Appendix B

English Composition (1928, 1931-33)

Fall 1928	Answer the question: ‘What Ideals of Life Do You find in “Les Misérables?”’ (As reprinted in the high school magazine, “The Helios,” p. 14.)
13 November 1931	Benet’s “John Brown’s Body”—What It Means to Me (As submitted in English A-1)
21 November 1931	About a Girl Who is Worth Knowing for Other Reasons than her Being a Girl (As submitted in English A-1)
27 November 1931	Samuel Johnson (As submitted in English A-1)
4 December 1931	Looking Backward at Seventeen (Written Some Years Hence) (As submitted in English A-1)
20 January 1932	City Limits (As submitted in English A-1)
Spring 1933 (?)	The Younger Married Set (As submitted in English 31)
Spring 1933 (?)	End of the First Movement (As submitted in English 31)
16 October 1934	Fascism for Beginners (As submitted in English 5)
20 October 1934	Travels in Arabia Desert (As submitted in English 5)
30 October (& 13 November) 1934	Young Man to his Father (As submitted in English 5)
10 November 1934	A Note on Jazz (As submitted in English 5)
12 & 25 March 1935	Incident in the Life of Jim (As submitted in English 5)

The Ideals I Find For Life In Victor Hugo’s “Les Miserables”

Throughout the life of the human race, in the continual struggle against circumstances, great epics are lived among the common place and degraded.  “Les Miserables”, as Victor Hugo calls them, are found in city and country.  Some of them, with high ideals, lie great lives; some of them, with false ideals, fall.  They are not “the masses”; they are individuals, confronted with the many problems of life. Collectively they make up society; individually, they mean little to society.  But everyone, no matter how poor or degraded, has divinity in him that influences him throughout his life.   The gifted pen of Victor Hugo has brought out this great soul of the crowd in a masterpiece, “Les Miserables”.  There, portrayed by people much like ourselves, are our great ideals for life:  faith, self sacrifice, and love.

Faith produces courage and patience in the face of danger and misfortune.  Faith in the cause of the Republicans brings little Gavroche to death , but he with a song on his lips.  Faith in the power of God’s love impels the Bishop to open his doors to a dangerous convict, when other doors are barred, and thus to reveal a new life to Jean Valjean.  The memory of this act helps Jean Valjean in his struggle with conscience.  This faith makes him renounce his position in the world and return to the hardships of the galleys to save a man whom he know not .

Self-sacrifice, which appears throughout the story, is found in both love and faith, but it is something more.  Eponine sacrifices herself to save the life of Marius though he scorns her.  Enjolras and his band, knowing the result, proudly sacrifice themselves for their ideal.  Jean Valjean risks his life and his standing in the world to rescue old Fauchelevant, his bitter enemy, and saves Marius, who has destroyed his happiness, to restore the happiness of Cosette.

Of all these ideals the greatest, which appears in many guises, is love.  Unselfish love for Marius redeems Eponine.  Upon mother love homes and nations are built.  Such love is born Cosette by Fantine.  Love embodies mercy, pity, and kindness.  Jean Valjean, never thinking of revenge, spares Javert, his implacable pursuer.  He spends much of his time in Paris, in deeds of kindness in the poorer quarters of the city.  It is Divine Love that inspires the good Bishop to give the soul of Jean Valjean to God.  He looks everywhere for good and finds it, in the soul of a desperate convict.  With this Divine Love, inspired by the Bishop, as an ideal, Jean Valjean goes on through life, helped at his hardest moments, and finally comes to an understanding of that supreme, self-sacrificing love, the love of Christ.  This love sustains him in his last moments, as he looks at a crucifix and exclaims, “The Great Martyr! ”.

These three then, faith, self-sacrifice, and love are the ideals that we find for our lives in “Les Miserables”, and “the greatest of these is love”.

Benet’s “John Brown’s Body” --What It Means To Me

I can still see my grandfather, a pleasant, decrepit old gentleman with a big mustache and twinkling eyes, as he sat in the sunny bay window and sang to a little boy on his knee.  There were things that he sang and many stories he used to tell, about the wilderness that was Michigan in his boyhood, the dirty, half civilized Indians, the wonderful woods, the corduroy roads, the “sugaring down” of the maple sap in the spring time, the foot races, the first circus that ever came to Grand Rapids; but most of all, he used to delight that little boy with stories of the Civil War and southern songs. 

The little boy is older now, and his grandfather is dead, but the strains of music and the fragments of story still prevail.  If he sits very quietly in the window-seat at twilight and looks over the countryside were his family has lived for over a hundred years, he can still hear the music of “Kingdom Comin’” strumming a faint chord on his memory.

