BOOKS
McKenzie, John L. & Turnell, Martin & Hazo, Samuel & Betsky, Celia & Boyle, Robert & Carroll, Elizabeth
of. Bloom, however, does not. Rather, he compounds the coldness so that Stevens seems frozen to the core, icier than his own snow man. Bloom's Stevens is also a poet totally self-deceived, a...
...His greatest play is The Prince o/ Homburg which was completed the year before his suicide, but not published until ten years after his death...
...The same sensibility is present in the cryptic poems that constitute the sixteen parts of "Exotica...
...Is it true that the Reverend Moon came from a shady past involving sex scandal, multiple legal and illegal marriages...
...He is convinced that "form" is the answer...
...The Public Burning ROBERT COOVER Viking, $12.95 CELIA BETSKY The King is dead...
...ELIZABETH CARROLL 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Abigail MeCarthy (eon't) who would say that...
...the poem is a beauty and really does not need it...
...The development of the myth of John F. Kennedy took less time than R.'s scheme of dates allows for a developed Christology...
...R. has no trouble in showing that these texts show no awareness of the event...
...Disgusting, pathetic, unattractive, tactless, humorless, and dumb, he is still a person...
...I mean that they ought to ask themselves whether the acEach new student enters a field already marked out for him by datelines which modesty a s well as sloth prompts him to accept, and having accepted, to preserve...
...Even if one had a solid basis (and Rome has not even stirred...
...Kleist wrote eight plays, all of them in verse except for a mixture of verse and prose in The Kaetchen o[ Heilbronn, an admirable volume of short stories, a few essays and an absorbing correspondence...
...The all-American boys and home-town honeys of our fond memories become a collective, conformist consciousness screaming fire and brimstone, out for innocent blood, and more than a match for the spectral threat of "Communism" they are being incited to hate...
...Sensibility is never complete without a spiritual, even a religious dimension, For Morgan it is almost elegaic, as in a poem to Allen Tate entitled "The Word": "Where Boreas comes hooting from the underworld/ he brings us news of those we may call heroes,/ persons we were, persons we're doomed to be/ each holding out to us a torch or chalice,/watching us from a blackness touched with silver . . . . " And the same tone suffuses "Being I," "Being II," "The Devil Demands Perfection," the superb "May 1, 1974/' "Mary" and "Prayer...
...92), and the embarrassing canonization of Hopkins, cranky little Englishman that he was, in the final paragraphs...
...Much of the story is told in a you-are-there Edward R. Murrow sort of present tense, but most of the world Coover describes seems not only chaotic and mad but stands on the opposite side from the Murrow who challenged Joe McCarthy...
...The decline from 72 percent to 52 percent happened entirely during the ensuing ten years...
...To avoid misunderstanding let me say at once that I wish him luck...
...He is more a solipsist seeking a sense of his own power tfian a naturalist seeking authentically to affirm the course of things...
...Poems o f t h e Two Worlds FREDERICK MORGAN U. el Illinois Press, $7.95, paper, $3.95 SAMUEL HAZO l~efore he published A Book el Change in 1972, Frederick Morgan was known primarily as a perceptive, innovative editor of one of the most distinguished quarterlies (The Hudson Review) in the United States...
...R. cites every major work of New Testament criticism for the last century and a large number of minor works...
...for parallels, consult Archilochus, F. S. Flint or T. E. Hulme...
...Jesus and Freedom makes a contribution to the theology of liberation from the sub-continent of India...
...At the same time, their remarkable Christian witness presents a challenge to believers in the West as well...
...It aims to provide "the general reader" with "a more up-to-date account of Hopkins's life and his literary and intellectual development," and it does that...
...His impression---or expressionistic chronicle----of the time is one of increasing stridency, mounting mass hysteria, and absolute paranoia...
...Very little has been written about him in England and America...
...Redat|ng t h e New Testament JOHN A. T. ROBINSON Westminster, $15...
...Further...
...Bergonzi follows Bridges and Miss Schneider into those complacent categories that provide certitude about what kind of a vehicle language actually is...
...Penthesilea is the runnerup...
...Emerson and Whitman made Stevens uneasy not because he wanted to be them, but because he wished to purge himself o f their attraction...
...It's not a matter of cliques or schools or trendiness...
...vorably inclined towards Catholic I liturgy and art in later years' he al" ways remained at an inner distance ~ ~ from any organized religion, even that of his own Protestant upbringing...
...Individuals must enclose payment...
...And it cores the prose-poems of "Five Ballets" with a vision that makes me think of no less an achievement than Baudelaire's Spleen...
...It is there in people aware that their origins may be varied and elsewhere but that they share the now with other newcomers...
...Schoder says his pictures produce...
...trdCn O,nVanY Such a reading of the Gospels and Commonweal: 701 of t h e continuing eruption of God into history implies that persons on the one hand "expect everything from God and rest all their hopes in him" and on the other, will to respond by "a qualitative change in one's system of values and mode of life...
...He is not the Yankee ,peddler, but the Yankee tinkerer, an inventor of new forms patched together from existing ones...
...The book is permeated by the awareness that prayer is not just the cultivation of a particular spiritual state, but encounter with the personal Being, I AM, demanding in turn our own growth in personhood...
...The Rosenbergs' guilt or innocence is immaterial in The Public Burning and they are not really the center of attention...
...Irvington...
...It is an even more important statement than the critic realizes...
...One has to wonder, however, whether even a scholar of R.'s dimensions and achievements can take on a hundred years' tradition of New Testament criticism and get away with it...
...These things can be argued, of course, but to my taste there is here and there a trifle too much of that "neck-~loth" which Hopkins found oppressive in Wordsworth's sonnets---e.g., perverse pious expressions like "to deprive God o f the glory that belongs to him alone" (p...
