The San Francisco Examiner from San Francisco, California • 166

ROBERT PHELPS Among the Contributors clipped over the years. In a very literal sense he introduced me to the music of Satie and Ravel and Mozart. He taught me as much as I suppose I shall ever know about sccundal counterpoint and atonality. Thanks to him I shall always ask myself exactly what I mean when 1 use words like "romantic" and "classical" and "modem." But liberating as his ideas were to me, it was from the good health of Mr. Thomson's personality committed to the printed page that I learned the most.

For there he was every week, wholesome and integrated, tart, tender and untimorous, knowing what he loved and why, and teaching me that a man's intellectual growth and the fullest use of his powers stand in direct ratio to his fullest use of the rest of him that his taste is only part of a greater whole. It was the same with James Agee. It was the personality that I heeded and learned from. I remember a rainy afternoon at an Army supply depot in Florida when I sat in a warehouse counting belt feed levers and belt feed pawls and at the same time reading and rereading a piece on Preston Sturges' movie, "The Miracle of Morgan's Creek." I shall never forget the sense of my own bounding growth as I responded to Agee's words. But again, it was more than his comparison (exhilarating and unprecedented as it was for me) of Rene Clair and Mozart.

It was the sense his words gave me of listening to a real human being. Perhaps I am running an obvious point into the ground. I know only that Agee and Thomson remain twin mentors for me. course, both Thomson and Agee were also good reviewers. They covered their field responsibly and professionally and neither was ever inclined to amateurism, fustian, or megalomania.

Thomson would analyze the character of Melisande and Agee would evoke the photography of "Meet Me in St Louis" with equally zestful language and insight. They both had guts and they both knew how to praise with precision what they loved. Both expressed something greater than judgments or adventurous taste: a fluent, consistent self, a three-dimensional first person, a recognizable voice. Now this is very rare, so rare that I can almost count on the fingers of one hand the times in this century that a man who is a first-rate composer, poet or dramatist has given himself to a regular commentary on some aspect of the community's cultural life. Shaw did it alwut 1900 for London music.

Colette did it in the mid-Thirties for the French theater, and about the same time Cocteau did it briefly for Parisian nightlife. In the Forties came Thomson and Agee and then Edmund Wilson followed the American publishing scene for a few years. Most recently, Cyril Connolly has been doing the same thing in England. But I can't, offhand, think of any others. Any others, that is, who have been personalities first and journalists second.

For two generations The New Yorker has given us superlative reporters Janet Flanner, Mollie Painter-Downs, I-ouise Bogan, Richard Rovere and at least one of them is also a poet. But their writing has restricted itself to objective reporting. The personality of the reporter has diffidently refined itself out. In the writings of Agee and Virgil Thomson the personality flourished. I still have a sheaf of Mr.

Thomson's columns, yellowing and frail, which I Two even voices in the tumult I am of that generation whose late teens and early twenties co-existed with the Second World War, and whose college years were distracted to put it gently by sudden departures, free travel and non-academic lessons. It was an exciting time to be alive but it was also a wasteful one. Overstimulation was the norm. The various possibilities, including a campus, seemed too tame to go back to. As a result, I have no degree.

By any conventional standard, I am ill-educated. And though I know better, I cannot resign myself to the notion that a poem and a seminar should occupy the same room at the same time. Hut there was a brighter side. For if my college years were intercepted by a war, my intellectual awakening, by the same chronology, occurred in a decade when two very original American voices one, a composer and the other, a jioct-novelist were contributing regularly to the journalistic life of the land. From 1940 to 1954, Virgil Thomson wrote alwut music in the New York Herald Tribune, and from 1942 to 1948 James Agee wrote a film column for The Nation.

I read them lioth eagerly and though I took them for granted at the time, it seems to me today that their voices had more to do with my education than any classroom or professor I ever knew. I say voices and I mean just that. Of "Aget on Film: Reviews and Comments" $2.45) and "A get on Film: Five Film Scripts" ((512 $2.75) will be published in paperback by Beacon this spring. 11' 'AR BERG is an associate professor of business administration at Columbia University. DANIEL J.

BOORST1N, professor of American history at the University of Chicago and editor of the Chicago History of American Civilization series, has written "The Americans: The Colonial Experience," "The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson," "The Image: What Happened to the American Dream," and other books. R. I'. CASSILL, whose new novel, "The President," will be published this spring, teaches English at the State University of Iowa. JAMES R.

FRAKES, assistant professor of English at Lehigh University, is a poet and co-editor of "Short Fiction: A Critical Collection." JOHN GRAVES, author of "Goodbye to a River," is a member of the English department at Texas Christian University on leave of absence this year with a Guggenheim fellowship to write a novel. JOHN K. 1IUTCHENS, now a judge for the Book-of-the-Month Club, was a daily critic for the New York Herald Tribune for IS years. His latest book, "One Man's Montana," is to be published in August. RICHARD KLVGER, editor of Book Week, once published a newspaper in suburban Rockland County, New York.