“Say darkeys, hab you seen de massa

Wid de muffstash on his face?

Go long de road some time dis mornin’

Like he gwine to leab de place?”

Then a half forgotten flourish of the hand and a far off smile, a little pause, and the verse continues.

“He seen a smoke way up de ribber

Whar de Linkum gun boats lay;

He took his hat an’ lef’ berry stubben,

An’ I spec he’s run a--w-a-y.”

The parlor clock strikes, very slowly--it has been there a long time and must be getting tired.  Still more faintly the verse goes on.

“De massa run?  ha, ha!

De darkey stay?  ho, ho!

It mus’ be now de kingdom comin’

An’ de year ob Jubi-lo-lo.”

My grandfather was in the Civil War.  He went through four years of constant riding, of sleeping occasionally in blankets steamed with the sweat of horses, of eating hardtack softened in black coffee.  He was a surgeon, and learned to cut mercilessly the arms and legs of half dead men.  After the war, he came back to be a country doctor and live on his land and be looked up to by the countryfolk.  He had been a part of the war, hardly understanding it, just doing what he was told.

From him I heard stories of the Wilderness, of Trevelyn Court House, of Winchester.  In Chapters twenty and twenty-one of my history book I found the story of the war, the political significance of this battle and that foreign policy.  I read two or three lives of Lincoln.  Yet somehow it was all a dream, something far removed from the present.  The civil War had been finished in 1865.  Its place was in history books, in the long halls of Southern manors, and in the memories of old soldiers.

Then last summer I read Stephen Vincent Benet’s “John Brown’s Body.”  Seventy years had passed; and a man had at last created the America of the Civil war-- Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, Georgia and Kansas-- with the life like colors of the trees and the look of its fields and the talk of its people.  The shadow was there too, the black shadow of the storm cloud that had been gathering for more than a century before the war.  And the tempest was there, ad, finally, a hint of the peace that was to follow the subsiding of the tempest.

“Iron-filings scattered over a dusty

Map of crook-cornered states in yellow and blue.

Little, grouped male and female iron-fillings,

Scattered over a patchwork-quilt whose patches

Are the red-earth stuff of Georgia, the pine-bough

                   of Vermont.

Here you are clustered as thick as a clump of bees

In swarming time.  The clumps make cities and towns.

Here you are strewn at random, like single seeds

Lost out of the wind’s pocket.

But now, but now,

The thunderstone has falen on your map

And all the iron-fillings shiver and move

Under the grippings of that blinded force,

The cold pull of the ash-and-cinder star.

That is the poet’s conception of the war, and only the poet can describe war, and the utter lack of reason for war.  Politicians and historians give us facts and theories; they know the inevitability of an economic conflict; but in expressing what they know they lack the advantage of poetry.  It was not slavery alone that caused the war; it was not states’ rights that caused the war.  It was a force composed of these and something more, something which men who pretend to know must try to explain, but which the poet interprets in a happy metaphor, a phrase or two, or a picture.

John Brown and Beauregard and Grant and Davis and Lincoln and all those men whose names fing in our nation’s memory meant no more to the war than to the privates and the sergeants and the small-town politicians and the wives and children left behind.  A war is a maze that can never be solved; the only understanding of it must come from threading a few paths in the maze.   Men and women, traditions, and symbols give only a fragmental conception, and the only true one.

The story of “John Brown’s Body” is the story of a nation, distilled from legend and from history and from Negro songs and from political speeches.  The oneness of a diverse people unifies it; the beauty of poetic understanding gathers in it all the truth and untruth, all the color and drabness, all the joy and sorrow, all the greatness and pettiness of America.

All parts of it are necessary to the whole--it is as impossible to quote effectively from it as to catch in a box a breath of wind, but I cannot refrain from giving here a few stanzas from the invocation, hoping that they will still retain some of their original life.

“American muse, whose strong and diverse heart

So many men have tried to understand

But only made it smaller with their art,

Because you are as various as your land,

“As mountainous-deep, as flowered with blue rivers,

Thirsty with deserts, buried under snows,

As native as the shape of Navajo quivers,

As native, too, as the sea-voyaged rose.

“Swift runner, never captured or subdued,

Seven-branched elk beside the mountain stream,

That half a hundred hunters have pursued

But never matched their bullets with the dream,

“Where the great huntsmen failed, I set my sorry

And mortal snare for your immortal quarry.

