ISSUES | fall 1982

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“Saturn”
“The Partisans and the S.S.”

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“A Poem from the Edge of America”
“Still Here”

“Porchlights”
“The Last Couples Leaving the Green Dolphin Bar”

“An Interview with Red Riding Hood, Now No Longer Little”
“The Wolf’s Postscript to ‘Little Red Riding Hood'”

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“Holidays”
“Fear”

A colleague of mine has recently published a book which he calls Criticism in the Wilderness. I am not surprised at his title. He might well have decided to call it Criticism on the Battlefield, for ours is a day in which the critics, notoriously a splenetic lot at best, have at each other with hammer and tongs.

In the spring of 1982, under the auspices of the Paul Anthony Brick Lecture Committee, we were able to interview Professor Brooks. Much to our delight, what began as a highly formal occasion — with tapes and microphones strategically placed chairs — swiftly developed into a relaed and far-ranging discussion of matters launched by the topic of his three lectures: the contemporary state of literary criticism.

In 1915 Ezra Pound was surveying the field of literary journals after the New York lawyer John Quinn offered to help him finance a magazine. The following letter from Pound to Quinn shows how shrewdly Pound assessed the contemporary scene.

I find that I’m difficult to satisfy in terms of my own stories. I think I have destroyed many more than I have ever submitted.

One thing, at least, was clear: he hadn’t given those long gray years in the candy store for this. Something had gone wrong; somewhere in the project to horde nickels and dimes over years of cokes, banana splits, and chewing gum there was a fraud.

When touring the Ozarks in ’06 the Govenor learned of a spa, famed for its medicianl baths, and went there. He was greeted by the host and quickly introduced to an array of clay cones, from which gurgled a soapy mud heavily charged with alkali and radium.

“It wasn’t any one thing,”she says with an easy shrug. “It’s never just one thing. It was a whole lot of little things pulling me apart — just pulling me to the breaking point.”

When I knew him, everybody called him Ears (on account of the obvious), but his true name was Dorcey Eugene Wingo and he liked to speak of himself in the third person, his voice a mostly sing-song instrument of twang and nosework.

The bull was a red Hereford, named Job, we had owned only a week, or perhaps I should say that a week earlier Dad sold us further in debt to the Farmers and Merchants’ Bank.