Under the Condor-A Story
Stillman, Whit
"Under the Condor-A Story" - already sunk below President Carter's "fair" price of $1.75 in response to market competition. "It has been argued," Schmitt said, "that there is no elasticity of supply, that is, that the supply...
...From the outside Jane had the appearance of a normal college girl, melancholy at her school's defeat...
...Sophocles, Racine, Shakespeare, Eugene O'Neill—all of them came out of it...
...Granted, she had never contemplated a gesture like theirs...
...she asked the bird in a nearly hysterical voice...
...Then she slipped into her berth for a needed rest...
...My father moved us up to Rye and sent us all to private schools...
...She used rich pastries to give herself an artificial "high," but each time the amount had to be greater just to reach the former level of well-being...
...Since leaving Exeter have you continued writing...
...I think you're wonderful," he had said, and she had replied: "I feel the same way about you...
...It was true that Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, the genre's two most celebrated practitioners, had both committed suicide—and maybe that was the consummate statement—but their style of writing was the only way Jane knew how to turn that terrible blackness inside herself into something bearable, or maybe even beautiful...
...In a sense, being depressed means being unhappy...
...She had failed utterly in her attempt to lead the life of an average college girl...
...but while she was struggling to preserve the family bonds, Jane was struggling to be free of them...
...They'll see at least that, although I'm nominally a Catholic myself, I know and value their Protestant tradition...
...Repton told her...
...But playwrights are not content with that...
...A deep puddle swamped her topsiders like canoes...
...It made a mockery of everything I had learned at Harvard so far...
...Jane went into her bedroom and closed the door before its departure for England, leaving a call with the steward to ring her in time for band rehearsal...
...On Plympton Street her notebook slipped out from under her raincoat and, in the moment it took to retrieve it, she was drenched...
...Coincidences like this can seem pretty amazing, but they can be sad, too...
...The depression Jane had suffered from during the first days of the term had returned, but in a much darker form...
...In accord with this resolution I approached the editors of the Crimson, the Advocate, the Lampoon, and the Independent and offered them the use of the concept, but none of them were interested...
...Of all days Tuesday is the most nondescript, and perhaps that's why it was her favorite...
...Helen asked...
...Although she had never written verse, Betty Rue's view of life was intensely poetic...
...To exchange these words had meant an extra drenching, but with Jim's arms around her she had not felt wet...
...and awkward manner...
...In translation, however, some of the play's nuance and subtle beauty is lost: for example, the sibilant quality of Medea's angry speeches to Jason, esosa se esosa hos isasi hosoi—one long hiss...
...But basically the people in Edgartown were good...
...The next three passed equally fast, mostly in personal chores, so that at the end of the six-minute period, Jane was standing in front of the bedroom mirror passing a hairbrush back across the top of her head and beginning to notice the expanse of blackish plumage looming on the edge of the mirror before her...
...Repton to keep the family together...
...I guess what we have is an early October kind of love...
...She thought of it as a terrible kind of rowing, not knowing whether one would ever reach the opposite shore, but pulling the oars anyway, as hard as one could—all this possibly taking place somewhere near the Vineyard...
...But there was a certain amount of self-deception in that...
...At her desk in Widener Jane pushed aside the book in front of her, turned to a fresh page in her notebook, and, without stopping, set down seven lines of a poem on rain, particularly the idea that while in October the rain was like a palpable embodiment of her despair, in July it had seemed to symbolize what being a woman was all about...
...We went out to the Café Pamplona for a coffee break together to discuss it...
...A '5' in the English advanced placement test allowed me to enter an upper level expository writing course in which I could work on perfecting my literary technique...
...They had analytical temperaments which happened to be perfectly suited to classroom discussion, while her own mind was associative, moving quickly from the common reference point to develop new lines of thought...
...They settled in the Bronx and still live there...
...The only solace she could fmd in the bizarre episode was that it at least proved, and in a dramatic way, her seriousness as a poet...
...What I feel for Rafe is calmer and deeper than that...
...But instead something very peculiar seemed to be happening...
...But that was different...
