BOOKS
Lawson, Steve & Neal, Marie Augusta & D., S.N. & Silver, Isidore & Phillips, Robert
at the train station when the inhabitants of the Roman ghetto are being taken away, as well as her and Useppe's mysterious illness: the ominous seizures and finally the davastating grand...
...Only rarely--as when she compares the pompous curlicues of a small-time pimp's signature with those o f Benito Mussolini----does she consciously draw parallels between the obscure and the powerful...
...WRITE: Fr...
...Naked I'd still have been myself-maybe all the more so--but without my name I was rendered null and void...
...But in their crisp and careful lack of excitement, in their unmoving calm, their deliberate evasion of conclusion or epiphany, they recall Ms...
...granted as to have elicited almost no comment...
...Among Irish, German, Italian and Polish Catholics a striking rise is apparent on those measures characteristically Used to demonstrate success in American society...
...All of us an SS hidden inside us," he cries, and then a little later: "there's a Christ inside each one of us...
...here are two perspectives on a form nearly half a millennium old--interim reports on stillgrowing careers in a changeable and changing field...
...Dunne sums up the life of this intellectual and moral giant toward the end~Black's last opinion (one of his greatest) was his ringing defense of the right to publish in the Pentagon Papers case...
...This augurs well for Baryshnikovmwe can look forward to much moremand suggests that, as far as Nureyev goes, a definitive study is yet to come...
...In an endless, drug-inspired peroration delivered days before his death in front of an audience of unappreciative proletarians, Davide grapplesbbut again with unrealistic clarity--with the question of have good and evil in man...
...Black and the Court upon which he sat groped for a role in American life after 1937, and Dunne vividly describes the tortuous but heady journey...
...Greeley demonstrates and celebrates the success of American Catholics who, despite the little they brought with them in the way of tools for success, have mastered the necessary skills...
...Yet, unlike Elizabeth Cnllinan, he is not guilty of being too subtle...
...When Bland settles down to photographic reCommonweal: 539 capitulation, he does useful work, 'but it takes one hundred pages to get there...
...Davide abhors himself for having been born a bourgeois, a Jew, for having killed a German in the war, and in his desparation he turns tO drugs...
...Consequently, Morante's thesis about villainous History is itself a simplified abstraction., Even Marxist critics, in a refreshing switch, have argued that Elsa Morante has forced her novel into too rigid an ideological mold...
...If a memoir is to be, essentially, straight autobiography, it is meaningful only if it paints the entire picture, "warts and all" (as Cromwell put it...
...S.J., Gonzage University, Spokane...
...Commonweal: 543...
...Davide Segre of an overdose, Useppe, at age six, of a massive epileptic fit...
...cluded minority but the majority...
...Warren does provide a few---examples of Ike's mild antiblack bigotry and his passionate denunciations of American communists as "s.o.b.'s" who should be shot have already publicly surfaced--but they are rare...
...The evidence is convincing that Catholics of European background in America can no longer claim that they are the oppressed poor...
...both were poor (though not grindingly so) and, at early ages, witnessed the evils of capitalism run rampant...
...Washington, D.C...
...Adler and Company...
...If the Constitution is, as Charles Evans Hughes once said, "what the Justices say it is," then the modern Constitution is largely the handiwork of Black...
...Art," Thomas Hardy said, "is a disproportioning o f realities...
...I find fault with "In the Miro District" for peculiar Southern reasons, My grandfather and those of his generation would never surrender to a boy's pressures or his discoveries as to carryings-on...
...Whatever happened to the dumb Pole of so many tasteless jokes...
...To the Editors: In my review of Michael Grant's book, Saint Paul (Commonweal 104/14 [8 July 1977]) an editorial embellishment of the text has made me sound disparaging to "sociologists," and I should like to correct that...
...Though the problem remains for them of how to seize power and prestige, the immigrants have shown their ability to overcome exclusion by building and using their own resources...
...For instance, he was not quite effective a governor as he believes, especially after 1946 when he, but not the California legislature, became truly "progressive...
...ROnERT PHILLIPS' Lewis Carroll study, Aspects of Alice, has just been re-issued as a Vintage paperback...
...He did pay political debts--especially in 1945 when he appointed the rabidly conservative William Knowland to .the United States Senate simply because he was the son of Warren's chief political benefactor in the state...
...SISTER MARIE AUGUSTA HEAL, S.N.D., is a professor of Sociology at Emmanuel College in Boston...
