Swarthmore College Alumni Bulletin 1989-01-01

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In • January 1989

the caveat
of conser­
vatives,
Chinese
filmmakers
eye the
reel world
with new
boldness

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“Sometimes when I had mixed a color and was going to put it on the wall, I found myself trying
to paint the air.” (Gulley Jimson from The Horse’s Mouth by Joyce Cary)
Artist Valerie Hollister assumes a Gulley Jimson-like pose atop the scaffolding she used while painting
the mural Winter Light, a shimmering fest o f blues dappled by pink clouds and ribbed with fluid,
somber lines suggesting bare tree limbs. The mural was created with water-based acrylic paints over
a seven-week period on the side o f old Tarble (see “Riddle” p. 27). Inset photo by John Dominis.

SWARTHMORE
COLLEGE BULLETIN • JANUARY 1989

2
R eel C ou rage R eal A rt

Chinese film makers resist didacticism with bold creativity.
|

«R M

By A

lan

G

ersh en feld

’8 4

1 7
C lo w n in g A rou n d

Simon Hawkins ’87 embraces an Auguste tradition.
By R oger W

il l i a m s

8
A ll the W orld ’s a D a n c e

Choreographer M ark Taylor
By C

S h1

HHH K M

.

in d i

75

seeks a new stage o f artistry.

L e iv e ’8 8

112

V.ttfMMni

T h e M en W h o W o u ld B e K ingm akers

One Republican, one Democrat, two Swarthmore issues directors
serve in the 1988 presidential race.
By R oger W

Editor:
Maralyn Orbison Gillespie ’49

Managing Editor:
Roger Williams

Assistant Managing Editor:
Kate Downing

Editor for Copy and Class Notes:
Nancy Curran

Assistant Copy Editor:
Ann D. Geer
Designer: Bob Wood
Cover: Beijing child. Photo by
Alan Gershenfeld ’84.
The Swarthmore College Bulletin (ISSN
0888-2126), of which this is volume
LXXXVI, number 4, is published twice in
September and in December, January,
March, and June by Swarthmore College,
Swarthmore, PA 19081. Second class
postage paid at Swarthmore, PA, and
additional mailing offices. Postmaster:
Send address changes to Swarthmore
College Bulletin, Swarthmore, PA 19081.
JANUARY 1989

m
H i

il l i a m s

16
T h e F ictio n o f Franzen

A young alumnus unveils an acclaimed first novel
By R oger W

il l ia m s

H H B i 119 •

PPf
■fflH

A V ie w from the Border

In the hard hills once ridden by Geronimo and Pancho Villa, a
Swarthmore senior sneaks a refugee into sanctuary.
B y T r ist a n R

eader

’8 9

DEPARTMENTS
24
27
28
30
42
52
57

The College
Letters to the Editor
Class Notes
Deaths
Alumni Children and Relatives
Recent Books by Alumni
Lost Alumni

1

When most of us think about movies from
the People^ Republic of China, we usually
c o i^ e up images of freneticming fu thrillers
or tedious bov-mfEts-tractor melodramas.
While ’W n o f these genres are still wellrepresented in the cinema of mainland
China, recently there has emerged a new
wave of young filmmakers who are produc­
ing politically and artistically daring films.
Despite receiving rave reviews and major
awards at festivals around the world (a feat
previously considered inconceivable for a
Chinese film), many of these films, along
with their filmmakers, have come under
vehement attack from conservative officials
within the Chinese bureaucracy. The result
has been an intense debate that has energized
the once moribund Chinese film industry
and has raised many intriguing questions
about the role of film in society.
I have recently returned from a fivemonth trip, funded by the American/Chinese Adventure Capital Program (ACACP),
to study current trends in the Chinese film
industry. The grant was unique in its inten­
tion: not to finance scholarly research, but
instead to finance projects that would involve

Chinese filmmakers
resist didacticism with
boldness and brilliance
by Alan Gershenfeld ’84

SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

8ÉÉM

m

PHOTOS BY ALAN GERSHENFELD ’84

extensive people-to-people contact enabling
participants to cement life-long relationships
with the people of China.
When I heard about the grant, I was
about to enter my second year working as
the production coordinator on a problemplagued Hollywood feature film that had
gone wildly over schedule and over budget.
I knew that as soon as the film was finished,
I would need a respite from the Hollywood
shuffle.
Although I had never seen a Chinese
movie, I teamed up with a friend and co­
worker, who was also intrigued with the
possibility of meeting with Chinese film­
makers in China, to apply for the ACACP
grant. The initial research for our proposal
turned up a variety of tantalizing tidbits. We
learned, for instance, that the Chinese sold
approximately 20 billion movie tickets a
year—which translates into an astounding
55 million movie tickets sold every day. As
far as we could tell, this made the Chinese
the world’s most avid movie audience not
only in terms of sheer numbers, but also in
terms of population percentage.
We also learned that the obscure AmeriJANUARY 1989

can television movie Nightmare in Badham
County played to over 200 million people in
China, that the equally obscure American
television series Garrison’s Guerrillas used
to be a hit among those with access to
television, and that Love Story was the cur­
rent rage in the cinemas. What this indicated
about the Chinese taste in movies, however,
was hard to ascertain.
Our research also gave us very little
insight into the dynamics of the Chinese film
industry and almost no sense of what types
of movies China’s 16 major studios were
turning out. The various levels of grant com­
mittees, though, thought it would be worth
finding out, and our project was funded.
Now that we had money, we had to figure
out how to go about meeting Chinese film­
makers. Anybody who wishes to do an
official project in China must first line up a
“receiving unit,” which refers to any orga­
nization in China that is willing both to
invite and to take responsibility for you. In
Los Angeles we were fortunate to befriend
Xie-Fei, the vice president of the Beijing
Film Academy, who was on a Luce Fellow­
ship at the University of Southern California.

He suggested that the academy should be
our receiving unit and insisted that he would
take care of everything.
When it came time to leave, we had still
not heard from the Beijing Film Academy,
and Xie-Fei was out of town. We also found
ourselves without a translator since, at the
last minute, our translator was hired to work

Writer Alan Gershenfeld ’84 (left) is joined by
brother Neil ’81, a doctoral candidate studying
engineering physics at Cornell University. Neil,
participating in a U.S.-China exchange o f scien­
tists, rendezvoused with his brother in Guilin.

Clockwise from top left: Three o f China’s avid film-goers
enjoy the silver screen without paying; a scene from the movie
Old Well, directed by Wu Tianming (inset), awarded bestpicture
at the Tokyo Film Festival; a future star in inner Mongolia.

4

SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

on a feature film shooting in China. Unfor­
parties at Maxim’s of Beijing (yes, there
tunately our plane tickets were nonrefundis a Maxim’s of Beijing), we had a
able, so with no translator or receiving unit,
triathlon of badminton, pingpong, and
off we flew to China.
swimming with a cameraman and a
Our first few weeks proved disastrous.
film critic, we got drunk with one of
We discovered that with our command of
China’s premier actors and watched
Chinese (I could say, “I am an American”
him re-enact the Japanese invasion of
and “cinema”), it was not really possible to
China to the Talking Heads’ song “Little
study current trends in the Chinese film
Creatures,” and I taught our translator
industry. The following entry in my journal
to say, “I’m rubber and you’re glue,
aptly describes our initial degree of success:
everything you say bounces off me and
Breakfast was a nightmare. By mistake
sticks to you.” Next week we travel to
we ordered 60 instead of 16 pork
Huhehot to visit her family and the
dumplings. Even though the waiter
Inner Mongolia Film Studio.. ..
must have known that we didn’t want
In China, if you want to get anything
60 pork dumplings for breakfast, I’m done, you need guanxi or connections. T his
sure he figured that the best way for us is as true for foreigners as for locals. Now we
to learn the difference between “leo- had guanxi. We were able to meet with
shi” and “shi-leo” was to serve us 60 studio presidents, we were able to screen
pork dumplings. We decided, though, previously unavailable films, and we were
to get the last laugh and tried to eat all treated to such oddities as the “Mao Room”
60 dumplings. After about 30 dump­ at the Beijing Film Studio. Prior to the death
lings we felt sick and conceded defeat. of Mao in 1976, virtually every scene in
We asked for a doggy bag, which every film would have some sort of Mao
promptly split open, spilling 30 dump­ prop (a painting, for example, or a statuette).
lings into a brownish sauce that splat­ But with the rise of Deng Xiaoping, Mao’s
tered all over us. The waiter seemed to images became rare in film. So this is where
enjoy this___
the hundreds of Mao props were stored. A
Before long we began to suffer a crisis of disconcerting sight, to say the least.
confidence. Not only were we having trouble
More important, we began to get a sense
with our breakfast, but we also found our­ of the film industry, both its history and
selves unable to meet with anyone remotely current trends. Throughout the 1920s, ’30s,
connected with the Chinese film industry. and ’40s, the Chinese film industry was alive
Just when depression started to set in, our and flourishing in Shanghai. Even during
luck changed.
the Japanese occupation and civil war, the
We contacted a contact of a contact from industry continued to turn out numerous
Los Angeles, who introduced us to a friend popular films. When the Communists took
of a friend (literally), who turned out to be control in 1949, the industry was split up;
a perfect translator. Because of all the nega­ some filmmakers fled to Taiwan with Chiang
tive stories we had heard about government Kai-shek, some fled to Hong Kong, and
translators, we had avoided getting one, and others stayed. Many of those who stayed
it turned out to be a wise decision.
were sent to a variety of regional film studios
Our translator, a student at the Institute of being set up throughout the country.
International Relations, changed the tone of
In the 1950s and early ’60s, the bulk of
the whole trip. Aside from being fluent in films produced in China were thinly veiled
English and extremely bright and funny, she propagandistic melodramas that were low
had played Pu Yi’s mother in the film The on artistry and high on dogma. With the
Last Emperor and was close friends with advent of the Cultural Revolution in the
many of the young filmmakers in Beijing.
mid-1960s, when nearly all the artists and
Suddenly we were not only meeting and intellectuals were sent to the countryside for
interviewing filmmakers, we were becoming re-education by the peasants, brutally ha­
good friends with them. We spent long rassed, or even murdered, the film industry
afternoons hanging out at the Beijing Film was essentially shut down. The entire decade,
Academy and Beijing Film Studio watching until the death of Mao, saw the production
movies, talking about movies, and meeting of only a handful of patriotic operas usually
with everybody and anybody. Again I quote handpicked by Mao’s wife (a former actress)
my journal, which I think best captures the Jiang Qing. In the late 1970s, after the purge
shift in mood:
of the Gang of Four and the entrenchment
I feel like the toast of Beijing. The last of Deng Xiaoping’s more liberal policies, A n astounding 55 million movie tickets are pur­
two weeks have been a blur of lunches, the Beijing Film Academy (China’s only chased each day by the Chinese, the world’s
dinners, and parties with all sorts of film school) reopened and the studios grad­ premier movie-goers. The dramatic Potola Pal­
ace (top), Tibet’s holiest monastery, remains the
Chinese film people. We’ve gone to ually started producing again.
silent symbol o f an old and besieged culture.

