BOOKS

...The phrase insisted on recurring as I read this slender (128 pp...

...To Survive would have made an equally apt title for Panov's autobiography, for the story conveys poignantly one gifted man's efforts---sub tle, forthright, devious, implacable--to stand up for his life as much as for his art...

...How far down in Latin American society do these values trickle...

...In a brief introduction Vawter defends his adoption of the classical documentary hypothesis, which received its definitive formulation exactly one hundred years ago in Wellhausen's Prolegomena, b~ offers little comment on recent studies which question the critical orthodoxy and suggest alternative models...

...The patriarchal histories are concerned with the destinies of the Arab as well as the Jewish branches of the Semitic peoples, and Vaster is correct in detecting an ecumenical intent in the way the story is told...

...149 pp.] What is an urban university...

...Agreeing with some insights in Marie Bonaparte's Freudian study of Poe h'om the 1930s, he writes that "Sadism and necrophilia are the motive power ,behind most of the powerful stories, Commonweal: 637 and the repression of these instincts seems the most reasonable explanation of Poe's attitude toward sex...

...He dissipates his wealth ostentatiously even if it means going withou~ the necessities at home...

...He lists specifically Spain, Portugal, Italy, Latin America...

...This ~nmle---and for the moment we are talking about the tip Commonweal: 635 of the iceberg--goes to the university to learn politics in action...

...Even if few today believe that Max Weber and R. H. Ta~vney ~vrote the last words on the impact of Calvin on what has become popularly known as the Protestant ethic, these thinkers undoubtedly did contribute to an understanding of the complicated elements that coalesce in the capitalist ~nentality...

...Whether in the name of equality or excellence, no educational philosophy should ignore these nonquantifiable realities or allow its ideals, like states' rights in the South, to become code words propping up racial inequality...

...According to this superbly researched, well written book, the American urban university is an ivory tower monument to the agrarian-Calvinist myth standing in the midst of America's worst problems...

...Doctoral candidates, here is read meat for your dissertations...

...The value of his work lies primarily in his ability to synthesize mainline exegetical opinion and presem the results in a clear, non-technical way free of scholarly jargon...

...To survive they need 'friends, and to make and keep friends they must exhibit as many as possible of the indices of those on top...

...As Vawter notes in his Preface, it was clearly out of the question simply to revise the book to incorporate the results of scholarship on Genesis over the intervening ~wenty years or so...

...I believe that at least half of the hemisphere's 400 million people are effectively untouched by them, because they live at a level where the only operative goal is survival...

...That the Latin American man manipulated theology to buttress his value system, just as the capitalist man manipulated Calvin to buttress his, I do not question...

...If he were living today, he might still be considered unfit for such polite recognition...

...It will not escape the alert reader that in several respects Genesis is at the roots of the political conflict in the Middle East today...

...Tbe workman wilt carry his tools in a briefcase and wear a collar and tie on the bus...

...It is logical because it is calculated to achieve the goals that correspond to the values of Latin American male...

...He spends endless hours in coffee shops or clubs with ,friends...

...Sensibly, Mr...

...But he misleads when he offers this type as distinctive of the Catholic vis&-vis the Protestant...

...Here was a paradox, an elegant Romantic with all the studied civilRies of a Southern Gentleman, and a writer of grotesque, alarming, sadistic tales...

...Indeed, Richard Morse in his Introduction to The Public Man recognizes as .much when he notes that the neo-Thomism of Su~rez "was no mere residual legacy ,but was tailored to ~he political sociology of early modern Spain...

...Genesis is, after all, only the first part of a larger literary corpus which came to be divided into five books under circumstances as yet inadequately explained...

...Ir is surprising, therefore, how seldom commentators take seriously the organizing and structuring principles in the work as a whole as they set about explaining individual passages...

...The Irish peasant doesn't sleep late because he doesn't have the drive to work...

...Coming when it did, Vawter's book provided welcome guidance together with John L. McKenzie's The Two-Edged Sword which appeared in the same year...

...Berube then proceeds to cast doubt on several cherished but unproven educational assumptions...

...and "to a lesser extent," Hungary, Ireland, France, French Canad, a, Austria, Romania and Poland...