...His enterprise was abetted by Eisenhower's appointment of Warren and Brennan and the march quickened when Goldberg, Fortas, and Marshall came to the Court in the '60s...
...Department of Biblical Stueles The Catholic University of America e e e e e e e e e Stetnfets (Cont...
...This is a pragmatic book written by a pragmatic Catholic priest-sociologist...
...Surely the affirmation of and resistance to the Church's stand on peace, poverty and human rights--the themes of Pacem in Terris--had an impact on some of the Catholic population, especially those with college education on the one hand and those with Third World identity on the other The operational definition of favoring Vatican II changes is weak, as is the evidence that people accepted Vatican I I changes...
...As a matter of fact, Ms...
...a speed-reader...
...Moreover, the Church's radical stand on the development of Third World people, beginning with Populorum Progressio in 1967, again called to public attention in the Call to Action of 1971 and the bishops' synods of 1971 and 1974 and implemented in the Detroit Call to Action Conference of 1976--ten years of intense action and reflection--is not among the variables measured at all...
...Weinberger's self-admitted "smug smile" is another matter...
...For instance, his garrulousness about his years as a California public official stands in stark contrast to the laconic chapters on his later (and, for us, more significant) public career...
...The idea of the Italians being the second richest Gentile group, and Poles and Slavs making more money in northern cities than British Protestants, will shock many...
...NonSpanish-speaking Catholics, he notes, are over-represented in the highest income bracket...
...they raise problems about what is in fact measured by the items used...
...Yellow Roses ELIZABETH CULLINAN Viking, $8.95 I n t h e Miro D i s t r i c t and OtliVr S t o r i e s PETER TAYLOR Knbp/, $7.95 ROBERT PHILLIPS "Survival," one of Elizabeth Cullinan's heroines learns, "was a question of a cool head and a light touch...
...Baryshnikov at Work closes with twenty-four related stills of the author and Tharp doing the pas de deux Once More, Frank...
...What remains to be seen is where the newly affluent and successful majority will lead once it has achieved the power and prestige...
...This about the artist who has danced, with extraordinary ilan and versatility, Petrouchka and The Prodigal Son, Don Quixote and Dances at a Gathering, The Sleeping Beauty and Le Sacrd du Printemps...
...Perhaps the disparRy is inherent in the distinction between memoir and biography Memoirs of public figures --the list is legendary and stretches from Harry Truman through Dwight Eisenhower to Lyndon Johnson--tend to be major disappointments, They are often badly written, almost devoid of humor, and selectively self-serving (Richard Nixon's forthcoming musings will doubtlessly conform to the disabilities of the genre) Biographies, at least when written by serious professionals with a modicum of talent, may be more graceful and tougher-minded...
...4420...
...at the train station when the inhabitants of the Roman ghetto are being taken away, as well as her and Useppe's mysterious illness: the ominous seizures and finally the davastating grand real, are all described with great delicacy and a strange sense of wonder...
...ADULT VOCATIONS special program for men over twenty-one...
...Whatever the reas,.,n, Warren's laconic comments about the Brown decision, for instance, are not in the same league with Dunne's treatment or, for that matter, with Richard Kluger's extensive analysis in Simple Justice...
...ISIDORE SILVER iS a professor of Constitutional Law and History at John Jay College of Crimnial Justice in New York City...
...The Memoirs o f E a r l Warren EARL WARREN Doubleday, $10 Hugo Dlack and t h e J u d i c i a l Revolution GERALD T. DUNNE Simon and Schuster, $12.50 ISIDORE SILVER It is reasonably safe to assume that History will rate Earl Warren as the greatest Chief Justice since John Marshall and Hugo Black as the most influential individual jurist of the last century...
...STEVE LAWSON, a Contributing Editor of Yale~Theatre, is Literary Advisor to both Circle in the Square and the Williamstown Theatre...
...Perhaps the modern reader--and reviewer--has been spoiled by contemporary journalism's emphasis upon "revelations...
...While they represent 20.6 percent of the general population, they are 22.8 percent of the over$25,000 income earnr He delights in pointing out that, if the Protestant ethic is success, then "Jews are more Protestant than Catholics who are more Protestant than Protestants...
...7c, three times...
...Some will disagree with this rationalization, I among them...
...In the conflicts created by the South's change from an agrarian society to an urban one, his familiesmlike Faulkner's Dilseymnot only endure but prevail...
...I f the stereotypes persist, they do so in spite of the evidence: "Still, whatever the occupational discrimination, the Catholic immigrant groups have been immensely successful in America...