...In "The Step" I would have preferred if the line "Is it not a clinching thought...
...He was born in 1777, but in 1811 at the age of thirty-four he died in a suicide pact, shooting a woman whom he hardly knew and then himself...
...With perceptive balance, he examines Hopkins's schooldays and experiences at Oxford, the long process of his conversion, his entrance into the Society of Jesus, his struggle with his priestpoet situation, and his final difficult years in Dublin...
...Unfortunately his neuroticism brought him down...
...cloth, $20.00: paper, $B.O0 SMALL COMFORTS FOR HARD TIMES HUMANISTS ON PUBLIC POLICY MICHAEL MOONEY and FLORIAN STUBER, Editors In this unusual volume, 25 American intellectuals, among them Robert A. Nisbet, Herbert J. Gens, and Benjamin DeMott, discuss the costs of equality, environmental ethics, the limits-to.growth debate, end more...
...Part vaudeville and part Greek tragedy, the novel seems construtted not in scenes but in front o f stage settings...
...Again, in dealing with "Spelt from Sibyl's Leaves," the thirteenth line of the poem is misprinted ("or a rack" instead of "of a r a c k " ) ; the verb "waste" in the fourth line, perfectly expressing t h e act of the two kinds of light, he dogmatically categorizes as an "epithet...
...Coover exposes the danger and stupidity of this dislike by showing howambivalence, double-talk, superstition and suspicion create an atmosphere of doubt that can only be dispelled by destructive lies...
...To analyze both the social system of Jesus's time and the current socio-economic-political situation KapNew from ORBIS FAREWELL TO INNOCENCE by Allan Boesak A socio-ethical study on black theology and black power...
...Confronting the major issues of the day from a moral perspective At last--a bbok that explaifis modern economics in layman's terms and suggests action to be taken...
...Coover is more interested in putting an entire generation, era, and system on trial...
...Dudko's replies that the small church was soon overflowing--until the inevitable state pressure removed him from the parish...
...Did the painting we see reproduced here emerge from some back parlor in Chicago (or Jesuit house at West Baden...
...168...
...Thus Bergonzi can approvingly quote Schneider's disapproval of Hopkins's "wilfully attempting to make language into a vehicle that it was not" (p...
...cloth, $12.00...
...What he says about the relation of Stevens to Emerson and Whitman, both of whom did trouble Stevens, is of note...
...For this remarkable detailing of the evolution of a cult, Sontag visited three continents to interview zealous "Moonies," disillusioned dropouts, bitter parents, and professional deprogrammers...
...As for the pictures, they are, most of them, well reproduced, and some of them do achieve Fr...
...Sebastian Kappen has agonized to find, out of the long cultural history and the oppressive social conditions of India, a Christian faith which is relevant to his people...
...Through the latter he gains a tool for reflecting upon contemporary experience which serves as "new eyes" for Gospel reading...
...And it is not only extra-canonical literature that is important...
...It is another play of opposites, and along with the author he tries to get a grasp on the groundrules by looking for patterns in everything...
...Coover has a lot in common with Nathanael West's "comic strip" technique...
...I have had questions about this for years, and I finally decided that it is futile to attempt to reconcile Acts with the epistles of Paul...
...ISBN 0-913836-33-8 128 p p , - $4,95 FOR THE LIFE OF THE WORLD: SACRAMENTS AND ORTHODOXY ALEXANDER SCHMEMANN A new edition of the book first written by Father Alexander Schmemann in 1963 to serve as an outline for students in a discussion of the Christian "world-view"--an approach to the world and to man's life in it that stems from the liturgical experience of the Orthodox Church...
...clp Cloth $7.95, Paper $4.95 Write for 116-title catalog ORBIS BOOKS Maryknoil, NY 10545 y From the author o! Diet for a Small Planet mammla'----'~ ,Challenges our most cherished myths _ ,, about world hunger...
...Gardner judges, on the basis of "fine, fingering beams . . do feature down," that Hopkins's text indicates a photograph (Study, I, 190...
...Cloth $10.gS...
...In 28 October 1977:700 The Prince o/ Homburg, however, there is an important change...
...Yet it is not simply a presentation of "techniques...
...But Hill Poems" capture the peace and idyllic quiet of Maine...
...I am curious to see whether my colleagues, open-minded as they are and as they believe ~Bemselves to be, will permit a most respected member of the lodge to buck the whole establishment...
...lovely essays on Hopkins's nature poems--the essay on "Spring and Fall" would make the whole book invaluable, even if all else were trash...
...In short, he has an intograted view of things...
...The translations of his plays in English are few in number and have been mainly produced in America...
...Surely no one ever pushed the argument from silence so far...
...I may liken such a conspiracy to the conspiracy of Talmudic Judaism to treat Christianity as non-existent...
...Perhaps Stevens, a perspectivist, allows for such a reading...
...On the "Johannine" literature R. establishes a very strong position, and I do not see how the conventional assumptions about the origin of this literature at the end of the first century can continue to stand...
...4.00 THE MYSTICAL THEOLOGY OF THE EASTERN CHURCH VLAD1MIR LOSSKY Classic study of Orthodox theology and of its basis in spirituality, by one of the century's most respected theologians-now available for the first time in paperback...
...Even the Indian legends do not appeal to great antiquity...
...Describing pioneering work done at Columbia in a variety of programs, the authors suggest creative innovations of interest to all those concerned with higher educetion...
...It is there in the cosmology of the Indian making peace with the great beasts with whom he shared the land...
...The success of the film is the result not only of Rohmer's genius, but partly because he has made skilful use of dialogue in most of his films and partly because the choice of a longshort story avoids the insoluble problems which arise from filming very long novels, reminding us that the failure of two films of Madame Bovary (described by Eisenstein as one of the most cinematic of novels) by Jean Renoir and Gerhard Lamprecht was largely the result of the novel's great length...
