Correspondence
CORRESPONDENCE Battle S t a r s Madison, Ct. To the Editors: In re "Washington Report: Prof. Kissinger" by Frank Getlein, 24 June 1977. The article on "Der /:reLier Heinrich" was a...
...as "all bread, rising, yeasty as a cloud...
...Inf...
...The final unitive vision is crazily but appropriately expressed, not just for Anne Sexton but for many in our age: "He starts to laugh,/the laughter rolling like a hoop out of His mouth/and into mine,/and such laughter that He doubles right over me/laughing a Rejoice-Chorus at our two triumphs...
...Here, for example, are some choice words from Beckett's Proust (1931), quoted by Mercier, in which Beckett sets out what is perhaps the central theme in all his writing: The only fertile research is excavatory, immersive, a contraction of the spirit, a descent...
...Those who view The Boss and Brecht as interchangeable necessarily come to the conclusion that Grass is judging Brecht and such conclusions miss the point and purpose of Ihe play...
...Everythingmit would seem at this point---depends on the choice of executive direction for the secretariat for the laity...
...Ms...
...Now that's fairness...
...Now Senator Strom Thurmond and his conservative colleagues are warming up for a repeat performance, with an expensive mass media campaign in the works, and old master Reagan is back on stage making threatening noises...
...The article on "Der /:reLier Heinrich" was a rather keen hatchet job on one of our great nonheroes...
...In another context she says: "I am, each.day,/typing out the God/my typewriter believes in" ("Frenzy," Rowing, p. 76...
...eye/ear...
...Sic, thirteen tlmus, Twelve words minimum...
...God must touch these things and her heart...
...In its search the committee on the laity has been remarkably open...
...But the island was empty, just as she had feared...
...Printed In the USA and published bi-weeMy by Commonwea/ Publishing Co...
...ROBERTSON, Editorial Asslstomt COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR.: Idovles JOHN FANDEL: Poetry FRANK GETLEIN: Washington BRIAN WICKER...
...It is a play about us...
...The meaning of the curious dramatic monologue, "Jesus, the Actor, Plays the Holy Ghost" seems to be that Jesus is delivered from death and becomes the true Messiah by identifying with the Divine Spirit in the very womb of Mary...
...One way or the other, the Canal issue promises to liven things up in the months ahead...
...Second class postage paid af New York, N.Y...
...and as milk ("Today God gives milk/ and I have the pail" p. 77...
...To the Editors: We are in debt to William L McGill for calling our attention to the remarkably God-directed poetry of Anne Sexton, for the economy of his argument, and for his fine selection of the poet's own words [May 13...
...His essay does oversimplify, however, creating a distorted perspective on her late work...
...PHILLIP CORWIN 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 A b i g a i l MeE~'thy ( e o m ' t ) to their needs...
...Since, chances are, such facts are kept under wraps_9 As a starter, though, he might inquire from the droning Studs Terkel whether royalties from his book Working were shared with the respondents about whom the book was written...
...Copyrlgkt O 1977 Commoewea/ Publishing Co., Ing.~US and Canada: SI7 a year...
...48106...
...57c, three times...
...News & Views, Aug...
...Kunstler, Miss Fonda, Miss MacLaine, and that ilk to reap outrageous profits while mouthing their sneering do-good superficialities...
...For this poet, given to depression, God's most special manifestation is joy, exuberance, laughter...
...5OG VERSE: Roy Scheele 583 A MORAL, NOT AN ECONOMIC OPTION: David O'Brien 508 ROOKS: Michael Zeik, Wayne Andrews, P. David Finks, Gerald J. McCarron, Raymond A. Schroth, Phillip Corwin GO0 JAMES O'GARA: Editor JOHN DEEDY: Idanaging Editor RAYMOND A. SCHROTH: Assoclato Editor ANNIE Id...
...47), ride "the elevator into the sky" (p...
...Perhaps Mr...
...gentleman / tramp...
...They hope, most of all, to find a woman...
...RUIS WOERTENDYKE Director of the N.Y...
...Commonweal Is Indexed In Reader's Guide to Periodical L~torature, Caf~o/Ic Periodical Index, and Book Review Digest...
...That this is not sheer irony is shown by the structure and progression of the whole volume, as well as the exuberance of its conclusion...