...It is perhaps for this reason that the only person in the novel who is aware of the forces of History, a Jewish anarchist named Davide Segre, is also Morante's least successful creation...
...One thing, though, we can agree on: Nureyev's features are "a romantic pin-up in many a lonely bedroom...
...Cullinan's writing...
...The memoir, if it is to serve a useful function, need not be "pure" autobiography but should contain either an appraisal of the writer's historical role or at least the matured reflections of one who has actively participated in public life...
...Write: AOULT VOCATIONS Box 41N, Commonweal C l a s s i f i e d RATES: 60c a word, one tlme...
...A tormented thinker, Davide is obviously the author's spokesman...
...Thus, despite an earlier record of competence and integrity as Alameda County District Attorney and a latter one of luster as Chief Justice of the United States, there were some warts --though not deforming ones...
...Taylor's primary fictional concern is family relationships in Tennessee's middle class...
...And neither the twisted nor the hunchback, the paunchy nor the scrawny: to him none was less lovely than the world's Paragon...
...by amplification, it's she who is the real hero of ttaryshnikov at Work...
...no longer the exOOOOOO 000 REVIEWERS IVAN SANDERS teaches in the English Department at Suffolk County Community College in Selden, New York...
...Yet, Morante's is not a despairing work...
...The success of the Irish Catholics is surprising enough: one would not have thought of them as the richest and best-educated white ,Gentile group in America, but one might well have thought of them as comfortably and respectably middle class...
...The Captain's Son" is one of Taylor's best stories in decades...
...The mod Mongol...
...To her credit, Swope preserves this moment--and many others--for US...
...The prime example is Renata Adler's 19 August 1977:540 plotless "novel," Speedboat--wildly admired by other proponents of cool, a book which missed (by one vote) garnering the National Book Critics' Circle Award and which did, in fact, win the Ernest Hemingway Award...
...Not even the two dogs are spared...
...By Bland standards, Nureyev is just about perfect, with an eye for detail, contracts, and timetables...
...The heavenly fugues heard by Useppe are but symptoms of his dread disease...
...Such definitive moments are rare in Yellow Roses...
...The book focuses on an upwardly mobile population of European Catholic ethnics now standing somewhere beyond the midpoint on the path to management of American affairs...
...They were independent, moralistic men who dramatically shed political identities and alliances (Black with the Klan, Warren with California's Republican old guard) as they acquired power and prestige...
...Classified payable with order...
...Beyond this, Catholics are said to exhibit qualities flowing from their traditional Catholicity...
...Cullinan's novel, The House o/ Gold...
...Prisoners' Magazine In process of formation: Rosebud International Magazine...
...S4c, seven times...
...541 ance to their sharing power and prestige, demanding their admittance to the the upper echelons of decision-making in the "illustrious foundations, the great universities and the powerful corporations," from which he claims they are still excluded...
...I f religiously separate groups are kept from sharing fairly in the rewards, this is attributable not to any failure on their part to absorb the Protestant ethic (as Lenski tried to demonstrate in his tests of Weber's thesis) but to prejudice on the part of those in the ascendancy...
...VILLA MARIA provldes a year-long opportunity for serious discernmeet with daily Mess and preyer, rel|gous community llvlng, theological renovtal end spiritual direction, in cooperation with _9 JESUIT UNIVERSIT...
...At this point, Greeley is clearly teaching and preaching as well as analyzing...
...While Warren's apologia for his advocacy of interment and removal of Japanese-Americans at the beginning of World War ~I is graceful, his discussion of the California Regent's Loyalty Oath controversy of the '50s is incomplete, misleading, and selfserving...
...And in the volume's best story, "In the Summerhouse," a sick and middle-aged man realizes with a jolt that he cannot bear to be with his wife and daughter...
...The claim of Catholic Schools in a Declining Church is repeated, namely, that 1968~the year of Humanae Vitae--marks the point of rapid decline in church at19 August 1977:542 tendance and participation...
...Each of us thinks we are the only one who's got it right...
...Robert Scudellari's design for B outstrips the hodgepodge of N, and Charles EngeU France restrains himself to a one-page introduction, leaving the rest of B to BaryShnikov himself...
...Martha Swope's series on Luci/er, in which the wild-haired dancer seems entirely a thing of howling, desolate spaces far from any stage...
...the sense is that of interviews molded into monologues or ruminations on an art...
...0016...
...The story can also be read as semiallegory, but I don't want to do that...