...It was a Greek legend he chose for dramatization fully aware of its depressing conclusion...
...For a poet to be a normal college student was like trying to turn a meadowlark into a pigeon—and pigeons were dirty, dirty things, Jane knew that from having grown up in New York City...
...For those who must live every day on the edge of lunacy there is always a real fear that they will at some point cross the line and not return...
...They dotted the stadium: some yellow, like hers, others pink or green...
...One afternoon in 1941 Betty Rue had taken a young naval lieutenant from the North to a cemetery where the Confederate dead were buried...
...But inside she felt something far worse, not at all normal...
...Jane lowered her hands and, seeing the bird still before her, immediately knew that she would have to get away...
...All she needed was the instrument of death...
...And after a bullet has been sent through the vital regions of the brain, there is a feeling that one can't go home again...
...He was either planning the ending all along as a kind of lesson, or else had just filled up enough tablets and wanted to end it, so had Medea kill the children and go off in the chariot...
...The rain's coldness pierced deep inside her to where the depression was...
...Jane followed the game with interest, though cheering mistakenly several times during the first half due to confusion about the direction of play...
...Some people valued verbal brilliance, others, like Ben, thought interest was the essential thing, but Jane herself was committed to poetry of a highly personal, deeply emotional kind...
...of Good Intentions, Washington, D.C...
...I don't know what their reasoning was, or even if they had any reasons, but the whole experience made me feel kind of uneasy...
...So it had fallen to Mrs...
...After generations of aristocratic inbreeding the Rue family history was strewn with cases of insanity and poetic genius...
...Interesting'—that, I realized, was the key word...
...Her fear of the condor and of having lost her ability to write had put her in such a frenzied state that it seemed anything might happen, and that whatever it was would probably not be good...
...Rupert Brooke ran dry at twenty-eight...
...Jane asked...
...He must have had a family, and they would have been sad when he died, but at least it was not in vain...
...for them it's not enough to show simply how beautiful life is...
...TO BE CONTINUED NEXT ISSUE The American Spectator January 1978 23...
...Poetry, Jane thought, though she did not mean this in an unkind way, was probably Ben's way of compensating for his short stature Whit Stillman is a reader in the trade-editorial department at Doubleday...
...They were among the best lines she had ever written...
...In that way, then, what are now price ceilings will wind up as price floors...
...The sun and white clouds were in the sky, otherwise it was blue...
...But on rereading my compositions I realized that they still didn't make a bit of sense...
...But, on the other hand, I don't want to blow up like a blimp...
...The pastries gave her a warm, glowing feeling, but when this effect wore off she was left feeling even colder, less glowing than before...
...Caffeine coursed through her veins, but it was primarily the cascade of thoughts Ben's conversation had stimulated which guaranteed that she would not be sleeping soon...
...Outside the rain was pouring...
...The physical explanation for what happened was that the processed sugar in all the pastries she had eaten so overwhelmed her normal processes of metabolism that the level of sugar in her blood could not be regulated and fluctuated radically, making her especially susceptible to hallucination...
...Government regulation has a way of ending up like that...
...I have no desire to get up and go out for a coffee break anymore—what Rafe gives me seems to fill that need, although, when the weather was warmer, we went out for ice cream several times together...
...Yesterday one of the main hurdles standing in the way of my magazine was cleared—coming up with a name for it...
...Never mind...
...Entering Widener from the back, still dripping wet, Jane passed up several flights of stairs and across to the narrow entrance of the library's inner part...
...She walked to the window and looked out—three stories, not enough...
...The dramatic form was perfectly suited to the epoch of external fears, but, Jane The American Spectator January 1978 21 felt, sadly obsolete in a time when the fears come from inside...
...It turned out later that she had not actually thrown her clothes in the river—that was just a metaphor...
...After leaving the house dining hall she descended the staircase, placing one foot in front of but below the other, and then repeating this maneuver, alternating feet...
...Jane fell asleep that night the hours seemed to A race until it was suddenly 8 o'clock Tuesday morning...
...After saying good-bye to Ben, she answered the phone...