“You are the buffalo-ghost, the bronch-ghost

With dollar-silver in your saddle-horn,

With cowboys riding in from Painted Post,

The Indian arrow in the Indian corn,

“And you are the clipped velvet of the lawns

Where Shropshire grows from Massachusetts sods,

The grey Maine rocks--and the war-painted dawns

That break above the Garden of the Gods.”

This invocation is not in vain.  From the Prelude, When the mate on the slave ship seems to hear

“Black, shining seeds, robbed from the black king’s

store house,

Falling and falling on American earth

With light, inexorable patter and fall--”

to the swift-sweeping coda where the final form of the poem is rounded out with a question of the future--

“Out of john Brown’s strong sinews the tall

skyscrapers grow,

Out of his heart the chanting buildings rise,

Rivet and girder, motor and dynamo,

Pillar of smoke by day and fire by night,

The steel-faced cities reaching at the skies,

The whole enormous and rotating cage

Hung with hard jewels of electric light--”

we see Change moving on to it’s inevitable and distant end; pride and regret are the lot of the nation’s past, pride and hope, of its future.  American history, brief in comparison to all history, takes on a meaning; the struggle of American life, incomprehensible to us who see it all around us and engulfing us, is invested with purpose.

To Jake Diefer, stolid Pennsylvanian, whose heart was in his farm, the war meant being away from his land, it meant an empty sleeve, it meant the hiring of a negro.  To that Negro, Spade, the war meant freedom.  To Clay Wingate and Sally Appleton, remnants of the old South, it meant beginning life over again.  To Jack Ellyat and Melora Vilas it meant the hardship and satisfying independence of a farm in the West.  The war brought down the master and freed the slave, though the master remained a gentleman, and the slave was still a servant.  The North won--and unchained the south to challenge it’s supremacy.  Grant became respected;  Lee became a legend and a hero;  Lincoln was reverenced, and Lincoln was killed.  Chaos took the place of order, and chaos gradually became a new order.

If anything as fragile as a poem can capture that indefinable spirit that makes America one, and if words can help us to appreciate our common heritage--”John Brown’s Body,” gathering into one great vision everything that is American, can accomplish those things.  It is the epic of a people satirized by a Dreiser and flattered by a Grandi, respected and scorned for its New York, its Cinema, it’s radio, its automobiles, its newspapers, and its schools, which it has created but can neither understand nor control, greater than, yet still inferior to the nations which gave it birth--a people that has much to learn and is slowly learning that.

One member of that people, I am linked to the past by ties unbreakable, and to the future by ties not yet forged; in me, tradition and the future will rest for a brief time, and nothing has made me as aware of that trust as “John Brown’s Body.”

About A Girl Who Is Worth Knowing

For Other Than Her Being A Girl

You could pass her on the street with scarcely a second thought, for she has never acquired that self-conscious, yet unconcerned air of the pretty girl who knows she is pretty and who is chic without ceasing to appear a little ingenuous.  She is not quite tall enough; her tiny steps are too quick; her dresses are never noticeably modish; her air is usually distant.  She is really deceiving you anyway: she is not walking down the street--she is listening to tune from the concert last night, perhaps thinking over a book she read last winter, perhaps looking at the clouds, if there are any, and at the blue sky, if there aren’t, or, for all you know, she maybe slyly peering at the dress in the shop window over on the other side of the street.

So when you say “good morning,” or whatever you do say, allow her just a moment to return from the clouds, or from that shop window.  You will be rewarded, for she will smile a greeting which sys s plainly as words could, “Why, I never realized what an awfully nice day it is...”  I think this is perhaps because she smiles with her eyes--her eyes are very charming ones, though I can’t remember just what color they are.

To me she is very disturbing person.  Not that we don’t get along famously; it is only that we differ.  Lewis Carroll charms her as much as Gilbert Chesterton; I am not certain that I understand either of them.  She thinks in poetry; I think in exposition.  She has read; I would like to read.  At eighteen, she is a woman, and at seventeen, I am still very much a boy.

As a hostess at an informal party, t be sure, she is far from perfect; her arrangements are thoughtful and her demeanor charming, but an  indefinite something is lacking,  As she puts it, her fault is that ‘she has such a good time that she half forgets she is the hostess.  To be among people, not to have hem about her, is her pleasure.

She is really at her best, it must be confessed, on those evenings which are characterized by trips to the pantry and refrigerator, by a radio, by a wood fire which has been thoughtfully provided, and by the grandfather clock’s melodious tones, slowly adding to their number till it is once more one.  There are girls that scintillate in the ballroom and those that make a house party a success, but their company is quite inadequate for an evening at home.  Camilla can keep a conversation alive while the embers of the fire are dying into white ashes--she is indeed a person whom it is very pleasant to know.