ME I

JANUARY 1989

Co-grant recipients Alan Gershenfeld (right) and Jim Taylor on the road to Lhasa, Tibet

The first group of students to attend the
Film Academy after it reopened in 1978
were different from the previous, pre-Cultural Revolution classes in a number of
ways. Most of them were already in their 30s
and had spent the previous decade in the
remote countryside often doing hard manual
labor. At the academy they had access to
more foreign films, modern equipment, and
generally more information about the world
outside than had their predecessors. The
horrors of the Cultural Revolution also
filled them with a passion to express on
celluloid their feelings about Chinese history
and the Chinese psyche.
This group of students became known
collectively as the “Fifth Generation” film­
makers, and their films have had an enor­
mous impact on the Chinese film industry.
It all started with the 1985 release of Chen
Kaige’s Yellow Earth, which created a sen­
sation at the Hong Kong Film Festival.
Critics were not so much upset by the film’s
political content—the story, set in 1939,
describes a young soldier from Mao’s Red
Army who is sent to educate (by collecting
and disseminating folk songs) a remote,
impoverished village—as they were by the
film’s slow, non-narrative format and the
depiction of Chinese peasants as ignorant
and superstitious. Proponents lauded the
film’s stylized direction, realism, and stun­
ning cinematography and insisted that the
film marked a breakthrough for Chinese
cinema.
As more politically and artistically daring
Fifth Generation films were released to
favorable reviews abroad (and by intellectu­
als at home), the debate within the industry
6

intensified. The powers-that-be criticized
these young directors for abandoning social­
ist goals in pursuit of artistic excellence and
for making films only a select few could
understand. When Fifth Generation films
strayed too close to sensitive topics (such as
the Sino-Vietnam war), the films often were
not released or were drastically recut.
As young filmmakers struggling to make
innovative films in Hollywood, we were
naturally drawn to this debate. Our alle­
giance drifted to the Fifth Generation, not
just because we had become friends with a
number of them, but because generally we
found their films much better than the bulk
of Chinese films that still tended to be
artistically bland vehicles for socialist educa­
tion.
On the other hand, we were sympathetic
to some of the government’s criticisms. After
all, China does have an enormous, avid film
audience whose needs must be met. Some­
one needs to be making more accessible
films for this audience. And yet it seemed
insane to stifle the talents of gifted filmmak­
ers.
At the center of the debate was (and is)
a man named Wu Tianming. Whenever we
would talk with anyone about film in China,
invariably the name Wu Tianming would
come up. We learned that he was not only
an acclaimed director, but also president of
the Xi’an Film Studio and one of the
strongest supporters of the Fifth Generation.
From all that we heard, he sounded like a
remarkable man, so we set out to meet him.
After spending a week with Wu Tianming
in Xi’an, it became clear why everybody
was talking about him. In less than four