...Government grants combined with tax-exempt status mean that it is a rare university that doesn't get at least 50 percent of its operating revenue from the taxpayer, either directly or indirectly...

...He sleeps late because it takes to 11 a.m...

...Perhaps Mr...

...And this repression, possibly, explains Poe's obsession with horror, violence, decay, gloomy castles and crypts and vaults...

...In no way does it detract from the value of a work which combines up-to-das.e scholarship with clarity and readability...

...I also agree with Dealy that this life style is ,logical, certainly no less logical than the life styte that expresses the spirit of capitalism...

...In a series of separate chapters fol,lowing the biography, Mr...

...To me at least it makes more sense to see the "Protestant" virtues of hard work, frugality and the rest, as characteristic of the central, dominant capitalist countries...

...Zionist f a s c i s t s . . , bastard"), describes the good work done abroad in his behalf by such diverse types as Clive Barnes, Laurence Olivier, and John Cranko, and generally paints such a harrowing picture of abuse, attempted poisoning, prison, and blackmail that it's easy to forgive the "fairytale ending" coloration Panov gives to his and Galya's landing in Tel Aviv...

...Had Dealy .been less ambitious and confined himself to identifying the "public man" as characteristic of Latin American society, produced by its sociohistoric experience and legiti29 September 1978:676 matedNas the capitalist man has been --by sycophantic theologians, his book could hdp students to understand a phase of history that is near its end...

...His critic is a Poe scholar, Daniel Hoffman, whose viewpoint Mr...

...In his clear and straightforward narrative, he invites the reader to see connections between the heroines of his fiction, those pale, tormented creatures who are sometimes buried alive, and the mother who died when he was two, and the sickly, passive, madonna-like Virginia: he idealized them all...

...Symons, wr.iting for "general readers" cannot satisfy the defensive spec~al4sts who understandably have career interests to protect...

...It is true that some of the characteristics of the .Irish peasant fit Dealy's construct...

...They are among the worst...

...Symons has recently been ~ttacked in .the New York Times Book Review for liking his Poe "unexamgood...

...He was constantly and dismally poor, and he died in 1849 at the age of 40...

...Though he must use his hands, he can rise a notch in the public gaze by having his shoes shined at a street stand...

...Feltrinelli, Milan, 1976...

...On Genesis, then, presems a straightforward commentary on the first book of the Bible based on the New American version, dividing it into Origins (chap,ters 1-11), the Saga of Abraham (1225), the Saga of Jacob (25-36) and the Story of Joseph (37-50...

...Poe has, in recent decades, inspired volumes of literary criticfsm and psychoanalytic scrutiny that are sometimes so energetic and ingenious that they spill into disbelief...

...Valery Panov, of course, rose to stardom at Leningrad's august Kirov Ballet during the Sixties, chafed under state demands as he became aware of urrbreachable limits on his and others' intellectual and creative lives, applied for the right to emigrate to Israel with his dancer wife Gaiya, and--after harassment by the KGB and other Soviet terror organs which led to an international outcry--fmally made it out of Russia...

...He disdains manual work...

...But they have, after all, given us many Poes, and Mr...

...And who is more deeply immersed in millennial Catholic culture than the industrious, frugal, self-reliant Polish peasant...

...Panov's writing (through and with Feifer) never rises above the level of a heartfelt translation, but the realities depicted are harsh and specific enough on their own...

...The values of those on top inevitably percolate to all strata of society with which they have politico-economic oontact...

...The Tell T a l e H e a r t : The L i f e and Works of Edgar A l l a n Poe JULIAN SYMONS Harper & Row, $10.50 [259 pp.] JOHN i~bUDAa There have been many Edgar Allan .poes...

...There is no copyright in ideas...

...There is no longer a neat distinction in values between "a Catholic" and "a Protestant," least of all in Latin America...

...Ideally one would consult all three which, taken together, provide a judicious blend of Jewish, Catholic and" Lutheran perspectives...

...Doctoral 'candidates in search of a dissertation subject are welcome...

...Where Dealy loses me, however, is when he sees the "public man" as a product of a Catholic ethos and consequently identifiable as the dominant type in all countries "that have remained .monolithicalty Catholic in culture since the Renaissance...