...Black said, "it's been around for over three thousand years, but still hasn't lost its impact...
...In Edgartown, for instance, how would it be...
...It seemed cruelly ironic now...
...The New Yorkers had no regard for what was soft and beautiful in life...
...in rather poor taste, let us say...
...If that happens, thenour dear old legion of well-intentioned, moonstruck liberals will take to the hustings once again and argue, this time, for deregulation of natural gas on behalf of consumers, just as they have recently done with regard to airline prices...
...After lying in the dark thinking for an hour, Jane put on her dressing gown and went out into the livingroom...
...He always studied in Lamont...
...No one would consider her poems interesting—nor had she ever intended them to be read that way...
...Technological progress, in relieving people of these external worries, left them vulnerable to inner ones like ennui, despair, and self-doubt—all the more terrifying because of their intangibility...
...After the weekend ended the two of them had kept in touch by letter and telephone—she on the Vineyard, he in Boston and Wiano—but with the end of summer all contact had been lost...
...There could be no doubting her artistic seriousness now...
...That was the question I kept coming back to...
...She was a young person with some serious problems...
...This is like something out of Kafka...
...But Jane came away from her afternoons of work alone with a sense of achievement and of the passage of time...
...Don't you remember what things looked like to you from the bottom of that laundry hamper back at Exeter...
...She asked him what had happened...
...Jim's idealism was one of the qualities which had first attracted Jane to him...
...Shortly before 9 o'clock she headed up Plympton Street on the way to the section meeting for her drama course...
...During the night the emotional conflicts left unresolved in their waking lives took the form of dreams...
...Actually I've been drinking hardly any coffee at all...
...A flick of the wall switch transformed the dark room into a sanctuary of light and sanity...
...The frightening vision of halftime would not let her go, but kept playing over and over again in her mind...
...I had never realized," Jane said, "how dominant Puritan culture still was at Harvard...
...She had the sickening feeling that no matter for how long the black condor might disappear, it would always be coming back...
...Harvard lost that afternoon, but there was a general feeling afterwards that one day the two colleges would play each other again...
...I see him with gray eyes, pale skin, and either light or dark hair...
...In the drama section meeting, two other women students—Helen and Sarah—usually contributed more to the discussion than Jane...
...Her classmates' dinnertime discussions of their own accomplishments —which could have been shattering—were instead enjoyable...
...Finally they drifted off to sleep...
...then she saw that it was only a seagull which had strayed in from the bay...
...Black asked...
...On the way back to her room after Widener's closing that evening, one of those odd things happened which made Jane wonder about life...
...The light-colored sweaters were, she thought, metaphors for innocence, though no actual innocence...
...Before it was always biscuits with jam, heavy sauces, and pastries with coffee...
...She turned on the radio part of the stereo...
...Depressing subject matter is still popular in the theatre today, even in comedies, isn't it...
...His purpose, like that of the other ancient tragedians, was to arouse pity and fear in his audience, thus provoking an emotional catharsis...
...Jane walked back to Quincy House, putting one foot in front of the other, and vice versa, over and over again...
...Then, just as abruptly, the bird folded its wings, and she was able to edge past it and out the door...
...Why did she want to kill herself...
...Instead they always want to make it seem ugly, and apparently that's the way it's always been, even going back to ancient times...
...Smith, who's arriving on a plane from New York...
...For the next hour Jane studied, until a drop of water fell to the edge of her desk...
...The poet Sidney Lanier was a distant relative...
...One factor," Helen was saying in class, "which seems to link Medea to all the other Greek tragedies is that it's so depressing...
...A little after 8 o'clock she thanked Ben for the game, and asked him to excuse her, as she had to go back to her room to do some work...
...Maybe...
...But finally I've settled on the right combination, I think: 'Cotton Mather's Magazine for the Arts at Harvard' with the 'Cotton Mather's' in large capitals and the rest in smaller print underneath...
...He gave his life for chivalry, honor, graciousness, beauty, warm weather—for all that the South has always stood for...
...As you might know, the students at Exeter are advanced academically but extremely competitive, and sort of young—there was a lot of hazing...
