ustxtxb_obs_1963_05_16_50_00016-00000_000.pdf

O’Neill does not give off cheap and easy affirmations. Only once does the mother, Mary, say, as a shadow of vague guilt crosses her face, “At least, I’ve loved you dearly, and done the best I couldunder the circumstances.” Throughout O’Neill makes’ it clear that the reason the family could go on was their love of one anothera love so fierce, yet so fitful, that in a drunk, Jamie tells his ailing brother to beware of him, because he has always been jealous of him and wanted him to fail. Jamie to Edmund : Remember I warned youfor your sake. Give me credit. Greater love hath no man than this, that he saveth his brother from himself. I find it inconceivable that Baylor banned this play because of the languagea damn, a hell, a goddam or two, a few references to whores. Yet I guess this was part of the cause of their reaction. I wonder to what extent they were upset also by the fact that the father and mother in the play were true, in their ways, to their Catholic faith. It is certain that by shutting down O’Neill’s play, Baylor said, and meant to say, to the community at large: “We are not a free college, we are a church college, and if this means we are third-rate, we would rather be third-rate than free.” If I were a Baylor student, I’d get the hell out. But, then, I wouldn’t be likely to be. ARECENT Reporter magazine contains a 14-page article by the Harvard nuclear strategist, Henry Kissinger, arguing that the United States should encourage Europe to develop and control its own nuclear weapons. Along with it the mail delivered to me that magazine’s form-letter request for my moral \(as intention of supporting such surrendered involvement in the suicidal pro 16 The Texas Observer liferation of nuclear weapons, nuclear nationalisms, and logical tits-for-tats realities of the strategic equation.” There is no real pressure in the Reporter for a turn toward responsible alternatives to this literal madness of weapons. I commend to our readers, not only Nation, Liberation, the Progressive, and New Republic, which do try to generate new thinking on the survival of the species in present times, but also a British publication, The CND Quarterly, published by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in London. In the issue just received here I have found much realistic thinking and information on the post-Cuban situation. People who present themselves as responsible to the public life are not, really, if they have not informed themselves on the new weapons of war and the vital arguments in foreign policy. Some time ago I suggested that Hiroshima, by John Hersey, and In Place of Folly, by Norman Cousins, were good books to start with. I do not see how any book could be more jarring morally than Hersey’s reportage from Hiroshima. Cousins, in his first three chapters, tells about then presents his case for a stronger U.N., metamorphosing into world government in control of the international weapons. I would add to the beginning list now Breakthrough to Peace, twelve views on the threat of thermonuclear extermination \(New Directions paperpeople overcome what one psychia-. trist, Jerome Frank, calls “insensitivity to the remote,” such as the remote fact that a single plane now carr1es more bomb-power than the power of all the bombs dropped during all the years of the second world war. I choose, quite at random, for one reason because it is opposite to what Rep. Hugh Parmer, Fort Worth, did say at a hearing on civil defense in the Texas capitol, \(that a Russian attack on strictly military targets in the U.S. would kill, from blast and heat, “five this excerpt from Frank’s essay in Breakthrough to Peace: We now talk of being able, through a massive civil defense program, to limit our casualties to ‘only five million dead’ and show no qualms at all about exterminating all of Russia. Such statements would have been unthinkable before the second world war, and probably even a decade ago. Again : . A few miles from me there is an accumulation of viruses, bacteria, and toxins more than sufficient to wipe out the human race several times over, yet it gives most of us not the slightest concern. ON A TRIP to South Texas I read a short new novel by the Texan, William A. Owens, Look to the River beleaguered journey from his rustic backwoods beginnings toward the gleaming Big City, Dallas. Set in .the Red River Valley, it is a good story, particularly, however, for boys; it is well told, and Owens has an authoritative touch when he is describing ,March winds or the migrations of the crows across the field the boy is tending, but the story line is somewhat too simple in its charm for adult readers who look, nowadays, for something less schematic. JAMES AGEE was a brilliant American writer of the thirties and forties. To make a living he came to terms with Henry Luce and his various magazines. In the interstices of this commitment, Agee managed to write a few things that were his own, but he never delivered his full strength to his work. Anxiety and suicidal despondency dogged him ; his Christianity and revulsion from materialism inclined him toward socialism, further alienating him from his society and his daily work \(. . . “the expedient corruption of living quietly shima deepened the pitch of his despair, for he saw no hope of avoiding a worldwide nuclear war. Weakening physically, his self-disgust choking him \(“I really deserve to have no and then he just died. All this is set out in a remarkable book, Letters of James Agee to Father Flye \(Braziller, believed “that the human race is incurably sick in more entangled ways than has ever been suspected.” By 1951 he believed that “Begetting a child is at least as serious an act as murder.” He started a life of Jesus in 1935, and never finished; he started a book on the atomic bomb in the forties, and never finished; he was too busy with Luce and the movies. Who was to blame? Luce and the movies, yes ; but Agee was most to blame, as he knew. R.D.