His first novel, "When the Bough Breaks," will appear this summer. ELEANOR PERRY, best known for her film "David and Lisa," which was nominated for an Academy Award, has written four mystery novels, magazine fiction, a Broadway comedy Best and the screenplay for "I-adybug, Ladybug." H. M. Tcnnant will release her film adaptation of Muriel Spark's "Memento Mori" in England this spring. ROBERT PHELPS edited and wrote the introduction for "The Letters of James Agee to Father Flye." Author of a novel, "Heroes and Orators," he is now at work on a critical study of W.

H. Auden. KENS' ETH REX ROTH, pinch-hitting for Don Stanley on Book Week's Page 2 this month, is a columnist for the San Francisco Examiner and co-founder of the San Francico Poetry Center. His books of poetry and criticism include "Natural Numbers: New and Selected Poems" (published in Decenilier), "Bird in the Bush" and "In Defense of the Earth." ARTHUR SCHLES1NGER since I'M) a speech writer and adviser for the late President Kennedy, resigned last month from his position as Special Assistant to the President in order to write a Uxik aliout the Kennedy administration. The historian and former Harvard professor is author of "The Age of Jackson" (winner of the Pulitzer Prize in history in 1945), a study of "The Age of Roosevelt" (of which three volumes have appeared), "The Politics of Hoe" and other books.

HUGH R. TREVOR-ROPER is Regius professor of modern history at Oxford University. His books include "The List Days of Hitler." "Men and Events" and "Hitler's Secret Conversations." SHELDON ZALAZNICK, editor of the New York Herald Tribune's New York magazine, covered the automotive industry when he was a senior editor at Forties magazine. Books Authors KENNETH REX ROTH very tightly organized community bears little resemblance to the society of young artists, students and camp followers of other times and climes. Edna St.

Vincent Millay, Harry Kemp, Bob Coady, Jack Kearns, the habitues of Polly Holiday's, the Dutch Oven, the Wind Blew Inn or the Telegraph Hill Tavern were a different kettle of fish from the anarcho-Catholic nymphomaniacs and post-Gandhian weedheads of the Kettle of Fish. Something intrinsically improbable to my generation has occurred something that squares and reactionaries have always told their adolescent children was ttound to happen. Social demoralization and personal disorder have liecn taken over by that sector of society most forthrightly dedicated to those principles usually called revolutionary. By revolutionary principles I do not mean political programs. Revolutions in politics were once advocated purely as instruments.

The end in view was the life of the individual man in a rehabilitated society, a life incomparably cleaner, more gracious and noble. Reflexively this produced a whole sub-culture characterized by a kind of enlightened pittisin devoted couples who worked at onerous jobs for long hours, lived in immaculate cold-water flats, spent their evenings going to meetings or reading aloud to each other from the latest Brookings Institute report, the third volume of "Capital" or the plays of Strindlierg. They did not smoke, drink or use foul language and most of them forewent the pleasures of having children in order to keep themselves pure and efficient for the day at the barricades. Against the sub-culture of the revolutionaries was another of the lohemians who insisted on living as though the revolution had already taken place. They wanted their strawberries and cream now but they most emphatically liked strawberries and cream.

They may have lived lives of promiscuity, though they were much less promiscuous than they liked to think. But they liked sex. They may have spent too much time in too many beds but they had a rousing good time in bed. Maybe they drank too much but they liked drink. They loved to eat and a surprising number of them were excellent cooks.

These two groups, along with the artistic and literary avant-garde (the liohemians and radicals were almost to a man extremely conventional in artistic taste), were assumed to make up the growing point of society and a large number of their values and folkways have been in fact adopted by the generality of post-modern men. Meanwhile, what characterizes the people descrik'd by Paul Goodman or Norman Mailer? A profound hatred of life. loathe (Continued on page 19) Our anti-life bohemians SAN FRANCISCO. "Things Ain't What They Used To Be" not for nothing is that the title of a jazz standard. You can ring the changes on it, set after set all night, like an English bell ringer.

Also, it ranks with anecdotage and night rising as a prime symptom of approaching desuetude and decay. I guess I'm getting senile, but things ain't what they used to be and that's a fact. I am prompted by the winter crop of the literature of alienation to make this observation in public. "Making Do," the latest novel by my old friend Paul Goodman, has many grating faults but it is a reasonably accurate picture of life among the New Bohemians of the Lower East Side, the New Jersey slums, Chicago's Old Town, San Francisco's North Beach and nearly all joints of the compass. Things ain't what they used to be, indeed! This community and it is a Patt 2 BOOK WEEK February 16, 1964.