...While it may be nice to know that Tom Dewey acquired a sense of humor after his 1948 loss to Truman or that Goodwin ("Goodie") Knight, Warren's successor as Governor of California, was somewhat of an incompetent, such fleeting reminiscences are not particularly important...
...One can say that the same principles describe Ms...
...For Baryshnikov is obviously reflective, and the longer the reflections on a specific dance the more we learn...
...The first two chapters of this book ("The Story" and "The Man") are an eye-glazing assortment of clich6s ("The Nureyev story begins like the traditional fairy tale . . ."), anecdotes, unbridled show-biz adoration, and vague pronouncements---all couched in the highest of measured tones, rather like a .gossip column ghosted by a doctoral student...
...If the California of Pat (not to say, Gerry) Brown was the legacy of Warren, then Jimmy Carter's "new south" derives from Black's unstinting commitment to civil rights...
...Cloud...
...t h e second means that she has a fine eye for the way a dancer's body moves, the emotional quality to be caught on film...
...His greatest problem is that he cannot reconcile his abstract love of humanity with his real aversion to people...
...Incidentally, Warren's blandness does occasionally slip, especially when he recapitulates the sorry story of the American Bar Association's hysterical reaction to some fairly tame Court decisions in the '50s and '60s...
...563QI...
...Moreover, what the European immigrants have clone in the past, Black and Spanish-speaking groups can do in the present...
...The gifted recorder of many theater and dance productions, Sw0pe actually began her career as a dancer...
...WA 99~8 or phone (S09) 328...
...It is a review of the public research issuing from his fifteen-year association with the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago and yet more than a review, for it enables anyone who has followed Greeley's analyses and polemics during the past decade to discern his overall objective and the direction of his current interpretation...
...They were --though in different ways and with different shadings--' 'Populists" who deplored the corruption that frequently accompanied wealth and power and sought to make Law reCommonweal: 537 sponsive to the needs of the poor and the marginal Both had substantial prosecutorial careers prior to their active political years and, before ascending the High Benqh (Black at age 51, Warren at 62), each had shrewdly used the then extant mass media, radio and newspapers, to abet a distinguished and progressive public service record...
...While awaiting the ultimate verdict of the implacable Muse, we should take note of other congruences, other affinities between the two men who (along with William O. Douglas) created a new jurisprudence for contemporary America...
...Cullinan's rather philosophical observations better than her characterizations...
...Despite Louise's consistency from one tale to another, one tends to remember, Ms...
...The Ames'lean C a t h o l | e : A S o c i a l P o r t r a i t ANDREW M. GREELEY Basic Books, $15 MARIE AUGUSTA NEAL, S.N.D...
...Nureyev approved all photos in the book, but Bland arranged them,) The public-relations treatment thunders on...
...He evokes the terror he felt of synthesizing classical jumps and jazz steps in Pas d e "Duke," and the eventual working through to triumph...
...Nureyev is not yet forty...
...Whatever happened to the hard-drinking, hardfighting Irish cop...
...Clear and creative tables demonstrate distribution o[ family income, level of education, comparative expressions of prejudice and openness to liberal positions on social issues among cohorts of Americans over the last decade...
...Because most of her characters are so meticulously delineated, their sorrows and joys reach back to many different sources...
...SIC, thirteen times, Twelve words minimum...
...His case is made against the stereotype in the social science literature according to which Catholics do poorly in achieving economic and educational success on account of a flaw in the Catholic personality...
...For all that, serious questions of causal interpretation are raised by the book's failure to take account of the worldwide action in the Church stemming from its eighty years' participation in social change...
...As the author makes very clear, this is not a book about the Catholic Church or Catholic beliefs, but about Catholic people...
...Baryshnikov not yet thirty...
...Because Elizabeth Cullinan seems unwilling to distort, to magnify, to raise her voice, many of these stories disappoint...
...Martha Swope's Luci/er pictures are the best thing in The Nureyev Image...
...Anyone who can state in all solemnity that "the world of ballet has always tended to be a claustrophobic hothouse" and then juxtapose that line with shots of Nureyev dancing with Liz Taylor at the Dorchester, ribbing Dick Cavett, or hobnobbing with the King of Greece, is clearly not to be trusted...
...The only piece in In the Miro District which seems an outright failure is "The Hand of Emmagine," which becomes shrill and Gothic when the protagonist chops off her offending, masturbatory hand with an ax...