...Perhaps the best reward to be had from this highly overpriced, slim volume is that one is enticed by Professor Mercier into re-reading Beckett...
...300 N. Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, MIch...
...Snow is seen as "the sock of God...
...This is meant to be a listening conference as much as it is a conference to set up channels of communication...
...It is hoped that he or she will know what it means to be a participating lay person in the Church, especially as envisioned by Vatican II and with a good background in Vatican II theology-not necessarily formally acquired...
...On the contrary, in "The Rowing Endeth" (p...
...Getlein is unaware that Gen...
...Our reading of it may be colored by an existential act so drastic as suicide, but her meaning and her presence in and through the art cannot be taken back...
...Idlcrofllms from Yo...
...10016...
...1, 1924, to date available tkrougk University blictatllm...
...MANETTA J . CALKINS C l a s s i f i e d RATES: 60c a word...
...For .the pleasure to be found in coping with Beckett's profound pessimism is perhaps the most puzzling contradiction of all...
...The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising is more than a portrait of one man's life---the play explores the revolutionary consciousness of the common man from the legends of ancient Rome to 20th Century Germany...
...Moorcroft can only surmise as to why this advice was given since The Boss .is obviously modeled after Brecht and in its final analysis " . . . is a painful indictment [of Brecht] by Grass...
...Foreign $33.50...
...While there are earthly nourishers of the material need--the sea, mothers, especially the Virgin Mother - - t h e human person craves more...
...He cannot practice friendship, because friendship, is the centrifugal force of self-fear, self-negation . . . we are alone...
...Would Mr., Deedy, to redeem his fairness, research and report on the salaries of the radical left (musicians, actors, poets, etc...
...painting/music...
...Indeed, President Carter will be lucky if he wins this one...
...During his almost successful try for the Republican nomination, Ronald Reagan ran the issue up the flagpole and saluted it almost nightly, and he got great mileage out of it...
...This is not quibbling pedantry but rather accounts for the source of the second distortion in McGUl's essay...
...Grass Cuttings New York, N.Y...
...One New York critic recently capsulized the play as "Giinter Grass's indictment of Brecht . . . . "while another calls the play "Giinter Grass's attack on Bertolt B r e c h t . . . " Is it any wonder Grass does not want The Boss to look (Continued on page 606) NEWS & VIEWS: 578 CORRESPONDENCE: 5T9 EDITORIAl.: 579 WASRINGTON REPORT: Return o f t h e N a t i v e : Frank Getlein 580 VIOLENCE IN THE STREETS: Brian Wicker 582 END OF TRE CONCORDAT.: Margo Hmnmond 584 A NE1W SECRETARIAT: Abigail McCarthy 58G GOD'S EYE VIEW: James A. Ralph 587 'ON TRE ORDINATION OF WOMEN': An Exchange o f Views: 580 PRESS: A T a l e o f Midnight: Thomas Powers 594 THE SCREEN: Colin L. Westerbeck, Jr...
...They want a person with-awareness of the Protestant and non-Christian world, one with ecumenical attitudes and experience...
...She is very self-conscious of this dramatic truth...
...But she (or he) may blend into a chorus the varied voices and arrive at an authentic expression of the mind of the laity...
...To the Editors: In "Floundering With Grass" [July 8] Marilyn Moorcroft makes mention of Giinter Grass's play The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising and Grass's specific advice as to the direction of the play...
...The artist is active, but negatively, shrinking from the nullity of extra-circumferential phenomena, drawn in to the core of the eddy...
...S4c, seven times...
...Cloud, Minn...
...Objective: to encourage prisoners worldwide to turn to Jesus for help, love, etc...
...The Canal issue brings back pictures of Teddy Roosevelt and the big stick and evokes memories of happier days when the U.S...
...That is why it is strange that so much excitement is being generated by the Panama Canal issue...
...The first order of businses is to be a national conference or gathering of the laity which will include lay organizations, lay movements and individual lay persons, in the words of Archbishop Edward McCarthy, chairman of The Bishops' Committee...
...her confessional art was felt both as a necessity and a recurrent source of repulsion and guilt...
...The latter remains a painful mystery of motive and act, and this would remain largely true even if we possessed more of the proximate biographical data than we do...
