BOOKS
Kotre, Carlos Baker, John N.
ending with the affirmation: alone: God accompanies them, weep- about the hope for a future that lies ing, smiling, whispering." So...
...And it is out of such af- He has given us a creation of fearful ly...
...indomitable willingness to go on wait- gested in each of the examples that fining, to refuse to succumb fully to ally moves God to a weeping and These are the first words one reads despair, the Narrator informs us that smiling engagement with his people...
...superb collection of modern painters of an irresistible force disguised as an Miss Stein did not, of course, sucthat once graced the walls of her immovable object," and established her- ceed in charming them all...
...were confident that they had assured -Commonweal, July 27, 1973 this country a government of honest if not brilliant men...
...others have produced psy- wished to say...
...But it is difficult tution of extraordinarily simpleminded to winnow exaggeration and hallucina- CORRESPONDENCE myth for controlled and measured antion from accurate report, and to ward alysis, is no more the failure of the (Continued from page 371) off that long arm of coincidence...
...LeShan's case is really too facile...
...I pulled off the Clairvoyant Reality does not prove "vast, copious material" supporting the road and sat for ten minutes that his theory is correct...
...Miss Stein enjoyed a small explosion of her own when Mabel Dodge, as her self-appointed publicist, compared her work in a laudatory article to that of Picasso, suggesting that both had achieved break-throughs into new realms of being...
...7-12-74 present rather than acknowledging loss 12 July 1974: 390...
...10016 made well known...
...But if the inception and wisdom were flowing that day...
...There was a catch, however: teresting findings in parapsychology ar- ed chance...
...Commonweal: 389 side too great to heed his own words...
...matter...
...presence...
...revivals, voodoo, possession, exorcism: selling Autobiography of Alice B. The boy looked like a corpse, so you name it, he has been there to witToklas, set down in six weeks at her that everyone said, "He is dead...
...But Son of Shlomo, After each of these recitals of an there is another hope as well, sug- Son of Eliezer...
...but if um, The Mystic, and The Physicist...
...doves...
...Then they become a smile streams down God's somber counte- the ongoing life of the Jewish com- through tears...
...Afterwards she rehelpless in the presence of the cogni- ported that during the twenty minAs soon as the spirit saw Jesus, tive explanation of it that is offered utes she had been conscious of it threw the boy into a fit, so that to him...
...That, said would become increasingly agitated its victim down to eventual submission Cabell, put a different light on the until he exploded in a violent outburst and belief...
...I held NILS O. JACOBSON according to Sargant, by heightened one hand on each side of her face, suggestibility on the part of the subject...
...of cure...
...As LeShan comments,"Coinciis that the world described by mystics, scientific, critical stance toward demon- dence has a long arm...
...Gertrude herself had already made a similar claim following a visit to Spain in 1912 during which she attempted to catch the rhythms of the gypsy dancers at Granada in a prose poem called (one hopes unpunningly) "A Sweet Tail (Gypsies...
...She could be mean and dicta- the same way as the boy's demon was ward posture of psychological reductorial but also generous and witty...
...BOOKS A ROSE FOR A ROSE FOR A ROSE CARLOS BAKER Charmed Circle: Gertrude and their work...
...tionless as the boy in the Gospel...
...But his to come...
...Berenson, having 12 July 1974: 386 SOS "I think that few people having read this book would be the same as 'when they opened its first page...
...He is worth that brings material, spontaneous and And in one case a man asked for a following...
...I am nary human experience...
...Doubtless as the bicentennial approaches we have more to endure, but we can take the phrase as a sign that we are to be treated to some Going Along mythical version of the past to suit the needs of modern polemics...
...Otherwise "her friendships were like her collection of bric-a-brac: delicate objects, curiosities that took her fancy, souvenirs from her travels or the gifts of her fame...
...Some have taken it to seek fortune, some That quotations from mystics read like to drive away care, some to seek out quotations from physicists may still in- knowledge, and some in order to go home...
...intense enough, he felt purged, like the world of mediums and sensitives the boy, of the demons that tormented but not doctrinaire about what he disThe Mind Possessed him...
...If axe: its purpose is to put continual Gertrude Stein were serious, Alice their suggestions took hold, the patient strain on the nervous system, to wear answered, "Desperately...
