The Tennessean from Nashville, Tennessee • Page 106

10-G THE NASHVILLE TENNES5EAN, Sunday, Nov. 26, 1967 Nefertiti Author Outruns Scholar Reichswhr: Compliant Cranes Poetry Still Matter of Controversy Waters' jacket art for "Jesse Stuart: His Life and Works." cal question in Crane as in the poetry of Dylan Thomas, a writer who in many respects resembles Crane and who raises insistently the same question is not one which criticism is likely to resolve, depending as it does upon personal judgment. The important thing is to make sure what we are talking about. There must be no question-begging. The writer who says that Shelley is pure poetry as Mozart is pure music is arguing along the same lines as the hack reviewer who says that, "All lovers of poetry will welcome this new selection." Both statements are a form of intellectual bullying.

Since he is completely free of this tendency, Professor Lewis is an ideal advocate. He goes over the poem, he points out its felicities, he analyzes its meanings and attempts to clear up difficulties, and he renders a verdict. But the validity of the verdict, or the lack of it, in no way negates the virtues of the preceding analysis. PROFESSOR Lewis believes that "The Bridge" is Crane's central achievement, and he devotes more than 150 pages to an analysis of the poems in the cycle. He thinks that a misunderstanding of the nat-ture of "The Bridge," a misunderstanding for which the poet himself may have been largely responsible, has led critics to criticize the work for not possessing a kind of unity which the poet never intended for it to possess.

While I am not at all certain that Professor Lewis's high estimate of Crane's poetry will carry the day, I feel that Professor Lewis has made as valid a case for Crane's poetry as is likely to be made in the foreseeable future, and that many of his explications will eventually be accepted as In Hitlers THE GERMAN ARMY THE NAZI PARTY, 1933-1939. By Robert J. O'Neill. Heine-man. $8.50.

HITLER'S LAST GAMBLE: The Battle of the Bulge. By Jacques Nobecourt. Schocken. $8.95. Reviewed by DOLPH HONICKER First you set up a strong defense so the other side can't score.

Then you polish your offense. Or, if you are Gen-eralfeldmarschall Freiherr Maximilian von Weichs and you're recalling a Feb. 28, 1934 (dig the date, please) speech of Adolf Hitler, you write that: he was resolved to raise a people's army, built up on the Reichswehr, rigorously trained and equipped with the most modern weapons This new army would have to be ready for any defense purposes in five years, and after eight years, suitable also for attacking." The Fuhrer's timetable was slightly off, but it was the thought that counted. THE RULES of warfare (or defensefare) have changed little before or since Hitler. All weapons are classified as defensive weapons whether they be V-2 rockets over London, intermediate range ballistic missiles in Cuba or Crusader (what a beautiful name) jets over Hanoi.

The bureau-racy that expends 70 of the U.S. budget is called the Defense Department, not the War Department. Is this meant to imply an analogous relationship between the past and the present? Of course not. Mein Land mit Recht oder Unrecht. All statesmen believe that God is on their side.

The German generals who were successfully courted and led down the primrose path by Hitler were, almost to the man, good Catholics and good Protestants. And now new evidence indicates that those duped men should be acquitted of harboring independent plans for aggression before Hitler's assumption of the office of War Minister in 1938, says historian Robert J. O'Neill. Recht oder unrecht, right or wrong, Dr. O'Neill makes a good case up to a point.

INDEED. THE contingent plans drawn up by the German General Staff in the early 1930s were of a defensive nature on the whole. Their long-standing tradition of shunning politics helped play them into Hitler's hands. It's also true that the push into the Sudetenland and march into Austria, both sprinkled with rose petals, helped cut the ground from under the wavering generals' feet. But the word "nonpolitical" is a relative term, especially when applied to the German army.

Throughout its history the army had played politics indirectly by selling out as a hired gun at any right-wing Think, Reason at an Early Age Aggression? or conservative element that would promise to perpetuate its own high standing. Outside of Wilhelm Keitel and Alfred Jodl few high-ranking officers could stomach Hitler personally. But the more lucid points of his half-baked philosophy were not anathema to the General Staff. They would have preferred a Junker or a king to elucidate that philosophy for them, but the corporal is all they had. Not all blindly followed orders.

There were a handful, such as Ludwig Beck, who resigned rather than make plans for aggressive warfare. And there were later a smattering of others, personified by Claus von Stauffenberg, willing to risk their lives in a futile conspiracy to assassinate Hitler. THE POINT that Dr. O'Neill glosses over in his "acquittal" of the German General Staff is that the bulk of those generalsthough professing to be anti-Nazis and Hitler haters, particularly the much glamorized Gotthard Heinrici fought tenaciously to the bloody end for their Fuhrer and Fatherland. Otherwise, O'Neill's book Is most excellent with a storehouse of useful appendices, a full bibliography and several superb photographs never before published.