...I am suspicious about his "Portrait of a brother and sister...
...Through the former he seeks to distinguish the perennial message of is Jesus from that which time-bound...
...Or is it a bogus religious institution using spiritual d o c t r i n e to mask political and economic ambitions...
...The author strikingly deals with the issue of "secularism" and Christian culture, seen from the perspective of the unbroken experience of the Church, revealed and communicated in her worship, in her Liturgy--the sacrament of the world--the sacrament of the Kingdom...
...The Major Works ot l l e t n r t e h co# l i l l e s t ROBERT E. HELBLING New Directions, $13.50, $3.95 (paper) MARTIN TURNEI,I, "I shall believe that the Germans are civilized when they stop admiring Kieist...
...the shape of the 1920s bungalow predominates...
...Assured limits, based on universal rules, give a solid basis for absolute criticism...
...It is exposed in a book of 360 pages devoted to dating alone, only one of the questions of "general introduction," although R. cannot escape entirely the questions of authorship...
...Especially out of his own remarkable grasp of Shakespeare, Milward can respond to and explicate hundreds of delicate echoes ir~ the poems...
...For he finds the teaching of Jesus on nonviolence as valid as ever when it concerns violence against persons...
...the ancient stuffed kestrel...
...His world is divided along Manichean lines into the "Powers of Light" and those of darkness...
...The fact that the charges against the Rosenbergs may be a gigantic mistake, one big communal delusion is sacrificed for the sake of public exorcism, an attempt to l~acify fears and wrongs in a cowardly new world...
...had been left out...
...a book of criticism seems to me a poor place to subordinate poetry to sanctity...
...But the lapses in t a s t e - - t h e garish prints 0 0 0 0 0 0 000 REVIEWERS EDWARD PROFFITT is an associate professor of English at Manhattan College and a poet whose work has appeared in Commonweal, The Humanist, International Poetry Review and other journals...
...But his struggle to do so, or his struggle against his own negations and desire for transcendence, is what to me is moving in him...
...But among so many superlative beauties these quibblings should serve mainly to highlight the excellence of these essays...
...His auto-da-/e pays homage to the American cult of competition, the belief that there is always an "other side" that is bad and must be liquidated...
...paper, $4.00 re order send check or money to Dept...
...Fascinaling in his appeal, Frightening in his power and purpose...
...Dmitrii Dudko, then a parish priest in Moscow, as a "dialogue with the faithful...
...The speaker was a Cambridge University lecturer in German who many years ago introduced me to the works of Heinrich yon Kleist...
...R. takes up the question of why the book of Acts ends when it does and deals with what may be called the sophisms which are alleged to explain why a work which was written in 85 after Peter and Paul had died in a persecution of Roman Christians, Palestinian Judaism and Jewish Christianity had been annihilated, and the Roman empire had had its own internal revolution, should 28 October 1977:692 serenely end its narrative about 62...
...R. remarks that one cannot set a timetable for the development of ideas...
...The sermons present a cross-section of contemporary Russian religious life...
...This latest book by Archimandrite Sophrony is a refreshing contrast...
...In other words, I find that Stevens was, though often with much hesitation, for ice cream...
...All the essential ingredients are there and brilliantly handled: the American language, largeness, bravado, false nostalgia, trust in a Providential Design which cushions the American mind like one of our outsize cars...
...No place is real, actions resemble cut-outs, actual events are treated with an air of unreality...
...19107 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 CORRESPOHDENCE (Continued from page 677) Another case in point would be the French Catholics, who are also a notably "skewed" subpopulation compared to the other Catholic ethnic groups-Polish, Irish, Italian and German...
...Something is repeated so often for so long by so many important people that it is never questioned...
...he conveys his outrage and his disgust by keeping his distance...
...His main concern is with the moral problem and its solution...
...One who has been trained in Roman Catholic theology (old style) recognizes at once what he encounters in New Testament general introduction...
...a view of fields from an airplane...
...And he presents the real Moon in an exclusive nine-hour interview which Moon says is the last he will grant- ever SUN MYUNG MOON and the Unification Church by Frederick Sontag 16 pages of photos $8.95 abingdon at your local bookstore Commonweal: 695 ETHICAL ISSUES IN DEATH AND DYING ROBERT F. WEIR, Editor This much-needed collection of art;* cles by persons in the life sciences, law, medic;ne, philosophy, and religion offers clear and level-headed discussions of the many pressing medical, legal, end ethical concerns involved ;n death and dying...
...ISBN 0-913836-35-4 291 pp...
...Kleist divided his own contemporaries and was severely criticized by Goethe...
...I .admit that there was a polished literary artifice at work on the Kennedy myth which we cannot find in the naive creators of the Christ of faith...
...that "competent readers" intuit...
...Coover uses bad taste to make his points, to illuminate a society equally hideous, in the way of the "'poshlost" beloved by Gogol...
...His book condemns the accusers and along with them an American tradition of persecution from the Salem witch-hunts to Sacco and Vanzetti...
...Aboard the Princess Marguerite it seemed to me that problems can be solved, people can start afresh, and that humanity might make it after all...
...This Christianity, which is really derivative of Paul rather than Christ, has always had its problems with eros, thus creating the stupidity of puritanism on the one hand and the futility of sex divorced from personafity (Margaret Mead's definition of obscenity, by the way) on the other...
...soft cover $5.95 THE GREAT ECONOMIC DEBATE An Ethical Analysis by ]. PHILIP WOGAMAN Avuilnbh: (tl v o l t r bookstore...
...Grounded in Scripture and the Fathers but at the same time concerned with presenting an articulate Orthodox witness to the modern world, Lossky shows that doctrinal issues are not just abstract propositions for theological debate but affect the whole of the Christian life...