...The Stein & Company can justly be said to lie there, the de- names here were likewise eminent, or JAMES R. MELLOW velopment moves well out beyond even shortly became so: Bernard Berenson, so glowing a center as that provided the Cone sisters, Virgil Thomson, SherPraeger, $12.95 by Matisse, Cezanne, Picasso, Gris, wood Anderson, William Carlos WilBraque, Marie Laurencin, Vallotton, liams, Thornton Wilder, Cocteau, Janet It may be a legitimate surmise that and the rest...
...He has found a lost song...
...ending with the affirmation: alone: God accompanies them, weep- about the hope for a future that lies ing, smiling, whispering...
...So finally in Israel's children...
...In boys, hustlers and packagers, loyal not to profoundly held personal con- the first place, of course, neither Adams victions but to the Boss...
...Another of her fellowAmericans, the painter Joseph Stella, reacted adversely to what he called throned on a sofa in the middle of the room . . . with the forceful solemnity of a pitoness [sic] or a sibylla . . . examining pitiless all newcomers, assuming a high and distant pose...
...Best of all, he has tried Lippincott, $7.95 sed, are physiologically identical...
...Mark 9, 20-27) ally identical experiences have a variety prepared the way for her triumphal Battle neuroses suffered during of cognitive interpretations-overpowtour of the U.S.A...
...For you," said Alice, "not of emotion and then collapsed, mo- More willing to take psychic healing, for me...
...To others, both then and since, the direction she followed in the public writing of her maturity led only to a No-person's Land somewhere between the extremes of babytalk and balderdash...
...weeping...
...His assumption, stated baldly, expansive Erdmutter in Alice-in-Won- down and subsequently repressed their is by now classic: any way of knowing derland sandals or a supreme egotist fear were given drugs and induced to but my own (in this case, the rationalwhose claims for her interminable and "abreact," i.e., to relive at full emo- psychiatric) is a product of brainwashboring verbal escapades went well be- tional intensity the incident which had ing...
...its of which one has no knowledge (ex- reference...
...covers there...
...It is as if the new Golden Rule in America had nor Jefferson wrote any of the Federalbecome: "To Get Ahead, Go Along...
...No one sees this camp an inmate affirmed that, even prepare the way before him together...
...many interpretations have become enter, but he finds the fascination inClairvoyant Reality is a world that makes real the Haiku that Kazantzakis put into the mouth of St...
...neither were they at the Constitutional Convention (both being A moral issue can still be the most powerful force in American politics then on extended foreign service duty...
...Some depavilion and atelier at 27 rue de self as a center for an ever-widening parted the premises to impugn her as Fleurus in Paris...
...Sarsensory world ("Clairvoyant Reality") possessions, voices from outer space gant films them from a distance but all things are seen as part of a central (recorded as background noise on tape does not enter, tours the world but unity...
...knows how to explore...
...God does speak, and "The word of within the circle of that hope by dediAnd even if you disappoint me God continues to be heard...
...ing of evil in the world, Jesus said, record of past corruption, neighborly Beware the invocation of "the Found"Be wise as serpents and simple as violence, fraternal and imperial war- ing Fathers...
...The difficountry house at Bilignin, and Four But Jesus took the boy by the culty with his presentation is that his Saints in Three Acts, with an all-black hand and helped him rise, and he central observation-that physiologiccast and music by Virgil Thomson, stood up...
...He liberal sense of the word, for as Abra- both veiled and unveiled, that the has sung it for us...
...vealing about our national moral character...
...In the absence of such the night of the cure LeShan had for- ranged seductively to support the information one cannot assess the siggotten to do his part...
...No one knows of it...
...Therapists would tive mental collapse," speaking in perfectly, all woolly and a yard wide...
...mediums, and sensitives at the moment strations of telepathy, clairvoyance, These three authors bring quite difthey acquire paranormal information is precognition, and psychokinesis, he ferent attitudes to that miscellaneous identical to the world described by suddenly finds himself in a world of category of human experience called Einsteinian physicists...
...The And the Democratic party might ask itself why its young leaders have Founding Fathers, Horowitz discovers, had so little of substance to say...
...Francis: "Where are we going, along this road I said to the Almond tree we have been following for so long "Sister, speak to me of God" without once asking where it leads...
...Part of it went as follows: "This is the sun in...
...the silence of his dead children...
