AMERICAN HEMISPHERE - A THIRD WORLD
Naft, Stephen
WRITERS AND WRITING THE NEW LEADER LITERARY SECTION American Hemisphere - A Third World Reviewed by STEPHEN NAFT WE OF THE AMERICAS. By Carlos Davila. New York: Ziff-Davis Publishing Co. 264...
...Davila admits that Latin America is largely responsible for the present economic dislocation of this hemisphere, as it defeated James G. Blaine's plan in the First Pan-American Conference of 1899 for an InterAmerican Bank, a Monetary Union and Customs Union of all the republics...
...ROBERT GRAVES' WORKS combine fantasy, erudition, and a concern for ritual, magic, ghosts, witches, and goddesses...
...The Goddess also exists in three age-phases—nymph, witch, and , hag—and the women in the storySapphire, Sally, and Erica—each typify one of these aspects...
...France and England, Davila points | out, are pouring into Africa as much 'money as they receive from the Marshall Plan...
...264 pp...
...3.50...
...He believes instead that only ''economic conutfementatkm and integration" .can meet the Challenge of powerful autarchies Which are already organized in the rest of the world, and which threaten the economic existence ,of this hemisphere...
...As Edward watches, the threads of the story come together, and the components' of the ritual drama symbolize the conflict of psychic forces within himself...
...its insistence that only by a system of democracy among the nations can democracy within the nations be established...
...A future war would deprive the United States of all these sources...
...Graves' thesis is that all life ro-' sides within a female principle, to which man must submit in order to attain his own stature...
...More recently he served as Chile's representative in UNRRA and on the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations...
...Society is organized around the worship of the Goddess Mari...
...Even then, the...
...He pleads for- a hemispheric organization for mutual self-preservation...
...that Latin America -has been...
...she gives birth to him, grants him sexual pleasure, and presides at his death...
...Custom and courtesy are the keynotes of human behavior...
...He sees the solution of our impasse in the building of our own hemisphere markets, in promoting Latin American^ industrial and agricultural development and production and greater interchange of North and South American products instead of giving preference to goods and products from the Old World...
...Edward VennThomks, a -poet of our "Late Christian Era," is evoked by incantation into New Crete, where conditions resemble those...
...John Shepley Jb a Harvard gradual* new completing his first novel...
...Office of Inter-American Affairs...
...Innumerable books and articles have bean published about the need for economic and political cooperation and integration of the Americas, but this book tells us why such integration has not been obtained before and how it may be .attained in our time...
...He emerges the devoted servant of the Goddess,and filled with her holy ecstasy, calls down destruction .on New Crete...
...This also affords him the opportunity-for some biting comment on our present civilization which has led the publishers/ and some reviewers, to describe the book as a satire on a Utopia...
...This, according to Davila, must in case of another war endanger 'the standard of living of the United States and the entire economic structure of Latin America...
...He was Chilean ambassador to the United States from 1920 to 1931 and Provisional President of ihis country during the revolutionary period of the early thirties...
...built around the Western European empires., With their managed economies, cheap colonial labor, food and raw materials",''they may, Davila believes, expose the NewWprld to .the danger of what Brooks Adam...
...that the Eurafrican centrally planned, government managed colonial economies are no threat to the New World...
...On its part, the United States has forgotten thevlessons of the last war when, after Pearl Harbor, this country was cut off from many of its sources of supply for vital strategic materials...
...neutrality 4n the wars of independence of the Latin American countries, the breaking up of Latin America instead of the creation of a Latin American federation, the lack of economic integration of this hemisphere, and the limited use of its natural resources for the welfare of all the peoples of this continent...
...By Robert Graves...
...From the very start Davila warns the reader that he is going to find the book in»violent disagreement with many established concepts ihat have been made • respectable through unchallenged repetition...
...Poets, of the magician estate, are the legislators, and their women are in charge of evocatory magic and rep' resent the Goddess in her aspect of witch...
...After a series of swiftly-paced adventures — a harmless war-game between two villages, some mysterious deaths, and a few interviews with the Goddess herself in the gui.se of capricious and tempestuous Erica — Edward, chosen instrument for the ruin of New Crete, is confronted with a re-enactment of the~arftient mysteries of the sacrificial k'lng...
...Finally, in The White Goddess, Graves defined woman, the eternal Muse, as the source of poetic inspiration, and all true poetry as a celebration of her mysteries...
...Although this deification of the most -discordant female qualifies may have, to say the least, the weaknesses of'misplaced emphnsis, one cannot deny the stubborn and courageous vision with which .Graves .persists in his adoration...
...the party most favored 'in her sgogomic interchanges with this country...