...Specially, his assertion that "Beckett's tragicomic figures are downto-heel gentry rather than Lumpenproletariat'" is the kind of stuff that good criticism is made of...
...The poems, however, are public docu16 September 1977:606 ment, indeed performances with the poet as actor...
...Children are dying from disease, hunqer and lack of medical care _9 . . our missionary hospital is thelr only hope-we are equipped and ready to serve but cannot afford to train native girls to serve as nurses...
...Gifts for the Derec hospital should be sent to: Missionhurst, 4/61 North 2Sth Street, Arlington, Va...
...In the descending movement both the action of the Divine Spirit and of Jesus as exemplar are central to her vision...
...Great |rffale ALAIN WOODROW: Paris HENRY TEN KORTENAAR: Rome DtESMOND FISHER: Dub/In EDWAIm S. SKILl.IN: Publisher RUTH E. TAYLOR: Advertising Idamagor StafF: LINDA F. KAYLER, PAMELA J. FITZGERALD, HARRIETTE EALSKY COMMONWEAL 232 MADISON AVE., NEW YORK...
...Nurse T r a i n i n g In Oerec...
...They also hope to find a person sensitive to special contemporary family problems including the problems of divorced and remarried Catholics...
...These concepts are all central to Beckett's work, and Mercier's treatment of them is enlightening when it is not bogged down in pedantry...
...2, 53), penetrate the "curtain of GOd" (p...
...For the uninformed and the nationalistic, this is one of those 4th of July, Americanas-apple-pie issues which bring out the worst in us...
...First, the author passes too easily from her published poems to her life, and back again...
...See, for one example among many, "The Play," in The Aw/ul Rowing Toward God...
...Could he...
...Two poems later she asserts: "And God is filling me" and "all in comes the fury of love" ("The Big Heart," p. 70...
...His chapter titles present, so to speak, seven ways of looking at a blackbird: the world/Ireland...
...COL...
...classicism / absurdism...
...Foreign $19...
...and a few poems later: " I am not a saint/but I carol with what the typewriter gives" ("The Saints Come Marching In," p. 80...
...He assumes that because we can know the testimony and meaning of her deliberately crafted poems, we can know the same for her act of suicide...
...Any applicants...
...that is the meaning of "You have a thousand prayers/but God has one...
...Listening to Gtinter Grass's advice as to the direction of the play served only to support what I had already felt...
...Together they constitute a rare instance in contemporary literature of a directly religious poetry of reflection, testimony, and prayer...
...The Rowing Endeth," p. 86...
...Carter's case on the Canal is weak--far from it...
...P r i s o n e r s ' Magazine in process of formation: Rosebud International Magazine...
...Notional Serials Data Program No.: ISSN 0010-3330...
...As a whole, they return to the poetry of depressive and difficult times, and the quest for God is not prominent in them...
...did very much what it wanted in Latin America...
...Viewpoint Viewpoint to Roe v. Wade--The Legal Principles of the Founding Fathers and the Supreme Court by Edward J. Melvin C. M. $1 to Pro Life Coalition of Pennsylvania P.O...
...The Boss hecomes a modern day Coriolanus with scars of intellectual wars equal to the scars of Coriolanus's physical wars...
...Other manifestations of God are more simply stated...
...Funds and correspondents needed...
...There is no space for explication here, but I heartily recommend to Commonweal readers this final poem and the whole climactic sequence preceding it, beginning with "Welcome Morning" (p...
...64...
...AI Hair not only commanded a rifle company in the Korean War, and won a couple of Silver Stars, but he also commanded a rifle battalion, and later a brigade of the 1st U.S...
...19), take off "the wall that separates" (p...
...They counterbalance the other movement of the Rowing volume, the one McGill discerns well, her human yearning and effort to knock on the door of heaven (pp...
...Eisenhower rose from command of a peace time battalion (Ike was never under fire), to be the Supreme Commander, with five star rank in Europe in WW II, "with no military experience at all between those two ranks...
...the Army's elite shock division in three wars), in Vietnam, and won the Distinguished Service Cross, for conspicuous bravery under fire...
...They are in search of a lay person who is a committed Catholic with lay involvement...