years, he turned what was arguably the
worst film studio in China into one of the
country’s most artistically progressive, finan­
cially successful, and internationally re­
spected studios. To accomplish this he had
to embark on a bold, unprecedented series
of reforms (practically unheard of in China)
like severely punishing the corrupt, sending
all who had not finished their education or
training back to school, and setting up a
substantial bonus system for those who
made films that were both critically and
financially successful.
Even more controversial, he sponsored
Fifth Generation filmmakers and backed
innovative films that no other studio would
produce. To finance these films (which often
lost money) he also set out to produce
popular films (like the hit kung fu film The
Magic Braid) as part of his policy of “for­
esting art films with entertainment films.”
His success was remarkable. In addition to
producing a number of critical and financial
hits at home, his films began winning prizes
all over the world.
Despite all this success, Wu continues to
be criticized and harassed by the more
conservative elements of the film bureau­
cracy. He is accused of everything from
being anti-socialist to having too many
affairs (he is happily married). He is con­
stantly called to Beijing to defend his actions
and must deal with government “vice presi­
dents” sent to Xi’an to watch over him. In
many ways the government’s handling of
Wu Tianming and the films he sponsors
serves as a good indication of which faction
is currently wielding control in Beijing.
After we had finished our project in
China and were traveling in Asia, we were
pleased to read that films from Xi’an won
first prizes in the Tokyo Film Festival {Old
Well, directed by Wu) and the Berlin Film
Festival (King o f the Children, directed by
Chen Kaige). Equally significant, we re­
cently learned that Old Well and Red Sor­
ghum tied for the Best Picture Golden
Rooster, China’s equivalent of the Oscar.
Each of these films, along with about a half
dozen other Chinese movies, has recently
been purchased for American distribution.
It seems inevitable that Chinese films will
only get better and will continue to play an
increasingly important role in international
cinema. We consider ourselves lucky to have
blundered into such a unique film commu­
nity at such a fascinating period in its de­
velopment.
Even more important, when we ran into
the Chinese delegation at the recent Cannes
Film Festival, we ran not only into other
filmmakers, we ran into friends. This, after
all, was the goal of the grant. A
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

by Roger Williams
Simon Hawkins ’87 was working as a para­
legal in the Washington, D.C., offices of
Spiegel & McDiarmid (’58) one day last
spring when he heard that the circus was
coming to town.
Washingtonians are used to circuses com­
ing to town, but this circus was different.
This was the real three-ring thing, the act
under the big top, the greatest show on earth.
This was the Ringling Brothers and Barnum
& Bailey Circus.
Simon had always wanted to be a clown.
Why not audition, he thought? He’d done a
Continued on page 23
Simon Hawkins ’87 becomes a clown.

TEVEN GOLDBL/*

horeographer and dancer Mark Taylor ’75 joins a member of his New
York dance company, Mark Taylor and Friends, to create a new move­
ment during a rehearsal in his Broadway studio. The artist’s consummate
creativity is mirrored in his latest work, opening this month in New York City.

C

8

SWARTHMORE COI LEGE BULLETIN

On the stage o f M ark Taylor 7 5

All
The
World’s
A Dance
When I first met Mark Taylor for drinks
several months ago, I was a little apprehen­
sive. I thought that as founder of his own
New York dance company, Mark Taylor
and Friends, he might prove intimidating,
using baffling, technical terms like “saut de
basque” and talking graceful circles around
me. I thought he’d be elegant and slightly
blasé. I guess I thought he might wear tights
and maybe some kind of cape.
Five minutes into our conversation, I had
to admit I’d been wrong. Taylor was ener­
getic and dynamic, leaning forward on his
bar stool as he told me about his newest
project, an evening-length work based on
the novel Invisible Cities by the late Italian
writer Italo Calvino. “I’d love to talk to you
about it,” he said, making little circles on the
bar with his beer. “But I really don’t have
time.” Taylor would be out of town at a
SUNY-Brockport residency for the next six
weeks. That gave me a lot of time to think.
The more I learned of Taylor, the more
interesting he seemed. His enthusiasm for his
work is infectious: I found myself fascinated
by the innovative approach that characterizes
his life as a dancer. Taylor, who’d planned
to major in music, had never danced before
he came to Swarthmore, yet he landed a
coveted scholarship with the Merce Cun­
ningham Dance Foundation immediately
after graduation and went on to study with
stars Lawrence Rhodes and Melissa Hayden.
Only four years after graduation he estab­
lished his own company—now recognized
as one of the city’s strongest—and had also