...Coover manipulates them consciously and confidently, seeming to stand outside a tradition, yet looking in on himself as a part of it...
...Uncle Sam battles a "Phantom" variously identified with sin, sex, and international Communism...
...The book, beautifully written, judicious, perceptive in speculation, is a pleasure to read...
...R. insists that advancing the dates does not change accepted conclusions about the relations of the Gospels to each other...
...Institutions may request billing...
...He follows her also in condemning the ranked possessives in the Deutschland's final line, calling it "hardly English" (p...
...His chapter can serve, as he perhaps mainly aims, to rouse interest in a deeper look at Hopkins's poems...
...Soft ~:over $7.95 U.S...
...Rohmer's film of "The Marquise of O - - " is a clear proof that Eisenstein was right and Bergman wrong...
...Helbling shows that though the short stories were written at different times from the plays, most of them can be clearly related to Kleist's dramatic work...
...Similarly, the novel is epiclength, but not an epic...
...In this spirit, Morgan's final lines in his book are both the first and last say: '~Fhe poems, then, may hesitate/ almost as though unavailing/ against a presence that is so simply there/ and, finally, dissipate/ within the large contentment/ of knowing that their being has been known...
...Dogma and ceremonials could no more help him in his own quest for selfhood than a "philosophic system...
...FATHER ROBERT BOYLE, S.J...
...Through the kitsch and the obscenities, the fantastic prose and the word-games, echoes the message used by John Dos Passes to describe the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti: "We stand defeated America...
...Best of all, for me, were his extraordinarily...
...As long as they cling to each other, they can weave all over the street without encountering a solid obstacle...
...Coover's simplistic dichotomies are tonguein-cheek and seem to play off the complex ambiguities that motivated Melville's Moby Dick or paralyzed his Pierre...
...He analyzes the abnormal states of mind with a certain degree of complacency, but they end in sadistic riots and no attempt is made to integrate his findings...
...What might appear to be the most difficutt step in R.'s thesis is really one of the easiest...
...but I cannot see that it will keep anyone from accepting R's revised chronology...
...In his cityscape, signs, slogans, billboards, and picket signs scream out messages with all the aggressiveness of propaganda...
...Naturally," R. says, "if one presumes to challenge the scientific establishment in any field one must be prepared to substantiate one's case in some detail...
...His own abnormal character is apparent in plays like Penthesilea and in parts of Die Hermannesschlacht (known in English as The Battle o/ Arminius) which has never been translated in full...
...The history of man there has a practical, sensible quality...
...14.95 TRADITION AND INNOVATION GENERAL EDUCATION end the REINTEGRATION OF THE U'NIVERSITY: A COLUMBIA REPORT ROBERT L. BELKNAP end RICHARD KUHNS This timely book shows how a wellestablished tradition in higher education can be reorganized and developed to meet the needs of our time...
...I~hihulell)hi~J...
...But my Stevens, like that of J. Hillis Miller (Poets of Reality), is quite another bird...
...R. quotes an irreverent saying of Austin Farrer that the dates of New Testament books are held up like a party of drunks weaving their way home arm in arm...
...I see Stevens not as an "involuntary Transcendentalist" but as a man struggiing to overcome his own urge to the egotistical sublime...
...SISTER ELIZABETH CARROLL, R.S.M., is on the staff of the Center of Concern in Washington, D.C...
...This is what happens in Morgan's moving poem to his father (" 'When It Rained and Rained' ") as well as in an almost macabre poem called "The Door" in which the presence of evil (as in The Turn o! The Screw) is present without being named: "The bombers didn't come...
...Too bad, in such circumstances, that he presumes to judge the line bad, and bad not only for him, but, according to some universal law, bad for all competent readers...
...I am aware that most of my colleagues think they need all this time in 'which they can allow for the development of Christology, the development of ecclesiology an d church order, the obscuration of the Jesus of history by the Christ of faith, and other dogmatic elements in New Testament study...
...I (J...
...It reminds us that in his critical writings Eisenstein insisted on the relations between the film and the novel, arguing convincingly that "montage" played an important part in both of them...
...Of course if Acts was written in 62 or shortly thereafter, Mark, Matthew and Luke must be earlier...
...They are Commonweal: 693 prodded by a host of historical villains, actual figures pumped up by Coover to the size of caricatures, a far cry from E. L. Doctorow's anguished novelization of the same case, The Book o/Daniel...
...It is there in the invitation of the Indians to the white man's missionary to share the God who gave the white men a seemingly superior knowledge...
...R.'s central thesis can be put briefly: there is no clear allusion in the New Testament to the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D...
...R.'s thesis is not dashed off...
...I do not mean that they must immediately run up the banner of "Before 70...
...Sometimes he neglects even necessary points, as in his essay on "God's Grandeur," where he fails to develop the structural connections between the mysterious energy of electricity and the Spirit's divine energy in the sacraments ("flame," "oil...
...As in his first novel, The Origin o/ the Brunists, Coover is aware of the relationship between religious ritual and mass emotion fanned by fanatical hype...
...I have no hesitation in affirming that R. has posed for thee world of New Testament scholarship the most radical question that the world has heard since the publication of Rudolf Bultmann's "Neues Testament und Mythologie" in 1941...
...His problem, however, is that he is too human, one of the wonders of Coover's book...
...The Gospel of John sho~vs too much knowledge of Palestine and Palestine Judaism before 70 to .be credibly the memories of a man nearly a hundred years old, or of his literary heirs...
...It is there in the border established without armed struggle...
...As India has been outside the formation of this Western conditioning process, so, by and large, have women, even Western women...