...In a book entitled The American Catholic, the large Spanish-speaking Catholic population is nevertheless excluded on the argument that it represents several ethnicities, none large enough to have its own impact...
...I suspect it may be more fulfilling than these stories...
...It should not have appeared therefore in quotation marks...
...He may have been describing ours...
...444) I originally wrote, "But in the last analysis, it [Grant's book] is Paul for the sciolists:" If that sends you to .the dictionary, then my point will have been made--unless, of course, it was a printer's devil...
...RONALD CHRIST Corrections In Marilyn Moorcroft's article, "Floundering With Grass" [July 81, the paragraph on page 435 beginning ".No matter...
...The dangers of selectivity are apparent in omission of mention of Warren's vigorous opposition to the appointment of Max Radin, an eminent law professor, to the California Supreme Court for reasons having to do not with competence but politics...
...One imagines Robert Lowell, who included prose in his poetry volume Life Studies, advising his friend to do the obverse here...
...He was not a reluctant candidate for President in 1948, but an eager one...
...What his evidence demonstrates is a regular, gradual transition to success in education and family income for each of the Catholic ethnic groups...
...At his best, Taylor makes subtle comment on human nature, on the permanent relationships between people, their variety, their expectedness and their unexpectedness...
...He and his beloved sheepdog, Bella, agreed that everyone they knew was beautiful and deserved their love: "Giants or dwarfs, beggars or dandies, decrepitude or youth, nothing made any difference to him...
...His data is excellent and carefully analyzed...
...Poles, Italians, and other eastern European immigrants are late nineteenth-early twentieth centory arrivals who were not supposed to be able to acculturate easily to American ways...
...Before this decline is attributed wholly to dissatisfaction with the birth control encyclical, however, it should be noted that the Gallu~ poll trend line published in Religion zn America shows this steep descent beginning not in 1968 but in 1957...
...He was not, as he contends, a McGovernish~ McCarthyish (Gene), Carterish seeker of small campaign contributions for his 1942 gubernatorial primary campaign, but rather accepted (and, indeed, begged for) a large contribution from the Independent Petroleum Association...
...The long title story is perhaps third best...
...The elegance of his statistical analysis, progressing from study to study, is as exciting to a colleague as it is to the author...
...There is scarcely a word about Richard Nixon and no reference to his role in undermining Warren's 1952 presidential bid, the genesis of a hardly secret split between the two...
...65) Greeley succeeds in proving that Catholic ethnics are neither dumb nor lazy as a result of their Catholicity...
...Jorge Fatauros's shot of Flindt's The Lesson, in which Nureyev as the Ionescan professor intent on murder bears a startling resemblance to Laurence Olivier...
...Earl Warren still awaits his biographer...
...The social contract in our cities hangs by a thread of copper wire...
...Despite or because of religious beliefs they are as achievement-oriented as any other Americans...
...Ever since, as a graduate student at the University of Chicago, he experienced the standard uncritical analysis of the Catholic ethnic as the eternally conservative, working-class non-achiever, Greeley has been determined to expose what he knew from his own experience to be a university caricature and a scapegoat for resistance to change in the structure of the state...
...that it is loss one dreads in love-any kind of contract is better than nothing...
...end to offer good reading material to prisoners free of charge, Funds end correspondents needed...
...Hitler . . ." and ending " . . . Nathan Hales of her country" was Moorcroft's statement, not Giinter Grass's...
...Armand Nigro...
...The author may despise History, but she loves people...
...it turns out however, that they can laugh all the way to the bank--or perhaps all the way to savings and loan...
...The mysterious illness is of course epilepsy which in literature is usually associated with geniuses, artists, mystics, but which here becomes, ironically, the undoing of an obscure schoolmistress's bastard child...
...The dangers of selectivity, of retrospective reinterpretation, of changing emphases to downgrade the unpleasant or unpalatable and to stress the positive, are, of course, the greatest when the Emperor chooses to literarily clothe himself...
...The artist is in focus here as he wasn't in N with Bland puffing after us with notes on childhood illnesses, favorite wines, et...
...Dunne's depiction of Hugo Black's 19 August 1977:538 public life is, in contrast, rich, complex, and sensitive to nuance, ambiguity, and paradox...
...That first fact means the photos in Baryshinkov are Superlative technically...
...All the main characters of History die...
...Ida Mancuso's story is also the story of millions of her comrades in distress who are wrecked spiritually and physically by the war, which to them means bombings, deportations, famine, battle fatigue...