begun to build a reputation for his ingenuity.
Tagged “astonishingly inventive” by The
New York Times, Taylor has built up a
meaty, complex repertoire, combining his
daring choreography with evocative original
music and provocative staging. (In “Freefall,” a 1984 piece based on Taylor’s child­
hood fantasies about flying, a taped narrative
recounts a fictional levitation to the ceiling
of his parents’ living room while dancers toss
themselves through the air; in “Lost Conti­
nent,” which explores issues of extinction,
Taylor plays taped interviews with kin­
dergarteners. Clearly, this is not “The Nut­
cracker.”)
Even with critical acclaim, Taylor has
refused to settle into a niche. He received a
1988 National Endowment for the Arts
(NEA) Fellowship in Choreography but is
in the process of applying for another one to
make videos. He has a solid, reputable
company behind him but is working on
independent ventures, including an elec­
tronic blues opera and choreography for
production of a play about Don Juan. He
simply never stays put—and this wanderlust
may have brought him to dance.
At Swarthmore Taylor was first wooed
by the performance of a visiting company,
then ambitiously set to work as a novice
with dance Professor Pat Boyer. Many of the
dancers in his company followed the same
route: They found themselves as artists only
after they found themselves as people.
“I tend to think,” Taylor says, “that
people who start early have it physically

by Cindi Leive ’88
JANUARY 1989

9

H e explores the reduction o f m eaning to pu re imagination.

Guided by a desire to lend his dance
thefu ll context o f theater, Taylor works
with members o f his company to create
a fusion o f music, dance, and narrated
language in a piece based upon Italo
Calvino’s novel Invisible Cities.

easy yet become locked into a narrow
aesthetic.” For him, pushing into new terri­
tory seems the essence of dance.
Most of all, though, I am impressed by the
sheer brashness of his latest, admittedly most
experimental, project. Invisible Cities is a
dense, poetic, confusing work. As I first
stood puzzling over the novel in an East
Village bookstore, an eager clerk told me,
“It’s a meditation on the nature of narrative;
it’s about the twisted redundancies of lan­
guage itself.” Not the sort of piece that cries
out for a musical score. But for Mark Taylor,
it is perfect material.
As Taylor and I sit in the large-windowed
Brooklyn apartment he shares with his wife,
Barbara Sieck Taylor 7 5 , a foundation ex­
ecutive, he tells me that the new piece serves
as a breakthrough in his work. “I always
have several directions I would like to go,”
he explains, thumbing his paperback copy
of the book. “And for me this is a whole new
form.” Whereas his previous pieces used
only music and text to illuminate the dance,
this project, he says, fuses composer Elise
Tobin’s music, Taylor’s dance, and Calvino’s
text as parts of a cohesive whole: a true
multimedia event.

Taylor likes this idea. “It does look pretty
original to me,” he says, grinning. “But it’s
also a step forward for me in terms of being
able to break out of some habits I’ve had as
a choreographer. I’ve always been an ex­
treme formalist, and one of the negative
things that can be said about my work is that
it’s just movement. Of course,” he continues,
“a lot of dance now is just movement, but I
can sympathize with the criticism.” Audien­
ces, Taylor says, need dancers prepared to
offer more than just pretty tricks. “I mean
the quality and invention of movement are
really important to me, but I find it even
more important to give [dance] a context, so
it becomes a piece of theater. This project is
richer; it’s got more levels, more things going
on.”
One of those things, Taylor tells me, turns
out to be an investigation of imagination and
fantasy, elements that he has played with
since the days of “Freefall.” “I wanted to
work on the problem of narrative in dance,”
he says, clasping his fingers together. “It’s an
issue that a lot of people are addressing, but
I don’t see a lot of great solutions.” He raises
one hand, waving the green-and-white pa­
perback vaguely in the air. “Invisible Cities
is about dialogue,” he explains, “a fictional
encounter between Kublai Khan and Marco
Polo. They tell each other these fantastical
tales about cities they’ve visited, but by the
end you realize that they’re all imaginary,
that they’re just sitting there telling each
other stories.” His dance, he says, tries to
recreate this mystical quality, this reduction
of all meaning to pure imagination.
This is where the text comes into play. To
get the fantasy effect, explains Taylor as he
pulls an unmarked cassette from its case,
he’s tried to bring out “the beauty of the
language itself, as music.” He flicks on the
stereo. “I think we really did create musical
form from the language,” he observes.
Words begin to float from the speakers. But
wait. Chinese? “Yeah,” he says. “Here we
took away the traditional music entirely and
made a tape based on Chinese, Italian, and
English narrations of a particular text from
the book.” A resonant English voice swims
somewhere beneath the insistant, guitar-like
Chinese words. Taylor sighs. “The Chinese
is gorgeous. And I think when we get the
Italian in there— ”
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