...My grandparents came over to this country from the little town of Pasquali in the hills of northern Italy...
...to 1950 A.D...
...They were like ships who had passed in the night, her mother had said...
...That meant taking a first step and then another and another, over and over again...
...Here in the safety of the poetry stacks Jane was able to immerse herself in overdue course work and put what had happened behind...
...Writing usually requires solitude, and that can mean hours of being alone...
...In addition to its role as scenery the river seemed to hold for some an odd and occasionally fatal fascination...
...Finally it had happened, she was blocked...
...Jane turned to see the huge bird, or condor, or whatever it was, perched ominously on the back of the livingroom couch...
...Jackson has recommended) they will not sink lower than that, no matter how much new gas is brought out of the ground...
...This was Mrs...
...What Jane did Tuesday afternoon in the six minutes following lunch was so insignificant and ordinary that it might in itself seem scarcely important enough to record...
...There was an implied symbolism in the stadium's placement here...
...Ascending the entry stairs, she put each foot both above and in front of the other, repeating this, while alternating feet, ad nauseam...
...While on its outside Widener is a classical structure of brick and marble, inside it is a jungle gym of shadowy book-lined corridors encased in glass and steel...
...Picking up her notebook and raingear, Jane began to move quietly toward the door...
...She reached up with her hands and pressed them to the side of her head and then over her eyes...
...Absently gazing at the wall, she noticed the optimistic verse she had copied from a book and pinned above her desk a week ago...
...That seemed simply unbelievable to her...
...This effect has not even been attempted in the English version...
...But, suddenly, she had nothing to say...
...My whole theory of aesthetics, which revolved around the idea of beauty, was deeply flawed and probably worthless...
...But the loss of her virginity was real...
...One of her problems was with pastries...
...Abruptly the bird extended its enormous wings...
...Cold weather made her wither up inside like a gardenia...
...But when Ben spoke all appearance of awkwardness disappeared...
...As a Southern European Roman Catholic it's hard to feel that one really belongs or is accepted at Harvard—it's a distinctly Anglo-Saxon Protestant sort of place...
...she had felt like a woman...
...What does she answer...
...By calling the magazine 'Cotton Mather's' I hope to gain for it the acceptance of the descendants of the Puritans, who still really run things at Harvard...
...If Ben, or her father, or Jim had been there with her, none of this would ever have happened...
...Jane liked her drama course for the material it covered—the greatest plays from 500 B.C...
...Huge wings were folded to the creature's side and a grotesque caruncle fell over its bill...
...The repulsive stench of dead and decaying flesh emanating from the bird made her gag...
...Your theory is interesting, but, as a matter of background, the story of Jason and Medea did not originate with Euripides...
...But then she thought better of that—maybe her impulse to write was tied up in the harsh northern climate...
...Worst of all, though, eating unhealthy foods made her feel dirty inside...
...As Mr...
...Three of the minutes following lunch were over...
...Today Lamont didn't seem enough," he said...
...Finally we'll all be together, like a family again...
...As the Harvard University Band played down Boylston Street on the way to the stadium, she and Ben followed...
...She knew that people born before 1950 would have a hard time understanding that...
...And she had never been a string saver—she regretted that now...
...In my mind love was always closely associated with spring—that euphoria one feels when warm weather suddenly ends a long winter...
...Selfishness, by contrast, is rather a low-life way of solving the problem...
...Unwittingly, I had discovered what I was looking for: that what's important in writing is that it have some interest—beauty is merely aesthetic...
...Some poets stop writing completely when they get older...
...Somehow, after what she had seen, neat hair did not seem so important anymore, but maybe, she thought, repeated brushing would help keep the top on her brain...
...In practice what this will require is an entirely new attitude on the part of writers, and for many of them it will be a highly challenging shift to make...
...Tonight at Lamont I talked to a junior from Lowell House who plans to start a Harvard magazine for the arts...
...According to my thinking the name had to be interesting as well as appropriate, and that turned out to be a tough bill to fill...
...She walked across the courtyard on foot and opened the door to her entryway in a fashion similar to that already described...
