So Long, See You Tomorrow
Letter, Robert A.
into that darkness" of rebirth and belong- ing. That was the authentic voice of con- version, and by those standards Cowley was hardly a convert at all. Nor were most of the prominent writers...
...DANIEL T. ROttERS is associate professor of history at the University of Wisconsin...
...we ask...
...delega- tion which returned the crown to Hun- gary and noted for the record that I took on that assignment with the full approval of church authorities in Hungary and at the Vatican...
...In a book critical of Marxism...
...Nor were most of the prominent writers drawn into the Communist orbit...
...But Mr...
...If Catholic liberal misbehavior unless one thinks that, in making this preposterc also spends fifty percent of his words on statement, he is accurately reflecting h Catholic conservative misbehavior...
...The memory of making love lay like a ban- dage across the front of his mind, day and night...
...We are given the particulars in the opening pages• The style is unadorned, reportorial...
...say--as has been their innocent custom throughout their brief friendship--"So long, see you tomorrow...
...centered to hold much place for the New Deal or offer much hope that anything would come of its frenetic motions...
...Edmund Wilson dreamed of "taking Communism away from the Communists...
...Hehir, who is the most modest of men, I would say that, from the point of view of the American bishops and church authorities at the Vat- ican, he is one of the most highly re- spected priests in the United States...
...Maxwell "do it...
...He stills feels guilty whenever he thinks of Cletus...
...Cowley's New Republic columns in the early thirties were, in con- trast, full of premonitions of short-run disaster, and he quietly passed on the proletarian novels to someone fuller of the faith than he to review...
...Then he wants to know more-- what it is like to be that very man, that man's wife, the lover himself...
...If Mr...
...Maxwell has his reasons...
...Lay Contemplative Co_m__m_unity For people who are looking for a simple, catholic, lifestyle...
...Ishe seriously suggesting, then, that Fr...
...He could not resist chiding Granville Hicks, a far more orthodox Marxian critic than he in the thirties, for behaving like a football coach at a pep- rally, hoarsely insisting that "we simply can't lose...
...What he has given us are the shat- tered pieces of experience that drove him toward the long view and that in the angry and puzzled thirties had, some-how, to be comprehended: the grim, midnight ride across the Kentucky state line...
...COMMONWEAL, 232 Madison Ave., NYC 10016...
...By suppressing an unneces-sary element of suspense, he can explore the nature of death, the confusions of childhood, the quality--the very texture-- of desire...
...He wants to know what it is like to be a child whose father will come to murder a man...
...In Hitchcock's personal view of the matt all charity, I can only say that that's sheer I can only say that with friends a nonsense...
...Early one morning while milking his cow, Lloyd Wilson is shot...
...It is here in a bold imaginative leap that the narrator takes himself out of his story and moves back in time to a point before the murder...
...That is to say, what- ever he may think about the U.S.C.C., it was utterly reprehensible on his part to smear the rephation of a Bryan Hehir- one of the most competent, most dedi- cated, and profoundly rtligious Ameri- can Catholics, clerical ar lay, whom I have ever been privileged to meet...
...60625...
...Whether after a while he and his mother were able to look at each other without embarrassment...
...Hehir must be charged with following a double standard because he favored the return of the crown but that the highest church authorities in Hungary and at the Vatican, who also favored i~s return, are not to be charged with the same offense...
...and fifty-fifty...
...What mattered to the Cowleys and the Wilsons far more than catharsis was comprehension...
...Once the details of the crime are presented, the narrator tells us about his childhood, of his mother's death in the influenza epidemic of 1918...
...Mr...
...Cletus's family moves away from town...
...The long view heightened the gaudy, sideshow aspects of the New Deal, particularly when measured against the real drama, somber and foreboding, being played out in Ger- many, Spain, and Russia...
...It is the sight of those shoes that is so moving...
...Maxwell's greatest concern has al- ways been with how people manage to survive...
...It goes without saying that Professor Hitchcock is perfectly free to criticize that segment of the church bureaucracy known as the united States Catholic Conference (even though, to the best of my knowledge, he has never really studied the organization), but all is not fair in love and war...
...I recommend it enthusiastically and without quali- fication as themost impressive work of its kind in the English -MSGR...
...On the one hand, he says that there is "valid evidence" for these accusations and also, presumably, for Hitchcock's al-most compulsive tendency to interpret other people's conscious and subcon- scious motives...
...The narrator's father remarries, gets a promotion and moves his family to Chicago...
...Ed- mund Wilson, sent to report Franklin Roosevelt's installation into the presi- dency, could not dispel from the front of his mind the zanily dressed lodge mem- bers, in purple fezzes and golden cloaks, who made up the tag end of the inaugural parade...
...He is lying on his left side, in the fetal position, as if he is trying to get out of this world by the way he came into it...