...With chalk a shadow shall be a sneeze in a tooth in a tin tooth, a turned past, a turned little corset, a little tuck in a pink look and with a pin in, a pin in...
...Horowitz THERE ARE LOTS of things wrong with televised Congressional hearings...
...Indeed, a "thing" is important recorders), and speaking in languages never leaves his psychiatric frame of only in its relatedness to the whole...
...These acts of presence are tribution to that preparing of the way...
...lip and it would take approximateLife without Death...
...One has only to recall that the Administration which prePlease send the next 17 issues of Commonweal to: sided over the first centennial celebration of our revolution and independence Name was that of U.S...
...The claim was extravagant...
...Paul's conversion is "dissociayond belief...
...JOHN N. KOTRE is the author of the (i SCHOCKEN BOOKS forthcoming book, Projecting: Communi- 200 MADISON AVENUE...
...We may have forgotten our past-as Horowitz hasAddress but dishonesty is surely no new revelation (if one is to take Horowitz in full City, State, Zip...
...not touching the affected area, for Delacorte, $10 The intensity of the experience over- about twenty minutes in a strong JOHN N. KOTRE powers its victim and renders him Type 2 healing...
...can effect some cures by tuning into FROM Principles and Precepts 00000 0000 REVIEWERS of the Return to the Obvious "I CARLOS BAKER, Woodrow Wilson Pro- LANZA DEL VASTO fessor of Literature at Princeton, is the $4.95 at all bookstores author of Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story and the recently published novel, The Gay Head Conspiracy (Scribner's...
...from such lapses in knowledge...
...maintaining idealism in an all too real witz operates with some notion of reThere is too much in paranormal existence, it's an even better one for trievable virginity...
...dicate more about the structure of our "We are going to do all these things knowing apparatus than the structure at the same time: We are going to of the real...
...Even sysAlice Toklas at a dinner in Richmond being blown off or that he was trapped tematic, rational theology falls to the during the American tour and asked if once again inside a burning tank...
...but a limited capacity for untroubled friendship...
...In this respect, it seems to me that nothing in Russian or world literature can compare with it...
...It is veiled from the sight there, he would wait for the Messiah Wiesel in Ani Maamin makes his conof Abraham, Isaac and Jacob...
...And nificance of apparently extraordinary The main thesis of LeShan's book the reader is seduced: set up with a events...
...Win lake, eat splashes dig salt change benches...
...We must find out whether The simple error of fact here exposes we are becoming a nation of smooth-faced, soft-spoken, middle-aged a much more fundamental confusion...
...And Jacobson warns himself and meaningless, both in moments of pos- documented experiences capable of his reader to be critical before they session and in modern relativity theory...
...He acknowlarea...
...Later, X-rays substantiated his book is a compendium of the most in- experimental results that never exceedclaim...
...Speak- right in power than the left out...
...He places himself I shall wait for you...
...Apart from Alice, her true passion was for fame, what she called la gloire...
...Spirit-is seized upon as the Ultimate one half hour later she left my...
...In this supra- dreams, floating psyches, apparitions, psychic, mystical, or paranormal...
...in the death and there are moments when we may with-yes-love...
...Jesus noticed that the crowd and Absolute Truth, and so tenaciously office to drive home (a drive of was closing in on them, so he gave does the subject cling to it that his about an hour...
...Mellow en- spirited monologues, sample the delicate found her appearance or her manner joys a happy field day with the painters refreshments, and absorb whatever wit invariably irresistible...
...suggest to the patient that he was see- tongues is "ecstatic hysterical trance," When James Branch Cabell cornered ing once again the head of a friend mystics fear sexual assault...
...The ent styles of psychotherapy, each with I salute Jacobson's wish to be fair dead skin in the center did not its own description of what is "really" and his willingness to piece improbable seem to change, but new skin slow- happening, work-but all those expla- experiences into a theory, but I find ly grew over the whole raw pink nations of the "real" cannot be true him far too credulous...
...In the end, poorly it...
...If it's a good formula for fare, one can only assume that HoroHe never returns...
...The disregard by incidents of the telepathic commu- 000 009 000 for complex past realities, the substinication of emotion...
...His lively account of circle of people who did not paint- a charlatan, others as a magpie who these pictures, and of the artists who the literal hundreds of friends, ad- picked up scintillant ideas from her painted them, would alone justify a mirers, enemies, and interlopers who brighter contemporaries and passed new life of their erstwhile owner, and came to see her collection, listen to them off as her own...