...But depression carries with it the implication that something big is about to happen...
...For Jane Repton of Quincy House, Harvard, depression, and the sense of promise it brings, came early in the fall of sophomore year...
...They're in the lawnmower"—this just doesn't ring true...
...But Jane had a feeling that the unexamined life was not really worth living...
...Now I have no real desire for rich foods—Rafe's love for me has seemed to fill that need, and we've never, you know, done anything...
...These conversations were actually given a heightened value, since she might later turn them into verse, or perhaps their value would be indirect, with the spoken idiom influencing her writing generally...
...Why do you keep hounding me ?" The condor just stared back at her stupidly...
...Early in the game the sight of a bird hovering over the far end of the stadium gave her a momentary start...
...A feeling of euphoria overwhelmed her...
...On Saturday afternoon Jane was happy to be going to the 22 The American Spectator January 1978 Cornell game with Ben Pasquali...
...The market system works so well, when it is allowed to work, because it is the "clutch" that engages self-interest (the little motor inside all of us...
...A happy poem, for instance, is not just the product of an author's high spirits but of the uneasiness he feels in his happiness—that it won't last, that he can't properly share it, or maybe that he feels it is undeserved...
...It has been argued," Schmitt said, "that there is no elasticity of supply, that is, that the supply of natural gas will not increase with an increase...in the price of new natural gas....In 1976 [in Texas] we could see the beginnings of a drop in price as the new supply produced by these wells became available, and the price in 1976 was about $1.75...
...Yes," Mr...
...I never thought being in love would be like this," Lisa said...
...In the medicine cabinet, on the bottom shelf, she found a bottle of Seconal capsules...
...You don't seriously mean to work at 8 o'clock on Saturday night...
...A spattering of rain struck the room's window with a sound like drops hitting a drumhead of glass...
...Immediately following a sprinter's gunshot which sent the band marchers scurrying like insects into a new formation, she saw the dark bird sketched on the field below her, its wings lifted in menace...
...She sat for an hour without writing a line...
...Football games were part of the experience of her generation, and participating in the life of ordinary college students would perhaps help her acquire their easy acceptance of reality...
...I was familiar with poetry from before, but I had little awareness of the non-poetic kinds of writing...
...It was when the band was on the field during halftime that she saw what she had dreaded to see...
...Certainly, Jane knew, the long summer separations in Edgar-town were often rough on marriages...
...But what's the value of a dazzling sentence if it doesn't mean a thing...
...Black, the section leader, opened discussion of the play under study...
...By 3 o'clock on Monday afternoon she had already eaten three of the sticky things...
...Just as they got to the room, the phone rang, and in her rush to answer it, Jane accepted his invitation to go to the Cornell game that Saturday without really thinking...
...Her mother was right, of course, but the memory still made Jane feel sad...
...Previously she had tended to see the scholarly life in sardonic terms—reading is not very imaginative—but now she found a sense of peace in it...
...More recently, in 1977, we have seen new contracts for new natural gas in Texas, in intrastate market, begin to go for about $1.60...
...It must be difficult to be an Italian Catholic in Lowell House...
...After the war and her marriage to Bart Repton she settled in New York City, but even after thirty years she could never adjust to life in the brusquely impersonal northern city...
...That evening when she and Ben were out having dinner and drinks with friends, Jane only went through the motions of having a good time, and not even all of those...
...Of course I suppose I could take my poetic talent and use it to become a good date, but is that what you would really want from me...
...Every so often I look up from my work andwatch Rafe reading, and that's enough for me...
...0 Whit Stillman Under the Condor —A Story From among the undergraduates of today will come the graduate students of tomorrow...
...She looked up and saw Ben Pasquali standing next to her, his hair disheveled and clothes soaked...
...Although only southern on her mother's side, "southernness" was in her bones...
...However, if prices are legislated at about $2.00 (as Sen...
...Ben and Jane stood listening while the band poignantly played "Fair Harvard...
...The only answer, I decided, was for me to start a magazine of my own, so the whole concept could be given a fair trial...
...Several moments passed—Jane stood perfectly still...
