American Scholar articles from September 1997

American Scholar archives from September 1997

Grow up, why dontcha?
September 22, 1997... Early in A Dragon Apparent, Norman Lewis tells about his travels in Indo-China and his encounter with the religion of Cao-Daism, in which, as he writes, "the best years of one's life are its concluding decades." In Cao-Daism "the dejection that...

Depression: darker than darkness.
September 22, 1997... As she tossed the book toward the foot of my bed, Clare turned toward me, forced a smile, and chuckled. It, too, was forced so that it sounded more like a snort. She was angry, irritated that I had asked her to read Darkness Visible, William...

David's Buddha. (poem)
September 22, 1997... Sits in the green splendor Of its aging bronze Gathering the morning light In our large bay window Overlooking the tree-shadowed lawn, Serene in the silence of itself. Someone has said, "God comes to the hungry In the form of food." I said,...

Rolls-Royce: how a legend was made.
September 22, 1997... The legend began in England with two men, the engineer and manufacturer Henry Royce and the racing driver Charles Rolls. Henry Royce, born in 1863, was the principal designer of all Rolls-Royce's products from the company's founding in 1906...

Contemplating the sublime.
September 22, 1997... While writing his fifth symphony, Gustav Mahler wondered how listeners would respond to the brooding, obsessively churning motifs that seem to chase one another into ecstasy or wearily wind down into despair. "How should [the public] react," he...

Swan Lake. (poem)
September 22, 1997... Never have I flung even a rag in anger or smashed a glass to celebrate. But again I've left my mother sprawled on the couch, gin not quite cached. When like a bride I begged my husband, Help me help her somehow - he shrugged, finished the...

Leaving Vilnius. (poem)
September 22, 1997... On the night we leave Vilnius, I send my son, Beryl, to bring goats next door in the moon. Since he is not the youngest, he can't wait pressed under a shawl of coarse cotton close to my breast as I whisper, "hurry" in Yiddish. My ankles...

Father's tales.
September 22, 1997... My father, author of Captain Horatio Hornblower and other novels, was a storyteller, and I started reading his books when I was seven. He spent part of most mornings at the desk in his study, a ground-floor room that looked onto the front garden...

Autumn crossing. (poem)
September 22, 1997... A sea of color rages ahead, parting for us with the soft hum of miles falling away, gently washing back into place, cloaking all traces of our safe crossing. ROBERT L. BRIMM, a retired copy editor, has had poems in the Christian Science...

The belled buzzard of Roxbury Mills. (poem)
September 22, 1997... Record heat. A poisonous haze on the hills Shows dawn as worn and blighted as twilight. Police reporters dazed from pounding the street Tally the dead from gunfire, dead from the heat, Black on black crime, white on black on white. I think I...

Philosophy into fiction.
September 22, 1997... One of the most remarkable international publishing phenomena of the 1990s has been the spectacular success of Sophie's World (1991) by Jostein Gaarder, who teaches philosophy at an adult education center in Norway. This "novel about the history...

The way of it. (poem)
September 22, 1997... At odd times, I have wondered: is this the way of it? does it all come together on some unconsidered sphere: a strange world, where impossibly, like the boy and the crocodile, and the girl with a dread of water, each keeps a rendezvous with...

The Nuremberg trial: fifty years after.
September 22, 1997... "The greatest trial in history," as Sir Norman Birkett, the associate British judge on the International Military Tribunal referred to the trial of the major German war criminals at Nuremberg, has inevitably been exposed to a wave of historical...

Peter Arno meets Somerset Maugham.
September 22, 1997... Maugham was dressed in gray slacks, a tweed jacket, and black moccasins, and he wore them with the upperclass Britisher's knack of making even new clothes appear faintly shabby and disreputable. Not that there was ever anything bohemian in...

October. (poem)
September 22, 1997... Inside the house, on the other side of a picture- window, the man I know as my father stands with hands pressed against the glass, looking out over the yard, through white arms of birch empty of leaves. His breath clouds what was clear and I...