O'Neill is the first Australian regular serving officer to be awarded a Rhodes Scholarship (1960). Another excellent book, this one by a Frenchman, is Jacques Nobecourt's "Hitler's Last Gamble." In order to capture a wider American audience, the English-language edition has added the subtitle, "The Battle of the Bulge," which is a trifle dishonest since the Bastogne battle is not treated in any great detail. A more accurate subtitle would be "The Battle of the Ardennes." SURPRISINGLY enough, Gen. Dwight David Eisen-however, the Allied supreme commander, flows out of Nobecourt's pen smelling like a rose. Ike was a man who could "switch from patience to brutality" and was "by nature inclined to weigh the pros and cons," says the author.

"Ha was continuously asking for advice and, when given it, was hesitant to translate it into orders." However, his timidity indicated to Marshall, Roosevelt and Churchill "proof of a capacity for sober judgment of possibilities." Their decision to appoint Ike supreme commander, Nobecourt, adds, "was justified by events." Hitler's ability to play off his generals against his diplomats is marvelously depicted. To the generals he promised peace on his terms if they would hold out a little longer. To the diplomats he promised secret weapons that would strengthen their hand at the bargaining table. The battle of the Ardennes, a massive counterattack flowing around Bastogne and aimed at reaching Antwerp, was to provide the victory. But it was doomed to failure.

Hitler's Panzer troops had literally rim out of gas. on the early history of Middle Tennessee which comes from no other source. During the Civil War McFerrin served hard, long years as a chaplain with Hood's Army of Tennessee, sharing the cold, hunger and desperate dangers of Confederate soldiers. Perhaps even more important were his long years of service to the Methodist Publishing House. Not himself a bookish man, he understood how a publishing house ought to be run and he made it pay.

BISHOP Fitzgerald wrote a number of books, including "Sunset Views" and a life of T. O. Summers. We think this is perhaps his best. A perceptive biographer, with feeling for his subject and the power to move his readers, he makes one almost hear the commanding voice of J.

B. McFerrin, speaking forcefully and fearfully from the printed page. Nashville owes much to Methodists and Cumberland Presbyterians whose b-lished books preserve the city's religious heritage. This is one of the best. We think it is a $5 item, which can sometimes be found for less Considering its content of' good local history, plus flashes of inspiration, it's a very good buy.

Order Personalized Christmas Cards Now The Happiness House Book fir Art Shop Harding Mall Shopping Ctntir Eternally Beautiful SUN-QUEEN. By Emma L. Patterson. McKay. $5.50.

Reviewed by L. M. COLLINS Nefertiti stands alone. When a list of the world's most beautiful women is compiled, Nefertiti's name is first. Even a schoolboy knows her; he has seen again and again a print of the famous head of Nefertiti, the envied prize of the Staatliche Muscen Der Stiftung Preussischer Kultur-besitz, Berlin.

She was the golden girl of Ancient Egypt, that kingdom of fabulous pageantry in life and in death, as evidenced by the everlasting pyramids, the tombs, particularly King Tut's of recent excavation; of a wondrous court and unrivaled celebrations, the glory of which even the story of Moses and the lamentation and travail of his followers cannot diminish; and of a king who wanted peace and for his urgent wanting unwittingly nourishes fear and terrible plots, while worshipping one god, Aton, the sun. In "SUN QUEEN," the king, Akhnaton, is weakly strong and the girl -queen, chosen from a number of exquisite beauties, is strongly weak. In librarian Emma L. Patterson's Arabian Nights-like romance the vigor of her stories of the American Revolution, "Midnight Patriot" and "The World Turned Upside Down," is no longer the hallmark; her heart here is too timid, her emotion too relaxed, her tastes too easily satisfied. The times demand more of the stuff of life her ingredients are a stale part of the dust of excavation, of digging in the past.

What is freshly eternal, however, is Nefertiti's beauty, though a lovely ghost in the Patterson story now faintly, now shiningly haunting the pages through the episodes of Bek, chief royal sculptor, who, loving his queen, immortalizes that love in the famous head, Nefertiti, a lasting criterion for female loveliness even into the 20th century. not simply a matter of imitation of adult talk, although imitation plays a large part. In the process of learning words, children must also learn to classify and differentiate things and ideas, and when they begin to put words together they can and do figure out for themselves some very complex rules of grammar. Much more alarming than fascinating are Holt's observations of the ways in which a child's natural methods of learning are suppressed and stunted and the child himself is made uncertain and afraid by most of the formal methods of teaching. "How Children Learn" is a valuable book not only for educators, but also for parents who would like to know how to encourage the natural process of learning in their children.