...But it's important to take cultural factors into consideration when one is trying to come up with an interesting name for a college arts magazine...
...Americans some time after they do...
...Suddenly Jane decided that it would be a good idea for her to lead a troupe of women drummers on a tour of the Communist-bloc countries...
...His gestures seemed awkward...
...After her morning classes were over, Jane went with Lisa to lunch in the Quincy House dining hall...
...Although it had not yet developed into a weight problem, Jane's sporadic sense of well-being rested on a precarious foundation of calories...
...he asks her...
...The creativity had stopped...
...She would go, she decided, to Widener Library and bury herself deep within its stacks—they seemed to her now as a sort of bulwark of scholarship and sanity...
...Feelings of terror, nausea, and claustrophobia overwhelmed her...
...Keats was tremendously prolific until shortly after he turned twenty-six and stopped writing completely...
...This was the direction of Jane's thoughts when her roommate, Lisa Devigny, returned from Eliot House where she had been studying with the senior she went out with...
...Dreams can rarely solve basic conflicts, but they can dissipate the subconscious anxieties which build up during the day...
...Poets write not in simple pursuit of artistic objectives," he told her over coffee, "but in an attempt to escape unease...
...Just the year before, when Jane was a freshman, a classmate in her upper level expository writing class had written an essay about how in the early morning darkness, after losing her virginity, she had put her Gucci shoes and a cocktail dress from Henri Bendel—symbolizing her former life as a New York socialite —in a bag and dropped it from the side of the bridge to the Charles below...
...She thought of the "good-time babies" from other colleges who, soused on beer, would be puking their insides out all over Eliot House stairwells that night...
...Her husband's family, the Reptons, seemed cold and hard too, and even Bart—with his senior partnership at Solitary, Poor—had little time or inclination for family life...
...Because she did not want to live any longer...
...That, at least, was something she could hold on to...
...Coming to Widener was completely uncharacteristic for Ben...
...Whatever the physical diagnosis, Jane had long accepted that the line between creativity and madness was very thin, and that even in the ordinary act of setting a poem down on paper the mental processes of the poet would, in clinical terms, be considered insane...
...In the midst of a downpour after the Regatta ball he had 20 The American Spectator January 1978 stopped her just to hold her in his arms...
...Ben Pasquali studied in the poetry stacks too, so from proximity they became friends, chatting occasionally...
...In Jane's case there was a lot for them to do...
...That's what she loved about the nighttime: the way it allowed one to control one's own environment, particularly as to whether it be light or dark...
...She habitually sat among the open poetry stacks so that she might periodically take a break to look through the shelves...
...Nini and Frey will be coming Friday, too...
...Later that night Jane lay in her upper bunk unable to sleep...
...As you might have guessed, I'm Italian-AmericanPasquali is an Italian name...
...Her commitment was white hot—as theirs had been...
...For a second she wished she were someplace perpetually dry, like Arizona...
...She traversed the lobby and pulled the outside door towards herself, exiting through the opening created...
...Fighting down the mixed feeling of nausea and panic rising inside, Jane turned back to the mirror with exaggerated calmness and, picking up her hairbrush, passed it back along the top of her head, over and over again, trying to shut off from her consciousness the monstrous presence looming behind...
...I don't mean to give the impression that I'm complaining—I don't find that very interesting...
...This never happened," Jane told herself as she descended the entry stair...
...I've always been afraid," Jane said, "that a serious relationship might get in the way of my creative work or somehow cripplemy productivity...
...Before the affluent society, which began roughly around 1950, the problems people faced were still largely physical—things like hunger and disease...
...Jane heard a rustling sound and turned to see a monstrous black bird perched on the back of the heavy armchair...
...And perhaps she would never be a poet of the first rank, no matter how hard she tried...
...Dazzling brilliance alone is not interesting...
...From this perspective what happened Tuesday was less of a shock for her than it might have been for the average person, but it was still frightening...
...If I were confident that I would always have this ability it would be different, but I might lose it at any time...
...Sometimes extramarital affairs occurred—at other times they just happened—and either way the results were bad...