...To the Editors: What in the makeup of John Deedy dispels his sense of fair play...
...This is not an unusual interpretation of the play...
...COMMONWEAL, 232 Madlson Ave...
...Transfer of the Canal to Panamanian control does Commom, 579 Mercier gets down to the particulars of discussing Beckett, he is able to provide some fresh perspectives...
...It is through her art that we have her belief and her "caroling...
...She (or he) must work for the bishops in what is, after all, a bureaucracy with all that that implies...
...These are poems unrevised, held back by her, but some of them written in the final year...
...Address Dale Borthon, Rosebud International, Box B-284SS, St...
...They are looking for a person with sensitivity to minorities in the Church, sensitivity to problems of the youth and the elderly, and with "extreme sensitivity" to the role of women in the world today...
...Single copy 75r Sgeclaf two-year rate S29.50...
...0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 CORRESPONDENCE (Continued Irom page ~79) like Brecht...
...This is not to say that Mr...
...000 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 THE CANAL Someone once wrote that the American people would do anything for Latin America except read about it...
...In the process they do show Anne Sexton's growing realization that God must stoop to humanity, must be immanent and incarnational in the world...
...New York...
...We cannot know and we cannot be known...
...monthly in advance for more than three times...
...With defeat in Vietnam rankling and the threat of Taiwan disengagement on the horizon, it is really no wonder that the Canal has become a great conservative cause...
...10016 Teiepkone: (212) IdU 3-204Q A review of Public Affairs, Litoratore and tke Arts...
...Finally, by way of corrective, it should be pointed out that, while The Aw/ul Rowing Toward God is the last poetic statement given for publication before her death, there has recently been published a posthumous collection, 45 Mercy Street, 1976...
...Not so...
...And therein lies an interesting phenomenon...
...Commonweal: 607...
...For box numbers add 50c per insertion...
...6301...
...Premiere, The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprixlng Se~t~ mind @od San Francisco, Cal...
...To which your readers are entitled...
...222S0...
...58...
...On second thought, though, maybe it is not surprising that the Canal can raise high blood pressure from Maine to California...
...DAVID L. DERUS University of San Francisco Executive Sweets Chicago, Ill...
...Class;fled payable with order...
...Two treaties are proposed, one guaranteeing the permanent neutrality of the Canal and the other involving details about its operation until the year 2000...
...when you talk about Latin America, you are talking into a dead mike...
...pp 83-84...
...The Sphinx tells her: God is not on earth "but I can tell you where the well of God is" (p...
...and, man/woman...
...Haiti, a mission hospital is ;n great need of funds for training nurses...
...Their reality is in an important sense fixed...
...This happens in two related ways...
...19046...
...And Commonweal itself might run the ad of the Right to Work Committee...
...That pretty much matches our experience here...
...The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising is not a play about Bertolt Brecht...
...Mercier does this frequently...
...one tlmu...
...Box 121, Jenklntown, Pa...
...Hence, when He laughs in the final poem she laughs too and so does all creation...
...But the play is more than thatmIt is a modern day tragedy with classic proportions and should be recognized as such...
...Grass has weaved a mental web of artfully juxtaposed historical facts, Shakespearean and Brechtian quotations, witty respect for the depth of the worker's needs, and an intimate understanding of the artist's plight...
...One virtue of a good literary critic is to uncover passages in which the writer can speak for himself illustratively...
...philosopher/ artist...
...85), the resolution poem, she finds God and is invited to a game of poker with Him...
...Thinking of the Plebeians as a portrait of Bertolt Brecht greatly diminishes its scope and confines its import to that of a topical didactic drama...
...however I respectfully take exception to the derogatory comment about a gallant soldier[ Gen...
...THOMAS F. LANCER (USA'gET...
...The poet herself finds she cannot testify to the presence of God in nature and in men's works without the creative action of Logos ("Not so...
...Whoever they find will have an almost impossible taskmbut an unparalleled challenge...
...The search committee is primarily made up of lay advisors...
...and to offer good reading material to prisoners free of charge...
...Do not make the face of 'The Boss' look like Brecht...
...5, re J. P. Stevens Co.] Why is it wrong for corporate officers to be paid their earned salaries and right for Mr...
Vol. 104 • September 1977 • No. 19