...en route she felt a command to the evil spirit...
...Whoever now yearns for further education in the works and days of Miss Stein can find it in Mellow's admirable and engaging book, filled with priceless vignettes that are art objects in themselves...
...But LeShan, at least, one: what about the selection process chological instead of physical cures...
...leaps on all fours into the morass of They give instant fame to men who might never have won public atten- garbled history, calling upon "the aution by their intelligence, vision, or strength of character...
...That explanation-be it pos- several periods of heat, and one he fell on the ground and rolled session by Erszuli or baptism in the of "tingling" in the lip area...
...For Shlomo-Elisha "Auschwitz," he declares, "has killed The presence of God is a veiled Son of Eliezer, Jews/ But not their expectation...
...The first time "a This is the hope that Abraham, Isaac ly be read until after one has read the tear clouds his eyes," then "a tear and Jacob have in their children, in final page...
...ness (and often to film) it...
...enters, explores but remains tentative, Past, present, future-arbitrary seg- We assume the initial analytical rigor if not in his belief in Clairvoyant Realmentations of time-good and evil- is still with us but it has been quietly ity, at least in his communication of an arbitrary value dichotomy-are left at the door...
...was first pub- psychology...
...NEW YORK 10016 cation through Fantasy (Jason Aronson...
...telepathy, and mysticism on their own It is to James Mellow's great credit Later he would come to, shake his terms is Lawrence LeShan (The Medithat we close his book half in love head, smile, or perhaps weep...
...Two or three times Viking, $8.95 the East, and Africa, in ancient times a year she would get one on her and modem-is practically a constant...
...Not everyone throughout the book Mr...
...About around, foaming at the mouth...
...Horowitz' argument follows themselves again what they might do to raise the ideals of the young...
...In- to practice what he has learned: The Medium, the Mystic, deed, the physiology underlying many A woman known to me, aged and the Physicist states of possession by devils and mysti- thirty-six years, had intermittent, cal encounters with God-in the United very large "cold sores" for over LAWRENCE LeSHAN States and Europe, in South America, twenty years...
...experimental, into the annals of paralong distance healing: LeShan agreed Life Without Death...
...And the fact that LeShan return to the obvious...
...Watergate has killed this benevolent business by an exposure Send for a Trial Subscription of "collective immorality...
...Soldiers who had broken tionism...
...For her part, as her biographer says, "she had a passion for acquaintanceship...
...And it is characterized in every case, ly thirty days to heal...
...Yet, we thors of the Federalist Papers such as must be grateful for these public hearings because of what they are re- Madison, Jay, Adams and Jefferson...
...Jacobson's ceptions that proved inaccurate...
...counts of mystics and healers and de- words, "I nearly had an accident 12 July 1974: 388 I was so surprised...
...ignorance or polemical purpose one The churches and universities that trained the conspirators might ask isn't sure...
...Her first real taste of it seems to have come just before the first world war, coincident with the New York Armory show of 1913, the much-heralded, much-maligned exhibition that included Duchamp's "Nude Descending the Staircase," which one critic wittily described as an "explosion in a shingle factory...
...watching the new skin regrow...
...Some of her relationships were notably durable-the fortyyear liaison with Alice B. Toklas was the supreme exemplum...
...Roy Medvedev T~GUIAG Archipelago Translated by Thomas P Whitney IjHarer & Row 10 E. 53M S1, New York 10022 At bookstores $12.50 cloth, $1.95 paper 1817 this "immense woman carcass enmet her one summer in Florence, later said that "her apparently seamless garment made her look like the protoSemite, a statue from Ur of the Chaldees...
...cept in a previous existence, of course...
...Worse, it is just this experience to dismiss it or to reduce it the scientific investigation of extraordi- assumption of our providential past that to mere psychological madness...
...Her droll explanation was that this, and others like it, represented her attempt to do abstract portraits in her verbal medium just as Picasso was "doing abstract portraits in painting...
...They cannot realGod is being moved...
...Mellow has caught her so terrorized them...
...an expelled...
...I ask this in all seriousness, for as I near my second childhood, I yearn increasingly to be educated...
...This is the lamb of the lantern with chalk...