...Then she had merely been despondent at being denied things like fame and recognition—now she saw them as utterly meaningless, along with everything else...
...This is something I encountered personally, I'm afraid...
...Continuing onto the Lars Anderson Memorial Bridge they crossed over the Charles River, a narrow waterway which irrigated the university and provided transportation for members of the crew and sailing teams...
...It was then that she realized—deep inside somewhere—that having gotten into a highly selective college in no way distinguished her from any of her classmates...
...Together they stood before a modest tombstone engraved, "Thomas Lee Hill, 1850-1864...
...I have to recognize these facts...
...The moral, I must say, is a stark one...
...Ben...
...That's when I started writing poetry...
...The enormous bird had feelings like anyone else...
...This realization led to a depression which, returning to the field of her secondary school success, she sought to express in poetry...
...He must have been just a boy when he died," she said...
...Repton's pathetic hope—that one day they would all be together like a family again...
...Until I went to Exeter for ninth grade—or Lower Middle, as we called it there—I hardly wrote any poetry at all...
...Her poetry could never pass Ben's criterion of "interestingness...
...But technically," Sarah said, "the play is a comedy since Medea, its 'heroine,' escapes danger in her chariot, even though the whole thing is pretty grim...
...Back in Mobile, when she was growing up, Betty Rue Repton's family had kept together, and that was not always easy during the Depression, especially since the once considerable Rue fortune now consisted largely of a few hundred thousand dollars in worthless Confederate government bonds and an allegiance to the courtly ways of a bygone era...
...During Freshman Week—two years ago—I was sure my ability to write poetry had entirely dried up...
...Looking around her, she noticed that many other young women were wearing pastel sweaters...
...Following dinner Jane studied in Lamont Library, jotting down in her notebook any ideas or phrases which occurred to her for possible use in future poems...
...It turned out to be her mother calling longdistance from New York to tell her to be sure to come down to Edgartown for that same weekend...
...How do you imagine him looking...
...Medea is the brilliant drama of a woman who first loves and then hates too passionately—ultimately killing her own children to punish Jason for deserting her...
...Does that make any kind of sense to you...
...Here Ben stopped and took a sip of his coffee...
...Writing a letter to Jane Austen would be faster, though, and she wondered why she had never thought of that before...
...Across the whole width of the room they stretched, blocking her path...
...Every evening after study hall a group of students would pick me up and drop me in the dormitory laundry hamper...
...There was a rustling nearby and she turned to see the huge black bird perched in the double-width livingroom window she had foolishly left open...
...I guess I felt a kind of hunger for experience...
...I decided to dedicate the whole of my sophomore year to the idea's furtherance...
...Smith drives out to the airport on a Friday evening in August to pick up Mr...
...Because," Jane answered, "the depressing story expresses something deep inside all of us...
...The American Spectator January 1978 19 "It was Freshman Week all over again...
...T ane's brush with insanity on Tuesday afternoon j left her both shaken and confused...
...Had she gone mad...
...Yes, it does...
...This was, she felt, the theatre's golden age...
...But then I thought to myself, 'Heck, just because I have no ideas shouldn't mean that I can't still write.' So I started writing without having anything to say and discovered the fascination of simply putting words down on paper, one after another, even if they didn't mean anything at all...
...Why do you think that is...
...But she did not mean that in an unkind way...
...Disconnect all those little motors, and replace them with the Fairness Office, Dept...
...But she could still strive to be, even with a handicap...
...She had a tremendous feeling of uneasiness...
...Only then will they realize that Senator Russell Long, custodian of the "special interests," has been on their side all along...
...Sailing, lying in the sun, croquet, tennis dresses, wine spritzers, "tanning butter"—there was nothing very sinful in it all, whatever the appearances...
...My reason for picking this name is to some extent personal...
...Please don't misunderstand what I've been saying...
...On the other side of the river was Soldiers Field and the ancient concrete stadium built as a memorial to the Harvard men who had served in World War I—the area had been used as their parade grounds before the war...
...She couldn't imagine it ever happening in real life...
...Where are the kids...