...That climactic brooding he might also have seen-as Joyce does on the opening page of Ulysses--as analogous to the Power 28 October 1977:698 which, descending upon Mary, conceived the Word...
...Catholic sociologists like Sister Marie Augusta, who dismiss our findings about the impact of Humanae Vitae on a priori grounds, ought, according to the canons of empirical social science, to detect 28 October 1977:702...
...The mere fact that "'New Testament introduction" tends to occupy his earliest and most inexperienced years has a formative effect, for good or for ill, on all his subsequent work...
...FATdER JOHN L. McKENZXE is the author of Light on the Gospels (Thomas More...
...Coover's central opposition is between spectacle and audience, watching and performing, sincerity and falseness~ publicness and anonymity...
...It, too, requires a marathon mentality to stay with it...
...Redating the New Testament shows no diminution in the scholarly virtues just enumerated...
...It is to be recommended particularly strongly for anyone who is already interested in Kleist or who intends to take him up...
...The controversies have not been confined to England and America...
...M~tTIN TURNELL'S books include The Art o~ French Fiction (New Directions...
...Finally, the title poem has enough to reward all the attention it may be given and which it certainly deserves...
...first truly concise istory since Vatican II, Covering the story of the Church from the time of Jesus up to this post-conciliar day, With a special chapter devoted to the Catholic Church in America and her mission in the area Of social action, this is the first concise history of the Church to be conceived and written in the aftermath of Vatican II...
...R. points out that other early Christian lkerature which is certainly later than 70 shows a poignant awareness of what must have been a revolutionary development in both ' Judaism and Christianity...
...but when the silence is total, it raises questions...
...His tactics are underlined and given force by a sense of the ludicrous...
...Autobiographies" as a unit proves by its very existence to all confessional poets that poetry of the self can never remain private but must become personal to be poetry at all...
...that the Council of ~Ierusalem, like the Jerusalem community of goods, must be classified as Christian midrash...
...SUSAN sECHLER, Washin.gton Post "One of the most stimulating" books in yea N.Y...
...And they cannot be dismissed once their poems are known...
...The Marquise of Ore" is of special interest because of Eric Rohmer's splendid film of it which has recently been shown in public cinemas and on television...
...All the stories deserve reading in spite of their poor reception during the writer's lifetime...
...It remains to add that this change, which did nothing to save Kleist, emphasizes what I have said already about his attitude towards religion...
...Writers from Ross McDonald to Joan Didion have documented what they see as the meaningless and empty life of California, the sad conclusion of the American experience, the journey west...
...There is no sign of the author in all of this...
...The other important figure and sometime protagonist is an awkward, insecure, megalomaniacal bumbler named Richard Milhous Nixon...
...SIGNIFICANT...
...Helbling's study is an excellent introduction to Kleist...
...He wants to mean, apparently, that the line does not fit into that abstract English language (existing where...
...mRedating the New Testament cepted chronology of the New Testa: ment needs something it has never had, a serious reexamination by the body of scholarship...
...Elvis Presley has died, so we are more nostalgic than ever for the 1950s...
...The result is that he has only been appreciated to the full in his own country during the present century...
...ISBN 0-913836-31-1 252 p p . - $5.95 Commonweal: 699 Peter L.Berger probesthe moral dimension of today social issues...
...Look at the alternatives: poets whose sense of ease with words is mistaken for the casual perfection of art when actually it [s nothing but a true reflection of their own superficiality, poets of pseudo-surrealism, free association, stream-of-consciousness and other symptoms of mere preciousness, poets to whom poetry is an exercise, a form of therapy, a time to versify, a rehearsal...
...Sensibility is born when a poet with a worldview begins an ineluctable scrimmage with his own talent...
...There has never been unanimous consent about the date of the Johannine material, and certainly the Qumran documems have reanimated the discussion...
...But on the whole one must judge ST.VtAdiMiak Smi y l Ess CRESTWOOD, NEW YORK 10707 OUR HOPE DMITRII DUDKO Of documents reaching us concerning religion in Russia today, this series of question-and-answer sermons is unique...
...ISBN 0-913836-08-7 151 pp...
...clP...
...A bridgebuilder, combining the daring of the liberal with the caution of the conservative, Dulles explicates his conviction that the Church can adapt, without capitulating, to the secular world by a more vigorous heralding of the Christian message...An important collection of insights by the author of Models of the Church~'-Publishers Weekly...
...But the Northwest terminus of that journey remains largely unchronicled...
...I object rather to Bloom's way of saying, a way that belittles Stevens and makes one wonder why he is worth reading in the first place...
...Robert Coover's The Public Burning blasts these images of the 1950s skyhigh: He uses the Rosenberg "atom spy" trial as the basis for an indictment of American history, politics, American idioms and ways of life...
...10.00 at booksellers A CONCISE HISTORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH Thomas Bokenkotter From the publishers of The Jerusalem Bible DOUBLEDAY Commonweal: 697 Gerard Manley Hopkins BERNARD BERGONZI Macmillan, $8.95 Landscape and lnseape: Vision and Inspiration in Hopkins's P o e t r y PETER MILWARD, S.J...
...7.95 at booksellers THE RESILIENT CHURCH Avery Dulles S.J...
...After the appearance of A Book of Change, which was an NBA finalist in 1973, Morgan was established as a poet of the first order...
...Men like Judge Irving Kaufman, Attorney General Herbert Brownell, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Cecil B. DeMille, and J. Edgar Hoover are presented by Coover as organizing and orchestrating the public execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in Times Square...
...The shining peaks of the Cascades were only lately active volcanoes...
...He engages in a stylistic tour-de-force, which, by tracing American speech and speechifying back to their roots, also gets to the heart of many matters...
