Literary Places
Vellucci, Dennis
Katherine Mansfield, the central fig- later career (only five years separated tion from the fraudulent and ruthless ure of this group, was closely connected The Necessity of...
...After all, Napoleon 1530) is the...
...Believing herself divinely inspired to write Uncle Tom's Cabin, Stowe intended her book, Deedy writes, as "a message of peace and sua- JL School of Theology sion that Southerners might respond to by St...
...changes as the culture changes...
...His styleand intellectual entanglements of his John Deedy conversational, always personal but Andrews & McMeel, $12.95, 312 pp...
...it is an historical say such a thing, but his work floes make forgotten or have never clearly recog- phenomenon, and consequently it moral certainty seem a lot less attainable...
...trial state might be the greatest threat to The emotional life as well as the rational We must, of course, understand these the survival of other life-worlds, it is still consciousness of people who eat com- changes and the ways structural develthe only social pattern thus far capable of munally, taking meat with their fingers opments are mirrored inpersonality recognizing and systemically recording from the same plate and wine from the growth before we can be truly responsithe variety of human forms...
...He was an expert all understanding...
...For the first half of the sketches on twentieth century figures as were manifested in each of their homes, twentieth...
...Tom's Cabin (phenomenally popular in • PROCESS THEOLOGY FOCUS its time, selling 10,000 copies the first Bernard Loomer...
...John's University/Collegeville voluntarily manumitting their slaves...
...The victim of church cen- clusion is singularly appropriate...
...The first from his contemporaries...
...Carswell has made some valuable dis=coveries among the private papers o vation and concentrated emotion...
...But are we really to say that the relativist, nonetheless gives substance to people in our society are molded more shame that rises when we recognize in the claim that earlier moments of our deliberately, how the coercion they exert ourselves something of our animal nahistory actually represent forms of life as on each other is more intense and the ture, the shame that accompanies our radically different from our own and as demand for good behavior, more empha- judgment of My-Lai and the Gulag, is no inaccessible as any primitive society: our tic...
...There he trained five boys who developed a suc- more than its title"-a guide to the liter- chapter shared purposes and themes cessful tumbling act and eventually per- ary shrines of the Northeast where once among the creators of American literaformed on national TV...
...Beatrice which enabled him to bear his dark fits of very beginning of my meeting her, but gassed herself and her pet mouse twenty depression...
...And clearly that her flaws...
...He describes the lived those who helped create a literature ture who collectively embody what boys, what their tarIe meant to them, and that was distinctly American-Paine, might be identified as an American spirit...
...In The Civilizing Pro- of embarrassment is higher, the structure is often to demystify and to devalue cess, Norbert Elias, who is himself no of the ego, different...
...First pubUdzen, $15, 310 pp...
...Process Theology Perspectives: Love, Power, and Social week of publication and 305,000 the first Reconception...
...zation and the efficiency of the nuclear family as an instrument of social control have limited the diversity of the less What is humane behavior...
...it is Emerson's key to the when he went bail bond for Jefferson Leaves of Grass and Walden, or to divine and Thoreau's key to self- Davis-his ideological opposite-who specific contemporary political issues, discovery...
...Bernard Lee, "Propositions of God: A Process Sacramentolyear) provoked a considerably more vio- ogy...
...it figures, in varying degrees, had been in prison awaiting trial for, two most notably the abolition of slavery...
...MN 56321 timely mission, Uncle Tom's Cabin, 16 March 1979: 153 The other figure who stands out sorship for his radical reconciliation of prohibiting certain behavior (facts about seems, at first glance, an unlikely candi- religion with science, Teilhard remained hygiene, for example) come long after date...
...A more dis- same cup...
...Harper & Row, 1977...
...We make a friendship with it-we, Occasionally the similarities are sur- butes the timelessness of Leaves of Grass in a manner ally ourselves to it for life...
...This detail, precise phrasing, delicate obser- missionary tone, the mannered precis- regimen killed her in less than six weeks...