...Liberal-minded "planners" love that garage, because they know there is a set of overalls waiting for them there, and endless opportunity to tinker...
...There was an odd look of peace in its eyes, but Jane did not see that...
...and you get a ramshackle contraption that never gets out of the garage...
...After Lisa and Jane had prepared for the night and were each in their bunk beds, they talked some more...
...He had apparently only come to her room looking for companionship, after some kind of failed romance...
...Otherwise he would be perfectly content with the happiness itself, and not need to write a poem about it...
...College football is an American rite of passage from early to late afternoon on autumn Saturdays...
...Finally, after a semester of the course, my writing talent had been honed into something hard and jewel-like...
...That is how people hurt one another...
...The concept of `interestingness' obsessed me...
...There was a chill in the air which she had not dressed for that morning...
...We study sitting opposite each other at a table in the Eliot House library...
...as a poet she found it the most challenging to characterize...
...All her life she had been to schools at which she was only taught how "to ask the right questions," so now that she needed an answer she just reached for the one which was closest—the same answer Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath had found...
...When the whole river froze during the winter it was said to be possible to skate on it all the way to Concord, where the famous shot was fired...
...My discovery led me to an interest in literature...
...Jane thought that the remarkable quantity of important plays in the period before 1950 was explainable by historical factors...
...This is because when sellers are not allowed to bargain at the marketplace, they do not bother to compete with one another...
...She wanted Bart Repton to know about the South...
...Do you think that was intentional on Euripides' part...
...It's not that I want to work, it's that I feel I have to...
...Since Rafe and I have been going out I've had much less of an appetite for rich food...
...she said with obvious concern in her voice...
...She had originally been fascinated with the play, until she reached the scene in which Medea actually goes through with her threats to kill the children...
...he said...
...Another gunshot sounded and the bird vanished, frightened away...
...There was no oven in her room, no gun or automobile exhaust pipe...
...This was a cycle which could not continue indefinitely—for one thing, she did not have that kind of money...
...As soon as Jane was back in her room she sat down on the sofa with pen and notebook to try to get some of her uneasiness out on paper...
...Japanese students blow their brains out when they do not get into the college of their choice...
...I feel tremendously uneasy inside, and this is a feeling I have to do something with...
...On the way back to her room to get stationery from her desk she passed by the condor, which in a deep, croaking voice abruptly announced: "I feel lonesome now my baby's gone...
...But life under the southern city's lush trees and shady porches was filled with warmth and graciousness, even when there was little food for the table...
...I couldn't think of anything, and remembered stories of successful young poets whose talent vanished as they got older...
...Lisa's ancestors, the original De Vignys, were Huguenot refugees who had come to this country from France in the early eighteenth century, and from them she seemed to have inherited her unusual seriousness towards life...
...Black continued the discussion, Jane looked around at the grubby basement room in which her class met...
...The old melody stirred her emotions even further, but it also made her think...
...She remembered what Jim had said in Edgartown in July about the Widener stacks—that although physically about the gloomiest place in the university, it was to him the most beautiful...
...What do you want...
...For a year I had worshipped at the altar of technique—perfection was always the highest goal...
...Several decades before, a Mississippi cousin of Jane's mother had, in a deranged moment while at Harvard, jumped from the bridge to a death by drowning...
...She did not drink anything alcoholic because that would cloud her mind, and complete mental lucidity was the possession she valued most...
...One evening during the first weeks of school they took a break from their work to have cafe cappuccinos at the Cafe Pamplona...
...Perhaps sensing this, Ben bought an official program for them to share...
...She had not told Ben about the bird, but had invited him to stop off at her room for a moment, so that she could check to make sure that it wasn't there anymore...
...the song playing was one of her favorites from three summers before...
...It's funny, but I haven't been to the Cafe Pamplona since Rafe and I have been going out...
...I went to Exeter and am now at Harvard, but inside I'm still Ben Pasquali, an Italian kid from the Bronx...
...Furthermore, it puts the planners out of work...
...Your father is taking the weekend off," Mrs...
Vol. 11 • January 1978 • No. 3