John Holt has taught various subjects in both high school and elementary school for 15 years, giving him a good background in teaching and observing children. He is now a consultant at the Fayerweather Street School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and teaches summer school English in Boston. REVOLUTION IN LEARNING. The Years From Birth to Six. By Maya Pines.

Harper Row. $5.95. Every parent of preschool children faces the problem of nursery school or kindergarten with much confusion and uncertainty. The burning issues of academic development versus "social adjustment," kindergartens as opposed to Head Start, leave each parent groping for some concrete facts upon which to base his decisions concerning the education of his children. "Revolution in Learning" is a comprehensive survey of the tieid of preschool education that will be of great value to such parents, as well as to teachers and educators.

The "revolution" is the fact that within the last decade, public attention has been focused on the education of preschool children. A college education has become much more than a status symbol a necessity and parents feel the pressure to begin preparing their children for college as early as the age of three. What effect does such pressure have on a child's ability to learn? And will a child develop emotional problems as a result of being taught to JESSE STUART: HIS LIFE AND WORKS. By Everetta Love Blair. University of South Carolina Press.

$8.95. MR. GALLION'S SCHOOL. By Jesse Stuart. McGraw-Hill.

$5.95. Reviewed by CARL MAY Jesse Stuart's writing career has been so rich and varied that his critics must have felt compelled to delay additional judgments till they could read and assess his most recent works. Now at last, however, the first comprehensive study of his writings is in print and happily it is splendid. Yet the busy Mr. Stuart has a new novel published almost at the same time, and his most recent volume of short stories also has appeared since the writing of Dr.

Everetta Love Blair's critical study. So Dr. Blair finds herself in the position of perhaps needing to revise her book at any future date of her choosing. Nashvillians of course have known Jesse Stuart well and his brilliant career was to a large extent moulded by Donald Davidson, Robert Penn Warren and others at Vanderbilt University. His new novel and Dr.

Blair's study should be read together and it really doesn't matter which is read first, though a deeper appreciation of the new novel is likely if the analysis of his other novels has been read first. In "Mr. GaUion's School" Stuart has written a sequel to his autobiographical novel about school teaching "The Thread That Runs So True." In it George Gallion, a thinly disguised Jesse Stuart, returns to teaching two years after suffering a severe heart attack. A consolidated high school in a Kentucky mountain county has become such an undisciplined place that only six teachers are willing to return to it to teach its 600 students. Gallion, against his wife's accepts the Job of principal and brings the school out of the kinks with read and write at the age of three? A FIERCE controversy rages in the United States over these and other questions, between the Establishment, the people trained in traditional methods of early-childhood education, and the "innovators," who include sociologists, linguists, psychologists, and computer technicians.

Both sides generally reply to the layman's questions with a hodgepodge of technical language and cliches. Basically, the Establishment emphasizes the child's emotional and social development, i 1 the innovators are concerned with cognitive, or intellectual growth. This book contains the first clear, non-technical descriptions of the wide variety of programs for early childhood education, including Head Start, the Montessori Schools, O. K. Moore's "talking typewriter," Pitman's Initial Training Alphabet, and day care centers, as well as regular kindergarten and nursery schools.

The author also discusses the work of many pioneers and experimentors in education, such as Jean Piaget, J. McV. Hunt, Jerome Bruner, Dr. Martin Deutsch, Carl Bereiter and Siegfried Engel-mann. The work of Dr.

Susan Gray, at the Peabody Demonstration and Research Center for Early Education, is mentioned favorably as an optimistic study of the effects of early education. Dr. Gray is a recognized authority in this field. Maya Pines has a background in journalism and education, and has written many articles for national magazines. With two children of her own, she writes from the viewpoint of both parent and educator.

The NY Times Fiction The Confessions of Nat Turner, Styron. Topaz, Uris. The Gabriel Hounds, Stewart. The Chosen, Potok. Christy, Marshall.

The Arrangement, Kazan. The Night of Watching, Arnold. Rosemary's Baby, Levin. Night Falls on the City, Gain-ham. The President's Plane is Missing, Serling.

General "Our The Great Jew THE POETRY OF HART CRANE. By R. V. B. Lewis.

Princeton. $10. Reviewed by WILLIAM PARRILL. At a time when opinion is beginning to crystallize about much of the poetry of the first half of the twentieth century, the poetry of Hart Crane remains a matter of controversy. Several respected and influential men of letters including Allen Tate, R.