Roundabout. (poem)
September 22, 1997... - for my father, James Spence (1922-1993) Our plan was not to have a plan: we'd fly To Australia - for you, the land of World War II - And see whatever came our way. The sky Below the equator shimmered hot and blue, As though we'd crossed the...

Donald Davie: 1922-1995.
September 22, 1997... In the summer of 1994 I found myself on a train heading west across England toward the city of Exeter. From there I would travel to a village set among low green hills to visit Donald Davie. As I rode, I thumbed through a paperback copy of The...

By O'Hara besotted. (writer John O'Hara)
September 22, 1997... (For Charles Mish) I began reading John O'Hara as an undergraduate, in the late 1930s, for pleasure alone, haphazardly, separate from the primarily dutiful and organized reading I did for university courses. I read him on the sly in company...

Queen Victoria's diamond jubilee.
September 22, 1997... The year was 1897 and the date was June 22, and by general consensus it was one of the most remarkable occasions of a remarkable century. Mark Twain, the American ironist, was at his most unironic as he sat in his chair on one of numerous wooden...

Leon Edel: the life of a biographer.
September 22, 1997... The Life of a Biographer From the beginning, Leon Edel's life has been that of the outsider, of the alien unsure of his identity, deprived of his roots, lacking a place distinctively his own. He is a first-generation American, first child of...

How to tell. (poem)
September 22, 1997... Not when my friends remind me they are there - Seeking opinions, telling me their own - Do I so fully sense how much we share As when together we are most alone. While music plays, perhaps, and each is so Enthralled the other seems to disappear,...

The Selected Letters of Leslie Stephen. (2 vols.)
September 22, 1997... Who was Bishop Colenso? And what were the Thirty-nine Articles? What was Essays and Reviews? Who was Governor Eyre and what happened in Jamaica that inspired committees in London to protest his harsh verdicts? Any Victorian specialist can...

A History of Reading.
September 22, 1997... Reviewed by JONATHAN ELUKIN Alberto Manguel's graceful meditation on reading is an intimate and scholarly attempt to capture the varied human experiences of reading. Like a captivating and voluble guest, Manguel holds forth about a dazzling...

Joseph Cornell: Theater of the Mind - Selected Diaries, Letters, and Files.
September 22, 1997... Reviewed by PETER DAILEY When the ballerina Tamara Toumanova met Joseph Cornell backstage after one of her performances in 1940, she found the artist, although only thirty-seven, "already an elderly man, rarely smiling, never laughing out...

Utopia Parkway: The Life and Work of Joseph Cornell.
September 22, 1997... Reviewed by PETER DAILEY When the ballerina Tamara Toumanova met Joseph Cornell backstage after one of her performances in 1940, she found the artist, although only thirty-seven, "already an elderly man, rarely smiling, never laughing out...

The Opening of the American Mind: Canons, Culture, and History.
September 22, 1997... Reviewed by SETH FORMAN Since the appearance in 1987 of Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind, the academic left has been searching in vain for a rebuttal to match the grand scale of Bloom's exegesis on the condition of liberal education...

Europe: A History.
September 22, 1997... Reviewed by VEJAS GABRIEL LIULEVICIUS It is at once strange and yet inevitable that the very idea of Europe, so central to the identity and self-understanding of peoples who are spread across that turbulent continent, should be so hard to...

Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography.
September 22, 1997... Reviewed by RANDALL CURB In the foreword to his new study, Roger Shattuck comes to the point in his first sentence. "Are there things we should not know?" he asks. Shattuck wants us above all to think about his question - and to think deeply....

The Only Thing That Counts: The Ernest Hemingway-Maxwell Perkins Correspondence, 1925-1947.
September 22, 1997... Reviewed by GERALD HOWARD Unlike F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe and Ernest Hemingway, the three authors with whom he is most closely identified, Maxwell Perkins improves upon closer acquaintance. What a hat trick of high-maintenance authors...