10

I

«mmmnrwip

If Taylor’s musical finesse works well
with Calvino’s text, though, his choreogra­
phy leaves you speechless. I sit hunched in
front of his VCR, mesmerized by the ways
his dancers manage to create the blurry,
surreal sense of imaginative play that the
readings invoke. Two men circle each other,
their movements fluid but courtly, angling
alternately away from and toward one an­
other. Tobin’s cello whines hypnotically,
sounding vaguely like a cross between Laurie
Anderson and Maurice Ravel. And a voice
says, “Newly arrived and totally ignorant of
the language, Marco Polo could express
himself only with gestures, leaps, cries of
wonder and of horror.” Other dancers begin
to flood the stage, raising their arms briefly
toward one another, offering their own short
narratives with full, expressive movement.
They begin to make webs with their bodies,
lifting themselves into tenuous, imaginary
shapes that dissolve in seconds. The cello
overtakes an unintelligible voice. Words
become a low pulse behind the music.
Taylor shifts abruptly in his seat. “It’s all
so beautiful!” He reads from his text, “ ‘Cities
in the shape of Kyoto or Los Angeles’—this
is great. The actual surface meaning of it is
quite ambiguous, but it’s great!” No kidding,
I want to tell him, but I’m still staring at
figures arching, touching, and breaking apart
on the screen. These images stay with me
long after Taylor has snapped off the TV,
long after I’ve packed up my tape recorder
and Taylor has seen me to the door. I sit on
the subway, oblivious to the mutterings of
the drunken woman next to me. I imagine
myself light and liquid, my body moving in
time to Tobin’s hypnotic melody, my move­
ments as illusory as Marco Polo’s invisible
cities.
Taylor had worried that “the danger in a
project like this is that it requires a great deal
of generosity from the viewers.” But Taylor
himself is a generous artist: spiriting a cere­
bral text into a full-bodied and evocative
theatrical piece, giving himself fully to this
project while still dreaming of other, future
directions. He thinks of courting vampireschlock novelist Anne Rice as a collaborator.
He mentions exploring dance through video.
And he says something, cryptically, about
Hawaii. J8W
Cindi Leive ’88 graduated with high honors
and holds a position as editorial assistant at
Glamour magazine. She reports that M ark
Taylor’s newest dance, titled XAN AD U /
THE MILLIONS, will be performed at New
York’s P.S. 122 on January 6,7,8; Philadel­
phia’s Painted Bride on March 13,14; and
the Baltimore Museum o f Art, March 18,19.
The dance is based upon Italo Calvino’s
novel Invisible Cities.
JANUARY 1989

hey begin to
make webs
with their
bodies, lifting them­
selves into tenuous,
imaginary shapes
that dissolve in
seconds....