...The good photographs in this section--Nureyev at work with such choreographers as B6jart, Graham, MacMillan, Petit, and Robbins--get lost in the shuffle of sunbathing and jet-setting...
...Little Useppe, who couldn't learn to pronounce his name properly (which was really Giuseppe) and couldn't function in school, holds out greater hope for mankind than an army of "positive" heroes...
...And there are some remarkable shots: Z6e Dominic's still of Nureyev in Frederick Ashton's The Dream, in which the man, black-caped and crowned, appears almost insubstantial against the air...
...We've all traveled that l o n g , winding road before: the first ballet at a tender a g e , the disapproving father (but Rudi was "not t o b e deflected"), the soloist dropping out and the subsequent big break, the ladder of success . . . and Bland's treatment does nothing to revitalize the story...
...The Throughway" is another fine character study, in which the enforced move from a home in whichthey have always lived since first marrying provides the occasion for Harry and Isabel to realize they each are trapped by circumstance and decision to remain living together ifi awful resignation...
...But more shocking, to him, is the realization that, in spite of that, they are all he has, and all he will ever have, in this world...
...that everyone is born with a soft spot which he either follows or resists, and either way it is what makes him what he is...
...In the first story in this, her second collection, a story which is basically a meditation on self-image through the medium of one's name, the author portrays a vital occasion which is the substance for an excellent story: When Sister Ambrosine announces to class that Peggy Fisher, from this day forward, is going to be called Estelle Fisher, we experience with the young girl her misery: "Had I been stood up and stripped of my clothes I believe the shock and panic would have been less...
...The editorial footnote inserted after Warren's death does not indicate the importance of the incident at the time...
...they are now the affluent...
...That questions sums up the book: the travelogue of an 6migr6 who happens to be a great dancer, making a home for himself, using his skills to carve out a niche in the annals of dance--watching, learning, trying, adapting, advancing...
...Elizabeth Cullinan's stories are not so detached as Ms...
...Yet there is nothing either radical or new about t h e m . The pieces--the least good in the book, incidentally--remain stories, not poems, no matter how tortured the typography...
...he enunciates too neatly the dilemmas and conflicts of a political radical in search of a secular religion...
...There is no justification...
...Finally, Dunne's sense of the dramatic is fully equal to Black's and, at times, rises to high art...
...JOSEPH A. FITZMYER, S.J...
...The inference here is that, whatever doors to power and prestige remain closed to Catholics, they are closed not on account of Catholic inferiority but on account of systematic discrimination at the top, a cultural division of labor that excludes Catholics from the upper levels of business, professional and academic life...
...We are curious people...
...Levine's work as a translator needs no defense from me: I have praised it orally and in print many times...
...There are exceptions...
...It is refreshing to realize that he had a temper comparable to Black's, and, perhaps, an ego to match...
...When Hobbes warned what a thin skein of civilization separated us from the war of all against all, he may not have been describing, as he thought, all societies...
...Levine only of performing in the past with "grace and wit" and of not always being "in good voice at this l~rformance...
...Unfortunately--and it is sad-those congruences do not extend to the treatments of their lives in these two books...
...To take the longer (and lesser) volume first: Alexander Bland's The Nureyev Image, described by its author as "primarily a photographic study of the art o f Nureyev," might better be summarized as a study of the art of obfuscation...
...There is, of course, a certain cachet of cool characterizing much of the fiction of New York (and New Yorker) writers...
...If Mr...
...Address Dale hrthon, Rosebud International, Box B.~I6S, St...
...To be sure, some of the enigmas can be rationalized...
...Nino, ex-black shirt, ex-partisan, who adjusts to postwar reality by becoming a smuggler, is killed while transporting contraband goods...
...They understand little of grand strategies and ideologies (Ida, for example, dreads newspapers), but, Morante strongly implies, there is not much to understand, since History is nothing but a set of abstractions, the phantasmagoria of madmen, "an obscenity from the beginning," a "history of fascisms...
...Precisely because I am aware how easily errors infiltrate publieations, I was scrupulous not ot attribute any blame and went on to say that the "off-notes," of which I gave two examples, were "easily correctable by a copy editor...
...And Bland has a bad habit of trying to make his subject (or victim) all things to all men: "At once shrewd, tough, easily hurt and cynical" . . . "witty and talkative one moment, silent and withdrawn the next...
...Giselle, Vestris, and Petrouchka receive the most extensive treatment (both text and photos) in the book, but even the two pages apiece allotted to Awakening and Le Pavilion d'Armide evoke an experience for us: how a young dancer feels reviving a seventyyear-old Nijinsky role...