...I seriously doubt, in this connection, that either Professor Hitchcock or Mr...
...Wilson had been having an affair with Cletus's mother for many months...
...I didn't speak...
...If to liken Communism to a kind of primitive church catches a part of its appeal, it badly understates how strongly the party appealed to the intellect and, still more, how desperately much there was to explain in the bewil- dering events of the 1930s...
...Bryan Hehir if they knew the man they were talking about...
...One doesn't have to be a apologists like himself, Hitchca mathematician to understand the differ- doesn't need any enemies or critics...
...Purcell blandly replies that this in no way disproves Hitchcock's gratuitous accusation against Fr...
...I also wonder about him, about what happened to him...
...Ultimately the long view foundered on those same distant events...
...The bullet had entered his body just above the heart...
...Let me also point out that if Hitchcock and Purcell really think that they can divide and conquer by trying to play off Bryan Hehir against his religious superiors, they are badly mistaken...
...Whether he had as lonely a time as I did when he first moved to Chicago...
...because it is a helpful contributipn to discussionon the trinitarian understanding of God...
...Box 2649, Chicago, 60690...
...But though he writes well and powerfully of the crime, he does not want it to dominate his other II concerns...
...Maxwell's story were about no- thing more than the murder, his presenta- tion of this information so early on might have proved ruinous...
...Write: P.O...
...The'story is told by a narrator looking back on events that occurred fifty years earlier...
...But it isn't only my failure that I think about...
...It was as if he had risen from the dead...
...Cletus, staying at his Aunt Jenny's house, fears that his father will return, while fearing as well that he will not...
...Years pass...
...PurceIl says, ag, Mr...
...GEORGE G. HIGGINS, U.S...
...Classified payable with order...
...Summer Institutes The University of Notre Dame has ar- ranged for a number of institutes from June 23 - August 9. Write the Center for Pastoral and Social Ministry, Notre Dame, Indiana, 46556, for this summer's schedule...
...Married Priests CORPUS-National Association Re-signed/Married Priests...
...Maxwell's near perfect memoir Ancestors...
...The double bed in the front room is made up and Cletus is lying on it, with his shoes extending over the side so they won't dirty the spread...
...Washington, D.C., bristling with sabers and machine guns, and haggard Army veterans talking of revolution...
...And this offering, like the story of Swann, is a long meditation on desire...
...The narrator returns at the end of the story...
...We just kept on walking until we had passed each other...
...Purcell would be so mean-spirited in their criticism of a Fr...
...a, non-Western voice presents the Trinity as a paradigm of what community can be in today's world...
...A book of importance for us in the West because it is an authentic and relevant voice of the Orthodox Churchof South India...
...These are superbly, told stories...
...This is the small town Middle West of They Came Like Swallows, the world which haunted the urban setting of The Folded Leaf and dominated Mr...
...Maxwelrs people speak and think in simple terms but the words burn...
...Editor and translator...
...That way, people won't peer in and see what she sees whenever she closes her eyes, and sometimes when they are wide open...
...He is .also contributing editor to The Progressive...
...Purcell says that my review of without blinking an eye, that it's a f Hitchcock's book "makes the assump- that "in the seventies the Left is f tion one can't attack contemporary mally, verbally schismatic...
...Whether the disillusionment came with the Moscow trials, the Nazi-Soviet Pact, or the dis- memberment of Poland, the Russian dream sooner or later turned to ashes, the long view failed, and the result was a feeling of emptiness and a raft of quiet resignations...
...and because it is a foundation of social ethics without sec~darisrn on trinitarian grounds and much more radical than our radicals:' -JURGEN MOLTMANN THEOLOGY OF A CLASSLESS SOCIETY by Arthur F. McGovern "This carefully documented study is a model of objective scholarship...
...The "long view" was too EuropeanREVIEWERS FATHER PETER CHIRICO, S.S., author of Infal-libility: the Crossroads of Doctrine, is cur- rently theologian-in-residence for the Archdiocese of Seattle...
...When he does not, there is no sense of loss...
...More horrifying still, "the mur-derer had cut off the dead man's ear with a razor and carried it away with him...
...The technique is reminiscent of Proust...
...They are not an inner view of political commitment, but, in the end, they are the heart of the matter...
...63c, six times...
...He is silent here about those last bitter years of broken friendships and angry recriminations at the end of the Simple terms, burning words thirties...
...Mr...
...monthly in advance for more than three times...
...If so, the logic of his argument com-pletely escapes me...
...The narrator, now without a mother, is a lonely child, and a woman in the corn9 May 1980:283 Classified RATES: 70c a word, one time...
...In its place he gives us a much more telling moment...
...Correspondence (Continued from page 258) never behind the Iron Curtain...
...John McKenzie, Pheme Perkins, Reginald Fuller, Daniel Daley...