...How can he imagine that the first Christians, who died because "we must obey God rather than man," regarded "a policy of obedience, if not subservience, to civil authority as a religious obligation...

...Instead, Berube cites several studies which show that a good education is an effect of economic success, not a cause...

...And while theology is hardly Dealy's ,forte, such as he exhibits is of the old style...

...STEVE LAWSON THE URBAN UNIVERSITY IN AMERICA, by Maurice R. Berube, Greenwood Press, $7.50...

...That was just thirteen years after the encyclical Divino Al~lante Spiritu gave the green light, or at least a flashing red light, to Catholic exegetes, and six years after Humani Generis which offered instruction on such matters as evolution and the his,toricity of biblical narrative...

...moves on to a chilling recapitulation of his denunciation by his own peers in dance ("Jew . . _9 animal _9 scum...

...And in his last years, overtaken by delusions and bouts of wild behavior, he could no longer ward off the demons of madness...

...He says early that the scarcity of opportunities fuels a false conflict over who is more equal...

...Symons takes sides...

...The book's last quarter begins with .casual reprimands, veiled threats...

...for the night dew to ev~orate and let him get to work with his field crops...

...One of the benefits of the theology of Bbe~ation as ~racti~ed by Catholics and Protestants in common is that it starts from existentia~ reality, as opposed to the older approach from a~sumption into which reality is squeezed...

...He assures us, for example, that in Catholic countries public |ife lacks "virtues," whereas Protestant religious vatues remain pervasive even when a Protestant society ,has been secularized...

...Most scholars, Vawter among them, assume a horizontal division into sources or traditions (the JEDP of the documentary hypothesis) rather than a vertical division into independent books...

...It does not signal a new departure in interpretation but alludes to an earlier study of.the author under the title A Path through Genesis published in 1956...

...but fascinating study subititled "an interpretation of Latin American and other Catholic countries...

...The two notable exceptions to this history of exclusion were the Morrill Act which created the land-grant colleges around the time of the Civil War, and the GI Bill after World War II...

...Along the way there are copious summaries of new roles essayed, teachers and friends gained and lost, artistic events weaving in and out of daily lives...

...If this seems too harsh an indictment, just look at the students' reading scores in the public schools closest to these institutions of so-called higher learning...

...Because he is wary of overinterpretation, Mr...

...Like the best biographers today, he keeps a smooth and cautious course between verifiable and plausible events...

...To DANCE, by Valery Panov, with George Fei/er, Knop/, $15, [385 pp.] Connections between art and ideology are always fascinating, and in the light of the souring detente between the U.S...

...But the post-hoe argument is dangerous even here...

...Grosso modo, I find his description of the Latin American male (the female is simply absent) clear, concise and accurate...

...Symons charts the jagged ups and downs of ,Poe's reputation and reviews both the critical stances toward the work and the "psychoanalytic approach" to the man, separa, ting the strengths from the stupidities, as ,he perceives them...

...He comes late for appointments or skips them...

...It should not be forgotten that a g~od education is a tool for enjoyment and a means of increasing human knowledge...

...the "Catholic," "Islamic," "Hindu," "Buddhist," "Animistic" virtues of cultivating friends, getting drunk, passing the time, as characteristic Of all precapitalist societies in which man did not have effective control of nature, and also of the dominated or peripheral countries of the capitalist world in which people's decisions are dictated by the dominant capitalist centers...

...And his Scripture exegesis is of e piece...

...The GIs were entitled to some reward for a difficult job well done...

...The Pstb|Je Mast GLEN CAUDILL DEALY U. o/ Massachusetts, $10 (128 pp.] GAILY Mael~DIN Way back when all wisdom snuggled comfortably in a couple of dozen Scholastic tags, I learned that ixihil probat qui nimis probat...

...and in summer he doesn't leave the fields until .light fades at or after 10 p.m...

...By now Catholics have joined the mainstream of academic biblical studies and most no longer consider it necessary to expend their energies mediating between scholarly hypothesis and the somewhat oracular utterances of the Pontifical Biblical Commission...

...Universities have usually been prep schools for privilege...

...Among commentaries of comparable length it stands somewhere between Speiser's Anchor Bible volume which is strong on background information and yon Pad's contribution to the Old Testament Library series which is strongly theological...