...He finds the criteria for this precarious project to ~ ~ ~ ~ ; ~ D ] be "fidelity to the original Jesusphenomenon and responsiveness to the God who reveals himself to us in $10.95, now at your Uookst~ history...
...So unusual was the approach and so bold were Fr...
...Of course, they of the Northwest share our history of exploitation, rapine, violence and despoil, too---but that civilized quality is real...
...Eerdmans, $10.95 ROBERT BOYLE Bernard Bergonzi, in a pleasant, leisurely fashion, narrates the fairly placid development ("Earth hears no hurtle . . .") of the externals of Hopkins's life...
...But I am not being entirely fair to Bloom here...
...The tribes of Paul might frown at this, but St...
...In fact for so many different authors and so many different works such a silence would in any other context be judged the result of a conspiracy...
...OOooOOOOO IN BRIEF JEsus AND FREEDOM, by Sebastian Kappen, SJ., Orbis, $8.95 Cloth, $3.95 Paper...
...Morgan is a poet who possesses what Donne and his contemporaries called "sensibility...
...Helbling, "Kleist himself was grasping for inner certainties and expressed his insight only in a tentative way, while always remaining a partial mystery to himself...
...Robert Helbling observes that "Although he felt faI NEW...
...It is there in the story of the first Spanish discoverer who yielded the territory peacefully to an English explorer, having decided that it was too far from home ~o defend...
...Nor can I accept Bloom's belated emphasis...
...Despite adversities, it grew and eventually crossed the seas to Japan, America, Europe, and on to 120 mission nations...
...6.95 HIS LIFE IS MINE ARCHIMANDRITE SOPHRONY In our day many pseudo-spiritualities have arisen, each offering its own shortcut to spiritual satisfaction...
...Yes, says Father Dulles, as he "picks his way through the complexil]es and polarities in contemporary Catholicism, exploring major themes in Church renewal...
...R. thinks this is radical skepticism, and it may he...
...r ilirecl i"r~m] the imhlisher...
...The wheat lands of eastern Washington state differ from the wheat lands of the Midwest, even of Montana, for wheat grown on lava soil seems to have a different color...
...Jesus and Freedom does not offer a finished model for renewal of society and church in India but a vision and methodology which will benefit the reflections of other Christians involved in social iustice...
...SAMUEL I'IAZO's latest book is Smithereened Apart, a critique of Hart Crane (Ohio University Press...
...163...
...Similar to the dramatic characters he created," writes Mr...
...Here are his most provocative essays of the '60s and '70s, exploring his three principal concerns: understanding the reality of modern society, engaging in meaningful political action within it, and defining its impact on an individual's religious quest...
...Schoder's stated aim, " . . . showing the actual object o r scene which Hopkins observed so sensitively"--e.g., the waxen hornlight of Welsh sunsets...
...Philosopher/theologian Frederick Sontag spent nearly a year in travel and research to get behind the sensational media reports and bring readers the first, full inside story...
...that Luke knew little about Palestine and Palestinian Judaism, and did not understand that little very well...
...it was only 14,000 years ago that the glaciers retreated--the land does not bear the age-old mark of man...
...Coover's 534-page book covers only three days, but it ranges back and forth in time, into every nook and cranny of public and private events imaginable, and into every crevice of a variety of warped minds...
...RAYMOND V. SCHODER, S.J...
...Address for orders: 136 South Broadway...
...Although Morgan in28 October 1977:696 vokes the theological rubrics of ancient Egypt, India and China, many of his dominant images come from Western Christianity but without the concomitant hang-ups...
...Scholars support the dates for New Testament books by quoting each other...
...But fortunately he doesn't make much depend on such judgments...
...It deals with prayer, and especially with the "Jesus Prayer" of Orthodox monasticism...
...poor pictures of mid-west American trees and sky...
...The worth of Poems o/ the Two Worlds will keep this book alive for years, I am sure...
...It must be said at once that in spite of his greatness, he was a highly neurotic character and that his problems were made worse by the study of Kant's philosophy...
...John of the Cross would understand as would Paula, Morgan's wife, to whom many of the poems are dedicated...
...the Prom is big at Yale, bloody Mary Brunches pack them in at Harvard...
...I don't know, but I don't think so...
...Secondly, among the inaccuracies in Marie Augusta Neal's review of The American Catholic is her assertion that Catholic church attendance began to decline in 1957...
...The Palestine prior to 70 had ceased to exist a generation before the conventional date of the Gospel of John...
...Is the Unification Church "'a new Christianity" soon to catch fire and take over America...
...In its final chapter, where criticism becomes central, that easy-going surface treatment is less satisfying...
...A major role is also played by "Uncle Sam," a mixture of Mike Fink, the Confidence Man, the Yankee Peddler, and other obnoxious, amusing braggarts from American folklore, who perpetuates himself through incarnations of our respective presidents...
...He recognizes dogmatic tradition...
...What Nixon calls his "ordeals" or "crises" are his efforts to not succumb to weakness when a show of force seems--as alwaysmmore politic...
...The argument from silence is the weakest of all historical arguments...
...After all, poets who can see as well as say are not that numerous...
...The complacent mood on college campuses is called "going back to the Fifties...
...Reviews and evaluates major black theologians from a black South African view...
...of stilted finches, of a roseomoled trout...
...Has he "brainwashed" America's youth, forcing parents to engage in drastic kidnapping and deprogramming techniques...
...Coover cleverly personifies The New York Times and Time as publicity mongers, who help throw up smokescreens to cover the duplicity of the causes they sup28 October 1977:694 port and help sustain a society that understands only commercialization, merchandizing and PR...
...Dick Nixon dubs this "gamesmanship...
...Comprehensive and thorough, yet'consistently lively and engaging, it answers the need of anyone-student or general reader-who seeks a concise overview of the Church as it has evolved through two millenia...