...Maxwell's earlier works, this is familiar material...
...JOrlN JUDlS is associate editor of In These Times, the Socialist weekly newspaper pub- lished in Chicago...
...He provides no evidence, no proof, but simply, with- out blinking an eye, makes the flat state-ment quoted above and asks us to accept it as an article of faith...
...Mr...
...66c, three times...
...John Dos Passos talked of finding an ad man to put Marx across in genuinely American language...
...He will have to excuse me if, on the basis of thirty-six years experience at U.S.C.C., I simply ence between ninety-nine percent to c refuse to do so...
...The gestures and the words build until we approach the moment when the murder will be committed...
...In commenting on this statement, I reported that I was a member of the U.S...
...Write: Director...
...Aunt Jenny has pulled the shades to the sill...
...Cowley held on through the end of the decade, much longer than most...
...If interested, write: Michael Rinaldini, 16 Henrietta St., apt...
...The narrator is overjoyed to have a friend at last, though Cletus is much less enthusiastic, feeling that he was wrongly pressed into duty...
...3, Asheville, N.C...
...Catholicconference "The most thorough, penetrating, clear-headed, and practical treatment I have seen of thiscomplex and highly important issue, the relation of Marxism to Christianity.An indispensable -LOYD D. EASTON...
...Courage, Mr...
...It is here that Cletus reappears...
...It seems the author has needlessly delayed the telling of his story...
...munity sends her son, Cletus, to play with him...
...The narrator, like Marcel imagin- ing Swann pursuing Odette, writes of events he cannot possibly have witnes- sed...
...And whether the series of events that started with the murder of Lloyd Wilson-- whether all that finally began to seem less real, more like something he dreamed, so that instead of being stuck there he could go on and by the grace of God lead his own life, undestroyed by what was not his doing...
...The Dream of the Golden Moun- tains concludes in 1936, in what Cowley calls "High Thirties," the euphoric time of the Popular Front, when "the price of groceries, a small merchant bankrupt in the next block, a love affair broken off, •. [the] revolts in Spain, a new factory in the Urals, [and ] an obscure battle in the interior of China" seemed to hold to- gether in a single historical pattern...
...And after that there was no way that I could not have done it...
...Translation Translating English to Chinese...
...Will Mr...
...The narrator offers these'pages in retribution for the sin of not speaking in that school corridor and it is one of the great gestures of kindness in all literature...
...He is found "sitting on a stool, his eyes open...
...and Cowley, too, was an outsider almost by reflex...
...Biblical Institute Trinity College, Burlington, Vermont 05401, June 22-27...
...For those who have read Mr...
...Pur- cell...
...and when one came upon it, Cowley remembers, its explanatory effect was "overwhelm- ing...
...ROBERT LE/TER has contributed to The Na- tion, Commentary, and Film Heritage, among other journals...
...Box 25123, Chicago, Ill...
...If you really think that church au- thorities in Hungary and at the Vatican Commonweal: 284 were wrong in supporting the return of the crown, why not say so...
...Cowley's reticence here and elsewhere will disappoint, but it is fit- ting...
...At fLrSt this shift in the narrative is a bit disconcerting...
...He tries to rest...
...On the other hand, he says that "Monsignor Higgins surely un- derestimates the difficulty of getting 'proof about motives when one is in the establishment and has buddies to caver for him...
...Communism offered, as no rival political movement did, a "long view" of history, in which the death rattles of capitalism and ac-celerating international crises fell into a sweeping historical pattern...
...Writings of the Young Marx ORBIS BOOKS Maryknoll,NY 10545 9 May 1980: 285...
...The boys do not see one another again...
...He doesn't say who is covering for whom or on what issues...
...But a certain sense of camaraderie grows bet- ween them until the night when they...
...One day during the first week or so of school as I was hurrying along a corridor that was lined with metal lockers I saw Cletus Smith coming toward me...
...28801...
...I SO 10Ng, SEE YOU TONORR0W William Maxwefl Knoll, $7.95, 135 pp Robert A. Leiter ~ 1 HE CENTRAL EVENT in William Maxwell's new work is a violent murder...
...Whether he was spared the sight of his father's drowned body...
...It is C|etus's father who kills Lloyd Wilson...
...Hehir...
...Fifteen days after Lloyd Wilson's mur-der, Cletus's father is found dead at the bottom of Deer Creek gravel pit, an appa- rent suicide from a bullet wound to the head...
...Purcell wants to have it both ways-wants to have his cake and eat it-when it comes to providing ''proof" or "evidence" of Hitchcock's innumer- able accusations against the "bureauc- racy" and the members of its staff...
...He didn't speak...
...At the risk of embarrassingFr...
...the panacea salesmen clustered at The New Republic' s door;, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hart Crane edging toward self-destruction...
Vol. 107 • May 1980 • No. 9