...implication we are now rather in the process of forgetting our past and fl I prefer a full-year subscription at $15...
...They had to withstand the lively traffic of her salon...
...hypothesis of survival after death...
...So does cating the book to his own child: I shall go on waiting...
...lip area, she looked at it in the "I order you to come out of the To make his case Sargant cites ac- rear-view mirror, and in her boy and never go into him again...
...to the exclusion of others (which, in edges criticisms of psychic research Other of his attempts at healing a different context, is what Sargant and responds well to all but the big have failed...
...Patiently but never doggedly he follows her errant fortunes from childhood in Pennsylvania and California to her undergraduate years at Radcliffe, her medical studies at Hopkins, her early Lesbian fictions, the long expatriation, the displacement of her ebullient brother Leo by Alice Toklas, the slow rise to fame with Commonweal: 387 Three Lives, The Making of Ameri- The spirit screamed, threw the scribes ritualistic dances, snake-handling cans, and other books until her best- boy into a bad fit, and came out...
...For Miss Stein, who used Flanner, Apollinaire, Sylvia Beach, James R. Mellow, art critic for the to sit Buddha-like "in one of the high- T. S. Eliot, Ford Madox Ford, FitzNew York Times, was attracted to backed Renaissance chairs in the stu- gerald, Hemingway, and Mabel Dodge, Gertrude Stein in part because of the dio," gave, says Mellow "the impression to name a few...
...Many differ- survival hypothesis...
...She had no patience for protecting them, for putting them out of danger...
...after the title page...
...in the village, a for the advent of the One together, and this time without restraint, and Jew continued to believe...
...present task is, in the fullness of gratido not know it, "They are no longer Wiesel does not only write a song tude, to listen...
...Before the machine guns, the Buber told us that "we can wait his people, weeps for the third time- child bespoke faith...
...ist Papers...
...He respects rigorous exWILLIAM SARGANT The two experiences of cure, argues perimental research and presents negaWilliam Sargant in The Mind Posses- tive evidence...
...This view of the matter may well have been in Ellery Sedgwick's mind when, in politely rejecting a "Portrait of Cbzanne" which she had submitted to The Atlantic Monthly, he suggested that "perhaps you would some day write me an entirely intelligible comment upon these paragraphs of yours...
...underlies the hysterical politics and imimpressed by the psychic healer and moralities of the present...
...Grant...
...nance," and finally, "God, surprised by munity...
...Others, less learned, were variously reminded of an obese Roman senator or the Cumaean Sibyl in Michelangelo's fresco...
...The more fragile were broken and had to be discarded...
...She would be sorry or annoyed-but usually discovered that the pleasure of a new friendship could console her for the loss of the old...
...and the Almond tree blossomed...
...If we are to "preham, Isaac and Jacob go away, the story of God's people continues to be pare the way . . . together," our own Narrator informs us that although they written...
...LeShan studies them and individuality or separateness is illusory...
...subsequent life is often totally re- suddenly a strong "tingling" in the "Deaf and dumb spirit," he said, directed...
...In particular, where is the to do it that very night, and the next lished in 1971 and is now being trans- list of precognitions and telepathic reday the man reported a "miraculous lated into eight languages...
...It is hard to take literally, or serious17 Issues for $3 ly, the declaration that dishonesty in the higher reaches of federal governFOR NEW SUBSCRIBERS ONLY ment has at last been discovered and COMMONWEAL, 232 Madison Ave., New York, N.Y...
...especially when it is clear, as it is today, that the network of deception Madison's principal collaborator on the and power-grabbing known as Watergate violates the moral foundations Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton, of democracy: trust in the people, respect for individual rights, and Horowitz leaves unmentioned-out of belief in some correspondence between civil, natural and divine law...
...children's faith has moved him, deep- not veiled...
...with this curious pair of homely but the abreactive experience had been LeShan is a tentative believer, entering gifted women...
...Moved him, indeed, in the most firmation, of a presence and a hope beauty...
...after thirty years' World War II were often cured in ers him and forces him into the awkabsence...
...Both her masculinity and her weight offended Agnes Ernst, a young reporter for .a New York newspaper, who called her "a heavy woman who seemed to squat rather than sit, her solid mass enveloped in a monklike habit of brown corduroy...
Vol. 100 • July 1974 • No. 16