...Warren, unfortunately, falls into each of these traps...
...At one point in his life he took a job in a factory , hoping to befriend the workers, but he failed miserably...
...Doubtless these are the ones Robert Penn Warren, in a dust-jacket blurb, refers to as being of "a radically new technique...
...He recalls dancing the Green Skater in Ashton's Les Patineurs: the expertise needed to play an anarchic spirit disrupting a social rite like ice-skating (especially without actual skates...
...It is the stereotype of the narrow, prejudiced, anti-intellectual hard-hat...
...Most of the stories, in excellent prose, reach no conclusion...
...In the last paragraph (p...
...The Nurel~eV l a t h e ALEXANDER BLAND Quadrangle, $17.50 B a r l l s h n i k o v A t Work MIKHAIL BARYSHNIKOV Knop/, $22.50 STEVE LAWSON Two books on great dancers, but the artists aren't equally served...
...For evidence: see the shot of him and Judith Iamison grinning at each other in middance...
...It concluded with a quote from an historic free press opinion of a former Chief Justice...
...For the groups he includes, however, no one can fault the sampling procedures or the generalizations drawn from them...
...Morante may have been inspired by Tolstoy who, in Anna Karenina, also enters the consciousness of a dog-Levin's Laska...
...In careful and leisurely fashion the author reveals the fatal flaw in a quixotic young man's character...
...Greeley makes his case well...
...One example only: a still from Pas de "Duke" in which Baryshnikov, all in white, is poised with the left leg planted on the stage, the right one flung up, and his back and 'arms arched in a backward curve, shows the plasticity, the sculptural potential of a great dancer...
...Dunne's is much the better and more perceptive...
...Using the home as microcosm, marriage and social contact as catalysts, he is an American Jane Austen...
...Finally, there are four stories which typographically, have been set as long poems...
...A final advantage of B over N: the dances are arranged in, chronological order, so we're able to trace an expansion of technique, of repertoire, and of daring over two short years, 1974 to 1976...
...Whatever happened to the fatalism that was supposed to inhi.bit Italian achievement...
...As their indignant spokesman, Greeley challenges the last bastions of resistCommonweal...
...Baryshnikov (hereafter B ) i s more interesting than Nureyev (hereafter N) for other reasons...
...Dunne's portrait contains almost all of the warts--"O1d Ego's" continuing personality clashes with Justice Jackson and a churlish response to Justice Owen Roberts' resignation are knowledgeably chronicled (Black's distaste for Douglas's propensity for acquiring a succession of young wives does not qualify as anything more than irascibility...
...Ballet as an art evolved at Tortona in 1489...
...Minn...
...They are still thought of as sanitation workers, Poles as truck drivers or bartenders...
...Black was a consummate actor and politician (Warren was only the latter), and his colorful and controversial political career was only a prelude to the equally dramatic, though publicly muted, clash on the Court between himself and the worthiest intellectual antagonist he ever faced, Felix Frankfurter...
...Though in many ways consequences of historical events, the tragedies in Ida's life seem actually to be so remote from them that the author's strict chronological progression from 1941 to 1947 as well as the unequivocally pessimistic historical summaries that preface each chapter, become, ultimately, meaningless...
...The temptation to freely reinterpret, decades later, early events surfaces all too frequently...
...And poor, withered Iduzza, after Useppe's death, finally gives up her battle against an always-threatening world and goes insane, ending her life in an asylum some years later...
...Also, the concluding chapters on the Warren Court and the Warren Commission are abbreviated and sketchy,-this is probably attributable to the author's death while writing them...
...Objective: to encourage prisoners worldwide to turn to Jeusus for kelp love, etc...
...Happily, the book's second half is devoid of these insights...
...monthly in advance for more than three times...
...Indeed, in reading these passages one feels like agreeing with Italian critics who maintain that History is closer to symbolist, decadent literature than to realism...
...that a readiness to enter into other people's lives is something out of the ordinary...
...leaders who fought the Bull Connors's of the old south and the reconciliation between Black and Douglas in the last years of their remarkable tenure together on the Court...
...Despite reservations, I am grateful for this new volume to place beside The Collected Stores of Peter Taylor...
...There is not the hard data for this claim, though, that there is for the claim of upward mobility...
...Reality--physical, social, not just psychological--lies at the heart of Morante's novel...
...her purpose, after all, is to show how the poor and the oppressed are buffeted by History's winds...