P. Blackmuir, and Yvor Winter have, in the words of Professor Lewis, "variously indicted Crane for dissipating an immense talent out of wilfulness, strategic wronghead-edness, or bad Romantic habits." Crane, they argue, wrote individual lines of great beauty, but was largely unsuccessful in integrating them into coherent patterns. Professor Lewis believes that Crane is one of the major American poets and that a re-evaluation of his poetry based upon a close reading of the texts will establish his rightful position in the poetic pantheon. According to Professor Lewis, the dissipation and turbulence of the last years of Crane's life have been responsible for the prevalent critical belief that Crane's poetry is not unified. Critics have "read" the uncertainties of the poet's life into his poetry, but, as the examples of Baudelaire, Villon, and a multitude of others serve to remind us, the fact that a writer makes a mess out of his life does not necessarily mean that he will make a mess out of his poetry also.

Such, at least, is the argument with which Professor Lewis opens his detailed and largely convincing explication of the body of Crane's poetry. Verdicts are bound to differ concerning the degree of unity, a poem must, or ought to, possess. The central criti Children HOW CHILDREN LEARN. By John Holt. Pitman Publishing Corp.

$4.95. Reviewed by KAREN RITTER One of the basic misconceptions held by most educators today is that very young children are incapable of thinking and reasoning. According to most theories about education, the child is ready about the age of six to begin thinking, and he must be sent to school to learn this difficult feat as if it were a foreign language. John Holt, who previously demonstrated his keen grasp of the young child's ability to Recommended Fictiorn The Deserted House, by Lydia Chukovskaya. A novel written in 1939-40, not yet published in Russia, telling of the terror that accompanied the Great Purge.

The Manor, by Isaac Bashevis Singer. A pious Jew leaves the Polish ghetto to become a successful businessman, at the end regrets the step. The Third Policeman, by Flann O'Brien. Sardonic novel about life after death, written 27 years ago by an Irish writer who, himself, died a year or so ago. Dirty Story, by Eric Ambler.

Coittinuing the adventures of that seedy character, Arthur Abdel Simpson, who was in "The Light of Day." General Downhill All the Way: An Autobiography of the Years 1919-1939, by Leonard Woolf. Memoirs of the 86-year-old British intellectual and husband of Virginia Woolf. The Elizabethan World, by Lacey Baldwin Smith, and The Horizon Book of the Elizabethan World, by Mr. Smith and the editors of Horizon Magazine. With excellent and similar texts, the latter book has many more illustrations.

Sarah Duchess of Marlborough, by David Green. Full-scale biography of a nice woman who turned into a quarrelsome virago in middle age. The Soviet Union: The Fifty Years, edited by Harrison E. Salisbury. An analysis by 14 reporters for The New York Times of all phases of Russian society.

old fashioned discipline, love, a lot of toughness and a lot of understanding. In the novel Stuart goes into great detail describing how Gallion rounds up a faculty, how he manages problem children and how he fights the community at times. Finally he wins, but his health will not allow him to return for a second year to enjoy the fruits of victory. Stuart comes as close to writing calculated social protest in this novel as in any of his writings. Dr.

Blair says that his social protest has rarely taken more than two forms: the unfairness of an education not being equally available to all young people and the abuse of the welfare or "relief" system by people like the shiftless Tussies of his delightfully funny "Taps for Private Tussie." It will be interesting to see how Stuart continues to pursue his theme of applying the old formula to the modern problems of youth. This theme after all is but a further variation of his eternal optism about youth and his love for education. THERE IS so much superb commentary in Dr. Blair's book that it is impossible to touch on it all here. One of her greatest strengths is the highly readable style of the volume which she achieves without sacrificing any of its scholarly qualities and that is as it should be in dealing with a poet such as Jesse Stuart, for Stuart has the uncanny ability to communicate almost completely with an enormous range of readers.

In everything he does Stuart's intensity is that of the poet. Yet his forte, Dr. Blair says, is the short story, and Stuart himself has said that the first check he received for a short story was "fun" money, but the poetry money he earned was "blood" money. Oddly he received the same amount, $25, for the first poem and for the first short story he sold. The first poem was bought by H.

L. Mencken and Stuart was thrilled because Mencken had recently said that no good poetry was being written in America at that time. Why then did he buy my poem? Jesse asked happily. Jesse's first volume of poetry was about five times as long as the average volume of poetry and it established his reputation though some critics found him repetitious and sometimes careless in the choice of some of his words. Stuart, it is true, hates to rewrite and in his early poetry he captured intense emotion, which he feared would be lost during revision.