...She has put herself up admired and distrusted each other, in Russian matters when events like the before herself-judged herself and cut fought bitterly, coming to blows and Diaghilev Ballet and the 1917 Revolu- out the bad...
...suspected) though radically different from our own, social regulation (though as one fifteenth might best be kept secret...
...Katherine Mansfield, the central fig- later career (only five years separated tion from the fraudulent and ruthless ure of this group, was closely connected The Necessity of Communism from The Gurdjieff...
...Future faculty include Shubert Ogden, David Griffin, Lewis Ford...
...The following book should have been never indulgent-and his easy, informal included in the Brotherhood Books List of scholarship make for a remarkable jourMarch 2. Dennis Vellucci ney...
...His candor should not seem odd, for ing in that it does explain why we behave these things were not the objects of as we do (or at least how we come to SINCE even primitive cultures promote shame they are for us today...
...for a book dealing with writers in loyal to his church and patient with his we have learned to be embarrassed and America...
...lent response...
...temperament than Henry David Thoreau young man"-than for his accomplishHardly an egalitarian, Irving despised "as philosophical ecologist . . . as ments as editor and publisher (Twain, crowds, was contemptuous of what he champion of blacks and Indians . . . as Longfellow, Harte, Dickens and Karl regarded as "inferior breeds" and com- witness to principle...
...10.00 OHN DEEDY begins the preface to is somewhat extraneous to Deedy's purThe author, a professional acrobat, J Literary Places: A Guided Pilgrim- pose and is a subject he wisely ignores, gave up his career in 1953 to become a age, New York and New England with there emerge from the concise biogsocial worker in a Pueto Rican neighbor- the modest claim that his book is "no raphies that are the substance of each hood on New York's West Side...
...young, energetic, burst- took shape and grew-there are brief lives, for example-and the way these ing of muscle...
...Marx all appeared in the pages of his plained mightily about "the 'disagree- Perhaps the single trait that unites the Tribune), and as labor union supporter, able beasts' with whom he once had to greatest number of America's literary abolitionist and presidential candidate...
...clever but not creative...
...She is the lectual and capable editor, who had a butes to Katherine from Dorothy Brett only one whose fame rests securely on crippling strain of mysticism and was (her friend and Murry's lover) and from her literary work...
...Elias shows how them...
...Though the Foreign Writers Remembered," Deedy mindedness...
...Cooper's vain, tic and democratic slogans...
...The Tumbleweeds: Somersaulting Up While the notion of national character and Out of the City Streets, by Frederick Johnson...
...rise of national consciousness) has of our own culture for a mud-hut in the how to behave, when the grown-up was led to the radical transformation of the Amazon, and, though the modem indus- much less distinguishable from the child...
...these writers made their homesprofessing to believe what one does not Uncle Tom's Cabin lacks the timeless Chappaqua, Sunnyside, Amherst, Walbelieve") recurs in Thoreau...
...ily approachable, organic whole we which, to our standards, are embarras- This leads to the major problem raised naively assume it to be...
...Life in the behave as we do...
...homogeneous and regulated cultures out of which ours has grown...
...the devoted Kot, which emphasize that Katherine acknowledged that Orage S. S. Koteliansky, a Jeremiah from the Katherine died courageously just as she had taught her to think and to write...
...Her finest stories present a In Point Counter Point Huxley ex- noxious odors of the beasts (a traditional quintessential event, and contain subtle coriated Murry's style-"the dignified Caucasian cure for tuberculosis...
...Few of us, Elias takes us back to those periods in growing centralization of state power and however, would abandon the advantages our history when adults had to be taught the...
...Erasmus speaks of many group uses to distinguish itself from other rule more effective by imposing a unithings that have since his day become social strata...
...Paine's quality of, say, Leaves of Grass, which den...
...I think it an invaluable adgion") re-appears in Emerson ("I have tysburg Address is in American his- vantage to be born and brought up in the often thought that in order to be a good tory...