...To Dance comes as a vivid, if grim, reminder that totalitarian systems seem virtually incompatible with most human or artistic rights...

...Maurice Berube documents the universities' failure to respond to the needs of black people from many different perspectives...

...The land-grant colleges were supposed to improve the lives of farmers through experimentation in agricultural technology...

...Julian Symons, a poet and mystery writer--it was Poe who originated detective fiction-does not claim to present original research, drawing on a century of exhaustive Poe scholarship...

...and the U.S.S.R...

...Ever since Chaucer wrote about the towniegownie conflict, we have been questioning the university's role in society...

...It would be greedy to demand that Panov the dancer and human being be equalled by Panov the biographer...

...And he certainly has not followed the Anglo-American machination in Italy during and since World War H, now documented from official records in Oil Americani in Italia (Faenza and Fini...

...While this may prove to be too blandly irenic for professional biblical scholars, it should be valuable to the lay reader prepared to work through the book of Genesis at the author's rather leisurely pace...

...His reputation, no less intriguing than his life, reflects a range of attitudes toward madness, alcoholism, poverty, creative genius and highly eccentric behavior...

...The logical complement to their studies is a .parallel or dialectical evaloation of the Catholic ethic, and that is the challenge Dealy has accepted or the temptation to which he has succumbed...

...In the private schools in 1926, that study says, 47 percent of the Yale students, 55 percent of Washington and Lee students, and 68 percent of Williams students had parents who earned more than $10,000 a year, well above the poverty level even by the inflated standards of 1978...

...Symons finds "too personal, too egotis.tical...

...Inevitably, the book takes us from the young Panov's birth in White Russia just before World War H, through his adolescent years at the Ballet Academy in Leningrad when he trained with the country's greatest coaches, up to success and well-deserved fame as the jeune premier at the Kirov...

...He gives less importance, however, to the land of Israel as an organizing theme in the Pentateuch as a whole, the promise to the ancestors as legitimating .the conquest of a later day, the elegant introduction of the theme of delay in honoring the promise by means of which the conneotion is made, and the function of the laws as specifying the conditions under which the land might be securely held...

...I for one find that throughout his engaging biography, he is on the side of common sense...

...a time, in other words, when for Catholics Genesis conjured up debates about myth and history, the propriety of acknowledging literary forms in the Bible, monogenism versus polygenism, and the like...

...In consequence, in Latin America, the middle sectors and even the day laborers seek, motatis mutandis, the same goals...

...This is not an "unexamined" biography...

...As with the late 29 September 1978:638 O'Neill, sincerity and reportage transmuted through pain compensate for final artistry...

...JOSHUA LEINSDORF Commonweal: 639...

...He apparently never heard of Watergate...

...As the kind of alcoholic who is undone by small amounts of drink, he was sometimes too drunk to read his poems to waiting audiences and failed to appear at the White House for a meeting with President Tyler...

...If the National Book Award had been offered in the puritanical America of his day, he would have been denied it...

...Berube's proposal for urban-grant universities overlooks the fact that there really are no private universities any more...

...Yet neither Morse nor Dealy sees that this obiter dictum alters radically the cause-effect relationship...

...The most widespread is that success in school is a means of economic advancement...

...If this is a criticism, it is addressed not so much to Vawter as to the current manner of writing commentaries in general...

...For him, success means to he identified as a public man, to have a plethora of friends whose support he can command, to be identified in the community as wielding power...

...Symons has resisted the extremes of interpretation, preferring to be suggestive rather than domestic...

...He married his cousin Virginia when she was 14, possibly 13, and he loved her chastely, perhaps because he was impotent, or perhaps he willfully repressed his sexuality...

...A study conducted by Ora Reynolds in the mid 1920s showed that 28 percent of the students' fathers had attended college compared to 40 percent today...

...The radical gulf today is between the values shared by reactionary Catholics and Protestants, and those shared by progressive, future-seeking Catholics and Protestants...

...Poe himself relished li.terary wars,, and as the biography makes clear, he fought them fiercely, even unfairly, and in his era they seemed far more vicious and colorful than in ours...

...Both of these movements required changing traditional admission standards and the creation of new curricula in order to serve new functions in society...