T

11

by Roger Williams

Chris Edley, Jr., ’73
One Republican, one Democrat,
On becoming issues director for Dukakis
(not Jackson):
two Swarthmore issues directors
Why did I work for Dukakis and not
Jackson?
The short answer is that Dukakis
serve in the
1988 presidential
race
called, and Jackson didn’t. The other answer
Late in the evening of Election Day 1988 at an on-campus party in
front of large-screen television, a member of the Dukakis for President
contingent, sporting an oversize Duke ’88 button and surrounded by an
increasingly melancholy crowd, remarked cheerfully, “We won.”
He went on to explain, hastily, what he meant: A Swarthmore Col­
lege alumnus served as issues director for each campaign, an indication
of the remarkable influence and eclecticism of alumni, and a positive,
vital sign for the College.
That startling fact, certainly a first for Swarthmore and very possibly
a historic precedent in America, may suggest how stimulating an envi­
ronment the College provides for bright students of varying political
ideologies. And it demonstrates to many that a view of Swarthmore as
exclusively liberal or left-leaning is about as accurate as the notion that
the College is single sex.
Certainly the two issues directors— Robert Zoellick ’75 (the Bush
campaign) and Christopher Edley, Jr., ’73 (Dukakis ’55)— have plenty
in common. Both had gone from Swarthmore to Harvard Law School,
and both had served in previous administrations. Both men are in their
30s and married (Zoellick’s spouse is writer Sherry Ferguson Zoellick
’77). Both, significantly, are products of a Swarthmore education that
encourages rather than diminishes differences in ideas and political dis­
cussion. As issues director, each had great power and responsibility,
managing a team of some 35 foreign and domestic policy advisors and
five or six speech writers.
Their differences, however, are noteworthy. One is white, one black.
One is the son of Midwesterners who are not college educated, the
other the son of academically ambitious parents who graduated from
Howard University. (Edley, whose father also graduated from Harvard
Law, is the first second-generation black to become an alumnus of the
prestigious law school.) One is a Republican, one a Democrat.
The two discussed their lives as issues directors in brief conversations
held several weeks before the election. Edley paused to consider the
campaign at the end of a long day spent on campus^ Zoellick made
room for a conversation in the midst of a hectic afternoon at BushQuayle headquarters in Washington, D.C.
Their observations on daily campaigning, on themselves, on the
media, and on their respective candidates are excerpted from those
conversations.

is that I am a pragmatist, and I eagerly joined
the Dukakis effort because I believe his
candidacy represented an outstanding op­
portunity for black America. The opportu­
nity theme was at the core of his campaign
and his career. And the fact that I viewed
him not only as the right candidate but as
electable, and did not view Jackson as
electable, made it no contest.
The signals that I got from black leaders
across the country suggested they were not
only pleased with what I was doing, and
where I was doing it, but proud of the fact

HARRY KALISH

SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

that I was. I think it’s important that the
issues director in the Dukakis campaign is
black. It’s an important fact about the role
of blacks in the Democratic—capital D—
political process.
On the daily grind:
This duty requires fifteen-hour days seven
days a week. But then I’m looking forward
to a month of vacation. I have a terrific staff,
incredibly good people. The staff numbers
about 42 including five speech writers. These
people are wonderfully dedicated and tal­
ented. Many are in their mid-20s, some in
their early 30s, a few in their late 30s.
Campaigning, after all, is for youngsters
simply because of the pace. When I leave at
night, between 9 and 11:30, half my staff is
still there, more than half. There are always
a couple who remain all night, and you just

can’t do that month after month unless
you’re young. And you can’t do it if you’re
the candidate, either. You have to pace your­
self.
On the media:
I’d say about half my day is spent talking to
the media, and I’ll tell you, journalism can
make you a cynic.
The media’s strengths and weaknesses?
It’s difficult to speak in generalities simply
because there’s a tremendous range. The
difference between the scope given to a firstrate reporter at the Wall Street Journal to
write a detailed, substantive analysis of the
trade positions of the two candidates and the
scope given to a political reporter at USA
Today makes the two jobs as different as an
orthopedic surgeon and your neighborhood
butcher.

Christopher Edley, Jr., 73 talks politics with animated students on campus before the 1988 election.
JANUARY 1989

But having said that, much of journalism
is dominated by concerns for consumer
preference, if you will. Most obviously in
respect to broadcast journalism. They’re
worried about attention span, visual interest,
simplified presentations.
And most producers feel that competition
is the thing of most interest to viewers. To
use a sports metaphor: the horse race. I think
this proves a disadvantage to a candidate
like Dukakis, who is more thoughtful.
There is another very important structural
problem. The reporters who cover the cam­
paign are, by and large, political reporters,
which is a species of sports reporter in some
sense. The political reporters, who are very
inexpert on specific issues like environmental
policy or the Super Fund or the moderniza­
tion of the land-base leg of the nuclear triad,
sometimes can’t recognize a good idea if it
hits them over the head.
Meanwhile the “substantive” reporter
who has the beat—the environmental beat
or the defense beat—is sitting back at the
head office usually with instructions not to
write about the campaign because that’s
assigned to the political desk. So it means
that day-to-day coverage is written by inex­
pert observers for producers who have their
eyes on consumer tastes and with the con­
straint that it be designed and packaged to
create “tapioca pudding.”
Maybe another way of putting it: It’s as
though you’re a composer who has created
a symphony, but you’re told that the music
critic in attendance that evening will consider
only that part of the performance that is
fortissimo; otherwise it might as well never
have been sounded. This is not good for
democracy or the democratic process.
On successes and failures:
On a personal level I’ve grown a great deal.
And I’ve learned a lot, obviously, in terms
of policy, particularly on the national secu­
rity side. I realized this the other day during
13