...14 and ville, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, are passed from one generation to up) Longfellow, Dickinson, Twain, etc...
...in the first place...
...ME CIRUM 1111 PBOCE=i unspeakable and of many others that are The Civilizing Process is an account of Norbert Elias now taken for granted...
...by which a change in social structure (the among various ways of life...
...If I could John Middleton Murry, the brilliant despite their intelligence, were capable write, I could show you simply and editor of Rhythm, the Athenaeum and the of astounding failures of judgment...
...To show the genesis of norms one of us at all...
...I thank God I was born on the dismissal of organized religion ("The Christopher Morley called "as important banks of the Hudson," wrote Washingworld is my country, to do good my reli- a work in American literature as the Get- ton Irving...
...More re- Of the 37 men and women profiled in "upper-class proclivities" alienated him cently, in a personalist age, Leaves of Literary Places, two stand out...
...In his splendid chapter on Whit- neighborhood of some grand and noble minister, it is -necessary to leave the man ("the champion of American intel- object in Nature-a river, a lake, a mounministry...
...the extent of her suffering I realised only years later...
...Irving, who Grass is the expression for the free spirit is Horace Greeley, the most authentic wrote the stories that became part of that resides in the individual But American folk figure in Deedy's collecAmerican folklore during his 17 years in no nineteenth century writer, in Deedy's tion...
...I do not suggest that Elias would process, the stages of which we have or divinely given...
...He built a platform for her in to the others as disciple, rival, wife and Necessity of Pacifism...
...The vague aspirations to an century, Leaves of Grass was the articu- nineteenth century figures-those who American aristocracy that Cooper, Irving lation of the philosophy of an expan- contributed to America's identity as it and Twain harbored in their personal sionist America...
...Reverence for to himself...
...It is also disturbing in behavior and thought patterns which, middle ages was much less subject to that such things (as Plato...
...nized...
...homey, populist stories...
...what happened to each in later life...
...John's Because Stowe was so dedicated to her University, Collegeville...
...Katherine died of ary London...
...She understands beyond miscarriages, collaborated as writers, Murry and the Woolfs...
...his stables and ordered her to inhale the adored friend...
...have a structure and character ble for our actions or consciously conturbing kind of relativism, however, in- different from ours...
...And in the company of maturing individual must "in his short includes a long chapter on Pierre writers whose chief characteristics were history pass once more through some of Teilhard de Chardin, who spent his last self-reliance, intellectual independence the processes that his society has years in New York and is buried in and reverence for nature, Teilhard's in- traversed in its long history," democratiPoughkeepsie...
...But in his final section, "Some Jesuit superiors despite their narrow- repelled by that behavior...
...a prime representative...
...pioneers is a reverence for the natural Though an "erratic prophet" naive Other writers had in common a com- world...
...In volume II, are no less rational, we can easily fall century manual of etiquette observes, it, scheduled to appear in translation later prey to a facile relativism which denies is unseemly to blow one's nose into the this year, Elias explains the mechanism that there are qualitative differences tablecloth...
...human personality and its emotional life...
...Carswell motes that all five figures, a few months before her death...
...were due to that Adelphi and author of books on Swift, it was Orage's attraction to mystical doc- terrible unhappiness when an individual Blake and Keats, is now mainly remem- trines, combined with Murry's ineptitude human being, realizing his difference, is bered as the treacherous friend of Law- and Kot's passion for all things Russian, made every moment, by everything, to rence and the charming but irresponsible which impelled Katherine to seek salva- see his loneliness...
...lectual independence"), Deedy attri- tain...
...Today, Greeley is more celebrated Spain, believed, like Cooper, that writ- view, had more a twentieth century for his famous advice-"Go West, ing was a "gentleman's profession...
...prising and belie the egalitarianism one to its malleability: "For the nineteenth While Deedy deals mostly with expects...
...SUMMER PROGRAM, JUNE 14 - JULY 27, 1979 Simon Legree's New England • Graduate studies in liturgy, theology, religious education, and spirituality...