...Paper $3.95 A SOUTHERN BAPTIST IN THE WHITE HOUSE by lAMES T, BAKER %~ THE WESTMINSTER PRESS, 905 With~!rsp.(m Bhlg...
...What he does actually mean, as I see it, is that he is not prepared to respond to Hopkins's English...
...Each of the imagistic sections has the cut of a swordpoint...
...In short, having taken Stevens as his province, Bloom feels free to exercise a droit de seigneur whenever he chooses...
...Now with the publication of Poems of the Two Worlds, many of the green shoots that were just beginning to show in his first book have become branches, put forth leaves, blossomed...
...by Aylward Shorter An African Christian theology can emerge, argues Shorter, only from a dialogue between Christianity and the complex phenomenon called African Traditional Religions...
...Publishers Weekly $11.50 at bookstores or direct from the publisher this handsome book of superlatively good essays and interesting pictures to be a beautiful tribute to Hopkins's work from two of his Jesuit brothers, and it surely is a book that would enlighten and delight anyone who loves and values literature...
...It is amazing to encounter Nixt~n as an "I," not as the monstrous, plastic, bad guy Tricky Dick of Watergate fame...
...I regret, as I am sure R. must also, that there will be n o response from one who never shunned debate, the late Norman Perrin...
...92) that Hopkins saw "the portrait" at Monasterevan, but he does not say that the portrait here reproduced is the one Hopkins saw...
...The Broken Pitcher is an excellent comedy and Amphitryon is felt by many critics to be superior to Moli&e's comedy on which it was based, but it is so remarkable that, as Mr...
...SUN MYUNG MOON and the Unificalion Church Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church was born in Korea and arose out of poverty, persecution, and prison...
...Covers Marxism, loissez.faire capitalism, social market capitalism, democratic socialism, and economic conservationism...
...New York 10533 Coover's vocabulary and his grammar are the clich6s, jingles, and themesongs of this culture brought together and transformed into a unique, captivating jargon...
...It comes down to sensibility and language, as it always has...
...As I remember the story, no adult could afford to admit that he even heard the child...
...He is one of the greatest German dramatists, but the Cambridge don's conservative pronouncement is an indication that he has been, and in some respects still is, a decidedly controversial figure...
...Sensitive and constructive proposals for easi n g t h e t e n s i o n s between East and West, rich nation and poor nation, pacifists and non-pacifists, environmentalists and nonenvironmentalists...
...His characters' every gesture is permeated by theatricality: the Rosenbergs, too, in their letters, public displays of affection, their need to establish themselves as martyrs, become press agents of their own...
...But that doesn't bother Bloom, who holds repression, as he does oedipal fixation, to be a sign not of neurosis but of vitality...
...Yet the disciple of Jesus who is committed to such a restructuring must b e prepared, in Kappen's view, to face death...
...It is structural change to offer liberation from a destructive social system that Kappen seeks...
...CELtA nETSKY is spending a year as a Fellow at the Smithsonian Institute...
...Ingmar Bergman has taken the opposite view, has recently declared that "film has nothing to do with literature" and that "we should avoid making films out of books...
...I do not recall a production of any of his plays in England either by a visiting German company or in English...
...these are among the modern issues Peter L. Berger examines in his wide-ranging new book...
...Milward says (p...
...These differences of interpretation of a single work are an indication of both the originality and complexity of his most important achievements...
...Morgan's answer is to accept eros as he accepts breath...
...Now R. comes along like the child in the story of the emperor's new clothes...
...There are very few New Testament texts which can be even adduced as allusions to the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple, and most of these are found in the "synoptic apocalypses" of Matthew and Luke...
...That critical lack is abundantly filled in Father Milward's critical essays, sometimes brilliant, sometimes deeply moving, sometimes helpful merely, a time or two deficient and misleading,but always interesting and alive with perceptive, knowledgeable, sensitive response...
...The farmsteads, too, have the look of this century...
...Therefore the authors were unaware of the catastrophe...
...It is difficult to name favorites in a book like this (and it is, to its additional credit, a book, not a mere sweeping together of poems), but I would nominate among the shorter pieces "Forgotten Poem," "I Love Grim Autumn Days," "The Walk," "Hideyoshi" and "Bianca...
...He knows what there is to know, and he weaves that knowledge, for the first five of the six chapters of his "critical biography," into an interesting and informative account...
...the placid expanse of the very water where the Deutschland got stuck (one looks for a companion picture of the very air where the Windhover hovere d ) - - d o a good deal, in my case, to mitigate that "wonder" which Fr...
...FOREIGN POLICY AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS by JOHN C. BENNETT arid HARVEY SEIFERT Written by a distinguished historian who is himself a Southern Baptist, this book provides a careful and penetrating examination of limmy Carter's faith and the tradition which shaped it-and how it will affect his presidency...
...In contrast with many other practicing poets who personify a "disassociation of sensibility" (Eliot's phrase), this is no small virtue...
...and he sees the overwhelming power of the hellish ending as a moral preachment instead of the stark expression o f present experience...
...Can the Church adaptwithout capitulating...
...In spite of their violence, however, they are more objective in the sense that the narrator never intervenes personally with, comments or analysis in order to deepen the significance of what is being presented...
...The sermons were initiated in 1973 by Fr...
...But while his lack of response to Hopkins's remarkable Scotistic insights and his ignoring of the overwhelming impact of the Spiritual Exercises on Hopkins's imagination do not injure his pleasantly relaxed biography, they do leave his criticism limp and bloodless...
...Paper $4.95 AFRICAN CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY: ADAPTATION OR INCARNATION...
...Coover obsesses about three days in June, 1953 without ever becoming tedious...
...Let me add for the pastoral epistles and the Catholic epistles that they offer no serious difficulty to R.'s thesis...
