’s Summer 1978 issue. A man of many specialties, Mr. Halle has been a contributor to this magazine for more than 40 years, with the subject matters of his essays ranging from international relations to natural history. Among his published books are two perennials, Spring in Washington (nature) and The Cold War as History (politics). The seabirds that are the subject of his article in this issue are also the subject of two of his books, The Storm Petrel & the Owl of Athena and The Sea & the Ice: A Naturalist in Antarctica.The drawings Mr. Halle has made for the current issue do not represent the first time he has illustrated his own work, but they are the first drawings to appear in VQR.

After taking his Ph. D. in experimental biology from Harvard, Paul A. Zahl spent more than a decade in basic laboratory research. He then joined the National Geographic Society “for nearly half a life-time of world travel, focusing on a spectrum of nature subjects, including the molluscs of three continents.” Mr. Zahl retired as the Geographic’s Senior Scientist two years ago but retained a post as staff advisor and a member of the Society’s Committee for Research and Exploration. He is the author of numerous books and articles and when last heard from was embarking on another expedition of foreign travel.

As his story, “The Goat,” clearly indicates, Clayton W. Lewis is a former U. S. Marine Corps officer (1958—1961). He entered the Marine Corps after receiving his A. B. degree from Duke University. Before entering the world of teaching and literature, Mr. Lewis worked as a copy-writer and later in the admissions and alumni affairs offices of his alma mater. After receiving a master’s degree from the University of Iowa, Mr. Lewis joined the faculty of State University of New York, College at Geneseo, where he is an assistant professor. His numerous stories have appeared in such publications as Texas Quarterly, the Carolina Quarterly, Woman’s Day, and Transatlantic.He has completed a novel, which is under consideration for publication, and now is working on a book that is partly autobiographical and partly fiction.

Gahrett Epps has been interested in politics ever since he was a student at St. Christopher’s School in Richmond, Va. He later graduated from Harvard, where he was president of the Harvard Crimson.After working as a political reporter for the Richmond Mercury, where he covered Virginia’s 1973 gubernatorial campaign, Mr. Epps received an M. A. in English Writing from Hollins College. There he began work on his first novel, The Shad Treatment, a story of Virginia politics, which was published in 1977 and received the Southern Regional Council’s Lillian Smith Award for the best novel on the South that year. Mr. Epps is now a staff writer for Potomac, The Washington Post’s Sunday magazine.

A former CBS radio and television correspondent, Ned Calmer began his journalistic career in the legendary Paris of the 1920’s. He spent the next half a century as a journalist in this country and abroad. In that time he was a newspaper reporter, a wire service editor, a war correspondent, a radio and television broadcaster, and, as if that weren’t enough, the author of nine novels. Since his retirement from CBS, Mr. Calmer has been living on Long Island, where he is still turning out novels when not traveling.

Lauren Shakely was a 1977 winner of the Walt Whitman Award for her first book of poems entitled Guilty Bystander. She is an associate editor at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Colette Inez’s latest book of poems is Alive and Taking Names.She teaches a poetry workshop at the New School in New York.

James Reiss is an associate professor of English and Poet-in-residence at Miami University of Ohio. His poetry has appeared in Antaeus, The Hudson Review, and The New Yorker.

A member of the faculty at the University of Texas, Albert Goldbarth is the author of several books of poetry, the most recent being Comings Back.

Henry Taylor is a professor of literature at American University and the author of five books, including three books of poetry, Breakings, An Afternoon of Pocket Billiards, and The Horse Show at Midnight. His VQR poem is from a new collection to be called The Flying Change.

Tomas Transtromer is Sweden’s foremost living poet. His VQR poem is a new work whose translator is Samuel Charters, an American musical authority currently living in Sweden.

The late Paulé Bartón was a Haitian-born poet and storyteller and a political exile who lived on various islands in the Caribbean, mostly as a goatherd. He wrote in Creole, and his VQR poems have been translated by Howard Norman, a linguist, zoologist, and folklorist.

“I grew up amidst so many people who write so well that I have only now plucked up my courage to try my hand at it,” Robb Forman Dew recently recalled. One of those writers was her grandfather, the famous Fugitive critic and poet, John Crowe Ransom. Mrs. Dew’s recollections of her grandfather have appeared in The Mississippi Quarterly, and another of her short stories has been published by The Southern Review.She is married to the historian Charles B. Dew, a member of the faculty at Williams College, and has two young sons.

Educated at Sewanee, Cambridge, and Princeton, and having taught in Europe, the Middle East, and at Dartmouth, Samuel Pickering, Jr.has seen the sun set on him at many institutions. He is now a visiting associate professor at the University of Connecticut, where, he writes, “the folks, the ice cream, and the university are all wonderful.” Mr. Pickering is the author of The Moral Tradition of English Fiction, and his essays and reviews have appeared in such publications as Sewanee Review, Georgia Review, and National Review.

A member of the English faculty at the University of Colorado who is spending a year’s leave in London, Jeffrey Meyers has written chapters on E. M. Forster in his books, Fiction and the Colonial Experience, Painting and the Novel, and Homosexuality and Literature.He recently completed a biography of Katherine Mansfield and is now working on a life of Wyndham Lewis.

After more than three decades as a working newspaperman in North Carolina and Virginia, Robert Mason retired last fall as the editor of the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot. Like Virginius Dabney, he was an eyewitness to that painful period in Virginia’s history known as massive resistance.

Michael Nelson is a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly whose work has also appeared in Newsweek magazine and other periodicals. He is co-editor of The Culture of Bureaucracy, which will be published this year, and he will join the political science department at Vanderbilt University this month.

VQR readers may recall Burling Lowrey’s essay on athletics in the Autumn 1976 issue, entitled “The Dehumanization of Sports.” A professor of English at Montgomery College outside Washington, D. C., Mr. Lowrey is particularly interested in satire, language usage, media criticism, and the nature of sports. “To my way of thinking,” he writes, “a truly stimulating essay would include all four of these topics.”

No stranger to the world of Latrobe, Robert A. Rutland is editor of The Papers of James Madison.He also served as a consultant for Time magazine when Time was publishing a special Bicentennial issue.

Suzette Henke recently joined the Department of English, General Literature, and Rhetoric at the State University of New York at Binghamton. An authority on James Joyce and a former member of the English faculty at the University of Virginia, Ms. Henke is the author of Joyce’s Moraculous Sindbook: A Study of Ulysses, published by Ohio State.

John E. Fagg has been a member of the History Department at New York University since 1946 and served as chairman of the department from 1961 to 1969.A native of Texas, he is director of NYU’s Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. His books include The Republican Movement in Spain and Latin America: A General Historu.