It was some 11 years before his second volume of poems appeared and he revised and edited until he had created a highly polished gem of a book. Yet the attention the book received (this was during World War II) was so slight that the result was one of the great disappointments of Stuart's life. Best Sellers ish Families of New York, Birmingham. Nicholas and Alexandra, Mas-sie. The New Industrial State, Gal-braith.

Twenty Letters to a Friend, Alliluyeva. Incredible Victory, Lord. Anyone Can Make a Million, Shulman. A Modern Priest Looks at His Outdated Church, Kavanaugh. Too Strong For Fantasy, Davenport.

Rickenbackcr, Rickenbacker. Between Parent and Child, Ginott. In his novels so much of the material is autobiographical that the study of his work presents a real challenge, yet Dr. Blair has met the challenge well. She was helped enormously of course by Stuart who gave her his complete cooperation and the scores of letters and phone calls and meetings obviously enabled Dr.

Blair to stand on solid ground in analyzing what Stuart intended in many of the poems and stories. Stuart of course has been misunderstood and sometimes unfairly criticized because his writing is often in dialect and because people in other parts of the nation have no knowledge of the people of Eastern Kentucky. Stuart declares that he has never exaggerated, and it appears that indeed he has not. In recent years, he has worked hard to tone down the dialect and the result has been greater communication with more types of reader. In his poetry he has always been a romanticist and undoubtedly it must please him that people who do not like poetry find that they like Jesse Stuart's poetry.

To read Jesse Stuart and to know him is to know Greenup County and Hollow and a remarkable group of people. Mrs. Blair summarizes: "In the words of Donald Davidson, "The readers of Jesse Stuart must say, "Here is writing that touches the "Since 'writing that touches the heart' might be called the basic definition of a classic, of work which attains universality and lives through the ages, one may say of Stuart's best works, 'Here is classic She concludes: "Jesse Stuart has carved for himself an individual, an inimitable, place among contemporary American writers. I believe that he is high among those who give promise for achieving permanence in world literature." McFerrin JOHN B. McFERRIN.

A BIOGRAPHY. By O. P. Fitzgerald. 1 i ing House of the M.

E. Church, South. Nashville, 1388. (Out of print.) By HUGH WALKER Methodist preachers in Middle Tennessee have always been staunch men. We had the pleasure of seeing them in a body recently at the funeral of our friend, Rev.

W. J. Fesmire. Through their churches and publishing house the Methodist preachers from frontier days have made a deep imprint on the Cumberland community. Early historians, including Carr, divided them into two groups the Sons of Thunder and the Sons of Consolation.

The Sons of Thunder, especially, were formidable men. "The very looks of a Methodist preacher," Carr wrote, "would strike terror to a sinner's heart." A Son of Thunder and much more than that was John B. McFerrin. Such well known names as McFerrin Park and McFerrin Avenue are reminiscent of the days when he ruled Methodism in Nashville. "BORN IN a cane-brake and cradled in a sugar trough" Devastated Sinners learn in his "Why Children Fail," has taken another perceptive look at the problem and comes up with some conclusions that will startle many.

In clear, simple language, Dr. Susan Gray recognized authority Holt explores the fascinating processes that go on in the minds of very young children. "How Children Learn" describes the strong natural drives with which children are born and how these drives aid learning. HOLT CONTENDS that children have an innate compulsion to learn as much as possible about the world in which they find themselves, to understand it, and to organize and control their surroundings. The view that curiosity is an inborn trait is not new.

Psychologists have known this for some time, primarily through experiments in the laberatory with monkeys. What is new, however, is Holt's assessment of the age at which this drive begins to assert itself forcefully enough to result in thinking and reasoning by children. He believes that children even as young as two years old are able to use their minds effectively in reasoning and thinking things out and learning from their experiences. In addition, Holt says, a child is constantly thinking and learning, naturally and spontaneously, without any "motivation" other than the desire "to make sense of the world, to move freely in it, to do the things that he sees bigger people doing." A striking example of the child's learning power is shown in an analysis of the ways children learn to talk. Holt has concluded that it is -'i 1 it -vm if Rev.

John B. McFerrin a Son of Thunder was the way McFerrin described his own beginnings. The fact is he was born on a Rutherford County farm in 1S07, just a year after Jackson killed Dickinson in their Red River duel. McFerrin was a powerful preacher, aggressive and combative. His biographer reports that many believed him the best platform speaker of his day in the United States.

And "his day" included such orators as Clay, Yancey and Andrew Johnson. As a writer, McFerrin left us his valuable "Methodism in Tennessee," a three volume work which is now a collector's item, and will be reviewed in this column. Its opening chapters shed light.