...The true sublime as I feel it in Stevens is not the egotistical sublime of Whitmanesque will and power, but the antisublime (from the perspective of the egotistical sublime) of the acceptance of necessity, of celebrating the bloom on the plum in all its ephemerality, of effacing one's narcissism to the point of saying "yes" with conviction...
...Nixon says, "Paradox was the one thing I hated more than psychiatrists and lady journalists...
...Times Book Review pen finds Marxist categories helpful...
...FACINGUPTO MODERNITY Excursions in Society, Politics, and Religion :Peter L.Berger "A conservative intellectual of great range and perspicacity...
...In spite of that last sentence, I am convinced that if Kleist had been or become a Catholic, his career would have lasted much longer and would almost certainly have led to greater achievements in the manner of Spain's three greatest Catholic dramatists...
...Therefore, by an easy corollary, they wrote before the event...
...It is literally a new land still...
...It is impossible that in twenty-seven books written by members o f a dissident Jewish sect, most of them Jews, this catastrophe of Judaism should not be mentioned...
...So Bloom thinks nothing of contradicting at every point Stevens's own statements on his work, of using etymologies to subvert surface meanings, and of forcing Stevens into a mold that Stevens himself objected to vigorously...
...Helbling tells us, it has been "variously called a comedy, a tragedy, a tragiccomedy, a metaphysical mystery, a heterogeneous product of tragic and comic elements, and the like...
...American Graffiti and Happy Days were the beginning of a longing for that yesteryear, and now people in their mid-twenties sit around at dinner parties doing mistyeyed imitations of Wolfman Jack, while their younger brothers and sisters try to reinstitute bobby-socks and pointy bras, beer and be-bop...
...It is generally assumed that it reflected the moral evolution of the writer, but unhappily it was short-lived...
...With his eye for revealing trivia and obscure facts, Coover sets a man like Nixon (or the Rosenbergs with whom Nixon apparently has much in common) against a panoramic backdrop of psychological and historical absurdities, so that it becomes suggestively unclear whether a sense of hallucination is theirs or ours...
...He gets behind and beyond history, his fictionalization of it most resembling the ingenuity of a Robert Wilson production...
...Father Milward can follow Hopkins's Scotist probings, and does...
...Fascists are made, not born...
...Further, he analyzes without pedantry Hopkins's linguistic achievements, the careful structuring of sound, and the literary influences at work in Hopkins's text...
...Contrasting the Rosenbergs with their enemies, Coover sets up a comparison between competing causes, self-deluded altruism and the lust for power...
...teaches in the English Department at Marquette University...
...a lesser man might be dismissed as a nut...
...Perhaps Stevens did not reach that point...
...This portrait is a gooey painting...
...That that ended badly was not the result of the Indian decision...
...An insightful look at humanists and their profession, as well as at the policy issues they undertake to investigate...
...Bloom's Stevens is also a poet totally self-deceived, a poet who repressed every motive Bloom considers important in his poetry...
...I believe R.'s position on Acts and the Gospels would be stronger if he were more critical--I should say skeptical-about the historical value of Acts 1-19...
...JOHN L. MeKENZIE Bishop Robinson has proved to all satisfaction his ability to combine sound and methodical scholarship with original, imaginative and even exciting ventures in the world of ~.heological thinking...
...It avoids psychoanalytic probing, and it merely points toward some of Hopkins's deepest interests, like his profound research into Scotus's thought...
...It was a fun time, wasn't it, before America lost its innocence and everything got mean...
...in the mind of God...
...For the community "the adequate response can be nothing less than the restructuring of the entire social and cultural system...
...Shifting around from viewpoint to viewpoint, from one style to another, The Public Burning is a marvel of skill--and bad taste...
...It is worth the effort, however, and Coover's method is no more outrageous than that of insipid soap operas like "Washington Behind Closed Doors" and other television distortions...
...Alone with the moon/ I wandered those empty streets for hours/ and when at long last I found the surly warden/ there was really nothing at all that could be done./The houses, the doors were all the same...
...In 1964--the time of the first NORC study--72 percent of the American Catholics went to church every week...
...This is not the only antithesis Coover establishes: The Public Burning is a studied attempt at a kind of dialectical fiction, a conscious aping of schizophrenias handed down from the likes of Hawthorne and Melville...
...He argues that the treatment of the temple and sacrifices in the epistle to the Hebrews could be written after 70 only if the author used conscious literary devices to conteal his knowledge of the end of temple, priesthood and liturgy--a catastrophe which would have strengthened his argument...
...The media are no better...
...Only two of his plays, The Broken Pitcher and The Kaetchen o/ Heilbronn, were performed in his own lifetime...
...The play ends with the acquittal of Prince Friedrich from his condemnation to execution and his union with Nathalie, while the dramatist's life, as we have seen, ended with precisely the opposite form of union...
...In The Public Burning, patterns, myths, symbols, and folklore are Coover's stock-in-trade and they make it a peculiarly American book...
...To Bloom, Stevens is, as I have suggested, a grudging transcendentalist struggling against his true fathers in order t o usurp their priority...
...R. is too well established as a scholar to be ignored...
...One of his theses---that Christian faith and practice have become alienated from the historical Jesus along cultic, dogmatic and institutional fines --rings true to a feminist perspective...
...A widely used work of general introduction, the English translation of Feine-BehmKiimmel, runs to 384 pages without the bibliography...
...it is on that ground, finally, that I would recommend Stevens and censure Bloom...
...What is the secret behind this achievement...
...The state of marriage, the role of class in America, the growing indifference to murder, the secularization of religion...
...Among the most impressive are '`The Marquise of O---," "Michael Kohlas" and "The Earthquake in Chile...
Vol. 104 • October 1977 • No. 22