...a fantastically hard worker . . . is life long enough, even for this...
...They are no longer those who can holler when stepped on by middle management, for they are middle management...
...Dance critic for the London Observer, Bland evidently feels compelled to give us everything anyone could possibly want to know about Nureyev's fife as prelude to the actual study of his art...
...COMMONWEAL, 232 Madison Ave., New York, N.Y...
...Many read like chapters from a discarded novel, especially those which portray Louise Gallagher and Charlie Davis...
...Black in 1971 thus honored Charles Evans Hughes, "the very man whom the vote o f . . . Senator [Black] had deemed unfit for the Court . . . . " Black's tribute to Hughes is only equaled by Dunne's to Black...
...For instance, her statement that clothes are not superficial aspects of life at all, they define and separate people...
...OOOOOOOOO CORRESPONDENCE (Continued /rom page 515) eluding the botched metaphor), I see none of the harshness Mr...
...that is, they can use their gemeinschaft solidarity to win the rewards of education and wealth...
...and that the body has its own insight, its own learning . . . . I have not read Ms...
...Weinberger discovers in it...
...In the text accompanying these, Baryshnikov asks how two such dancers--worlds apart in style, cuRure, and experience--can find common artistic ground...
...or, conversely, how he feels doing a "young" dance like Awakening for a young choreographer just starting out...
...For box numbers add S0c per ln~[ertlon...
...Weinberger will also reread what I have written--this time with something more than occasional attention to the language--he will learn that I have, to use his word, "accused" Ms...
...Her work in this book is all of a piece, like a kaleidoscope the parts of which are autonomously lovely but nonetheless coalesce into a satisfying whole...
...Greeley would show old Americans and Jews who write books of sociology, as well as his fellow Catholic sociologists and others, that despite the Catholic ethic of communal solidarit~ mperhaps because of it--Catholics have managed to win the same prizes as Protestants...
...Cullinan and succeeds more often...
...Not even the representation of thinking, talking animals--Blitz and Bella, faithful canine companions of Ida's boys, become major characters in the novel--need be regarded as a nod to mysticism, but rather as the ultimate in psychological realism...
...In Taylor's story this is, knowing what I feel I know, unreal...
...Fortunately, most of the tales are more serene...
...Black was born in 1886, Warren five years later...
...Or his turning point as a dancer in America, Twyla Tharp's great Push Comes to Shove, a blend of Lamb rags and Haydn which simultaneously made huge demands on Baryshnikov and opened up new vistas to him: "Nothing was as new, as different, and, thank God, as inevitable...
...Particularly moving are the descriptions of Black's relationship to the lonely white liberals and the N.A.A.C.P...
...REV...
...his own manager...
...These are more than technical points...
...Peter Taylor's fiction also appears modest and quiet, but he takes far greater risks than Ms...
...Adler's unruffled pages...
...And nothing like the brutality in his letter...
...al., Baryshnikov comments on each of the twenty-six ballets he's danced in the West (good translations by Remi Saunder...
...Greeley shows that religion makes a difference, as does ethnicity, that Catholic schooling is a channel of upward mobility and that American Catholics would like to continue to use their schools for this purpose...
...He winces over La Fille Mal Gardde--the oldest ballet in repertory, by the way--that chestnut about a virgin in a vaudeville world, explaining how the male lead must be romantic and a /arceur at once and how nerve-racking that is...
...Although Dunne's otherwise excellent effort suffers from occasional impenetrable arcanities and a minor habit of repetition of the same stories, Warren,s is almost defaced by wooden (at times, leaden) prose, a resolute unwillingness to reveal personal feelings, and serious biographical omissions...
...Warren was a conservative, somewhat shallow, Republican for much of his early political career rather than the Hiram Johnson Progressive he retrospectively believes himself to have been (uncommented upon is the irony of Knowland's appointment to Johnson's Senate seat...
...Reflections"--a summing up---may not be readily separable from discussions of "personalities," but Warren's (apparently calculated) decision not to indulge in appraisals of the latter should not have been inexplicably extended to neglect of the former...
...R e l i g i o u s Life FOR FORMER RELIGIOUS (men and women) who seriously consider re-entrance into religious life, end for delayed or late, blooming religious vocations (inCluding previously married...
...The Roles" is devoted to sixty-seven of the eightythree characters Nureyev has danced so far, a photographic history arranged alphabetically rather than by choreographer, genre, or chronology...
Vol. 104 • August 1977 • No. 17