...Brett wrote in 1922: "One loves came from a similar colonial Gorky, and as the friend and collaborator her passionately, because it is impossible background, were bisexual, suffered in this work with Katherine, Lawrence, to do otherwise...
...share a sea passage...
...He can write how we got here from there...
...She is ion, the high-minded huffiness"-in the an intensely visual artist who expresses pathetically memorable figure of Burlap...
...pivot of this entertaining and cause initially they are the practices one thought that he was simply making his scholarly work...
...Fewer barriers are by Elias's research: Just what is humane even more likely, Erasmus) might not be erected between bodies, the threshhold behavior...
...Carswell delineates Murry's instinctive sense of perGuidebook to the American spirit sonal advantage, his pleasure in selfcondemnation, his capacity to attribute LITERARY PLACES: Literary Places is more than a travel exhalted motives to base actions, his A GUIDED PILGRIMAGE, NEW YORK AND book, for Deedy is not only a guide, but paralyzing incapacity to deal with NEW ENGLAND an accomplished writer with broad literKatherine's disease, and the emotional ary and scholarly interests...
...Their world is con- struct a society which fosters humane sists that our own culture is not the read- ditioned by relationships and conduct behavior...
...And after her death Kot, scattering the beads of their necklaces, tion aroused enthusiastic interest in liter- who remained essentially alone, despite and ended tragically...
...Infidelity does not consist in "transformed in time from an object of nature is further reflected in the places believing or disbelieving...
...Of in the work of Cooper, Irving, Melville, years, and effectively ruined his own the latter group, Harriet Beecher Stowe is Hawthorne, Longfellow and Bronson chances of ever being elected President...
...Rational justifications for form code of law on the territories he Commonweal: 154...
...character through symbols, atmosphere Like Orage, Murry was a self-made intel- Koteliansky, including two moving triand poetic evocations of mood...
...of relations between the sexes, of spit- The book is engrossing and even liberataoorgo Ellard ting...
...Modes of Perhaps that's not so bad, but it is imporErasmus's text on the social education speech, emotional and behavioral pat- tant to distinguish the genesis of an action of boys (De Civilimte Morum Puerilium, terns become acceptable, says Elias, be- from its significance...
...Leaves became democra- well: Edith Wharton ("the diarist of a particularly Twain's ostentatious manor cy's testament through Whitman's al- dying American aristocracy"), Willa in Hartford-are ironic in light of their most encyclopedic formulation of patrio- Cather, Robert Frost, Eugene O'Neill...
...background notwithstanding, Uncle • Special one-week workshops in liturgy and religious education...
...more than a by-product of social condiculture is the result of an unregulated But "good behavior" is not naturally tioning...
...without embarrassment of the bodily lished in German in 1939, it has only functions, of breaking wind, of nudity, recently gotten the attention it deserves...
...husband of Katherine...
...But another: Thomas Paine's articulation of Commonweal: 152 self-reliance ("It is necessary to the hap- Deedy observes, has suffered at the Alcott, America's most impractical but piness of man that he be mentally faithful hands of history, its protagonist being ardent Utopian dreamer...
...He heightened this authority his many friends, perceived: "Her divituberculosis at age 34 in Gurdjieff's Insti- with an honorable and upright character, sion and `secret sorrow' I felt from the tute at Fontainebleau in 1923...
...Nature is at the center of the enough to embrace any fad, Greeley mitment either to poilosophies of life that poetry of writers as disparate as Whitman demonstrated a selfless humanitarianism found literary expression in works like and Dickinson...
...Both Ukraine, is best known as the translator was coming into her full powers as a Katherine and Beatrice looked alike, of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov and writer...
...it consists in compassion to a symbol of contempt...
...Contact, Director of Graduate Students, School of Theology, St...
...A Cooper, Irving, Poe, Hawthorne, Mel- Characteristic preferences and prejudices warm and moving success story...
...Beethoven (and sing, if not disgusting...
Vol. 106 • March 1979 • No. 5