...Here are some of them: That the strategic security frontier of the United (States is either on the Rhine, or am .the Mediterranean, the Elbe or the Pyrennees—but always in Europe...
...3.00...
...another the' monolithic Communistcontrolled Eastern European-North Asiatic world, and the third the co^ lonial world...
...this continent is necessary lor the "survival of the whole hemisphere...
...He predicts that the Eurafrican and Eurasian cartels, which in the past have ruined the Latin American rubber, cocoa and quinine industries, will now wipe out foreign markets for the other eleven products on which the whole economy of Latin America is based...
...In less climactic portions of the book, Graves exercises his gift for playfulness and lightness" of tone, which only occasionally leads him into dangerous gllbness and questionable taste...
...whims and hidden intentions of the Triple Goddess...
...Watch the Worthwind Rise projects into the future some thousands of years hence, a "New Crete," within which he assembles his ideas on society, poetry, and sex...
...Davila foresees mot two but three worlds: one, the American hemisphere...
...Davila pleads for no loans for Latin America...
...Man functions only as her agent...
...Woman Into Goddess Reviewed by JOHN SHEPLEY WATCH THE NORTHWIND RISE...
...WHILE the Monroe Doctrine was a success, PanAmericanism has failed, the author enumerates the mistakes of PanAmericanism as well as its virtues...
...prevailing in Minoan times...
...Here the author's fine craftsmanship becomes, fully apparent...
...Davila is in favor of a world federation organized on a regional basis, but he warns of catastrophe for all nations concerned, including the United States, unless we proceed immediately to organize the New World economically, politically and militarily as an integrated, self-sufficient and selfprotected unit...
...He is now publisher and editor of Ahe Editors Press Service, widely used by the most important newspapers in South America...
...CONTENDING THAT...
...Among the defeats, he mentions U.S...
...Graves' perennial theme, the nature of woman, was first struck in the Claudius books, where the lives of the men, just and unjust, were sacrificed to the purposes and caprices of power-ridden women...
...Stephen Haft was Director of Research, U.8...
...King Jesus recounted the struggle between the male and female principles...
...New York: Creative Age Press...
...K * * « J>AVILA THEN PROCEEDS TO demolish these concepts with a barrage of facts and statistics on Western Hemisphere production, investments and trade, in support of his theory of interAmerican regional security...
...that Europe is the United States' best customer...
...Count Belisarius reiterated the idea in a later period of history, and in Hercules, My Shipmate Graves returned to the mythological source: the matriarchal society...
...On the qredit side of Pan-Americanism he mentions its unwavering adhesion to the principle of equality of all nations, small and large...
...In, New Crete, power is vested in woman...
...The atory unfolds with the plausibility of a dream...
...There are five classes, or estates, for which individuals qualify by their natural talents: captains, recorders, commons, servants, and magicians...
...290 pages...
...u.'Ttt .the New World can attempt to .-integrate the world before integrating this hemisphere...
...Yet, to read it in this spirit-, is to confuse technique and presentation with content, and to be misled into thinking that Graves has relinquished his devoted concern with, birth, love,, death, and creation,' and gone off into the lesser profundities of social ridicule...
...that only tunder international free 'trade can the United States be prosperous...
...It is from this consistent body of ideas that Graves has conceived an original fantasy...
...With the exception of .Sapphire, they combine their seductive charms with considerable malignancy and cruelty...
...He is the Author of "Questions to Communists...
...its dogma that no state has the right to intervene in the internal and external affairs of another state...
...The king, a member of the commons, rules by virtue of his marriage to the queen, and he is periodically killed with appropriate ritual...
...outcome is always subject to the...
...We are again buying such materials from colonial areas and nonAmerican cartels...
...Though the author is not sure that there will he a shooting war, he feels that we may lose the economic and ideological war now in progress if we place all emphasis on military preparations—our Maginot Line...
...anticipated when he wrote that "to be undersold is often more fatal to a population than to the conquered...
...A .statesman well known in both Americas...
...therefore the immediate development of them on...
...Claiming that the present different economic levels in Anglo-Saxon America and Latin America are the result of .the breakup of the Spanish Latin American empire into many small nations divided by political and economic rivalries, the author points out that a unified empire was built in the North which -brought about prosperity lor its inhabitants, while the Southern half of the'hemisphere bogged down in poverty amidst plenty...
...its juridical organization, unique in history, which imposes the solution of disputes and conflicts among the nations of this hemisphere by means of arbitration and conciliation...
...Carlos Davila has written an Impressive and provocative plea for hemisphere unity now...
...THIS BOOK IS AO PACKED with startling statements and information that it tan be classified as a condensation of'five books in one...
Vol. 32 • April 1949 • No. 16