Both men went from Swarthm ore to Harvard.
a CBS interview that covered an incredible
range of questions.
There has been growth for me in learning
to manage a significant number of people
and a very complicated organization under
tremendous pressure, very tight resource
constraints, with difficult tasks.
It’s also been personally rewarding getting
to know Mike Dukakis well. He is an in­
teresting, complicated, admirable person,
and I’ve learned plenty from watching his
character be tested and his j udgment applied
to dramatically changing circumstances.
When I consider what I’ve done wrong,
I realize that I’m more skillful today at
managing my “shop” than I was a year ago.
I think, in retrospect, that I lost a few
bureaucratic battles I probably should have
been more forceful about winning. In particu­
lar, I wish that in the winter and spring I had
demanded a larger budget to hire speech
writers. You know, had we developed more
of an in-house speech writing capacity ear­
lier, we would have been in better shape at
the end, with less pressure on everybody.
People would know how to write in “Duke
speak” rather than having to get up to speed
during the crucial weeks.
I think that if I had to do this all over
again, I would organize my operation so that
I had fewer responsibilities for the daily
management of policy development and
more opportunity to work with members of
Congress in communicating our message to
their constituents and to the press. I enjoy
policy development—a lot—but that’s selfindulgent.
On Dukakis:
He has a very clear sense of the kind of
speech he wants to deliver—the ideas, the
cadences, the language. The words you put
in front of some politicians are the words
that come out of their mouths. Dukakis is
not that way at all; he’s difficult to program.
He processes it all himself; he owns it. In this
organization everyone has the sense that the
boss is better at it, that he knows more. And
he does.
This is not to say we don’t have arguments.
For example, I went through a long exercise
with my staff one night to create a memo
trying to persuade him to change his mind
on a point I wanted to include in our housing
initiative. I spent an hour on the phone with
people on the plane to educate them to all
the nuances so they could present the argu­
ments on both sides to him. That kind of
14

thing may or may not cause him to change
his mind. But that’s exactly the way the is­
sues team ought to work.
On life after Nov. 8,1988:
[My wife Tana] has been wonderfully sup­
portive, but it’s been tough. She’s a manage­
ment consultant with an office at the house
and daily responsibility for our 41/2-year-old
son who just started kindergarten. I’m look­
ing forward to spending a lot of time with
them.
I don’t know what I’ll feel after Nov. 8.
I am physically and emotionally exhausted.
Even if we win, the idea of just dropping out
completely is a real possibility. I’ve worked
in Washington and at the White House
before, and there is no particular job the
prospect of which excites me.
Susan [Estrich] and I were joking the
other day that we’re just about the only
people on the campaign with a job to return
to on Nov. 9. Having tenure at the Harvard
Law School, you know, ain’t a bad spot in
life, especially after 19 months of not seeing
my wife and kid. And there are things I want
to write. So I guess I’m saying that unlike
many people in politics, I have a welldefined alternative that is very attractive.
I know I’ll replay in my mind a lot of
meetings, a lot of speeches, a lot of issues
papers—I know that I’ll do a lot of soulsearching about things I may have been able
to do better, win or lose.
And I will feel deeply sad for the country,
especially the “have-nots” in our society, if
we lose.

Robert Zoellick ’75
On origin:
Mike Dukakis was on the cross-country
team, and I was captain of the cross-country
team for two years. He ran the Boston
Marathon, I ran the Boston Marathon. He
was at Harvard, and I was there, so we have
a similar background in that respect. I am
not, however, the son either of a doctor or
of immigrants. I am the son of some plain

old Midwestern people. There you go. I
lived about 25 miles west of Chicago. It’s
kind of flat out there. As James Field [Isaac
H. Clothier Professor Emeritus of History]
used to say, “America starts west of the
Appalachians.”
On becoming issues director for the Bush
campaign:
I got here because of Secretary James
Baker—a small number of us came over
from the Treasury Department with him.
After I left Swarthmore in 1975,1 worked
basically as an economic research person at
the end of the Ford administration. Then I
went back and did a joint law degree and
public policy program at Harvard. Then I
took two leaves of absence, and one of them
was a Luce Fellowship in Hong Kong.
Sherry and I came back early on that
because placement wasn’t all that good and
I was eager to get back and finish up at
Harvard, where I had one semester left.
Then I was in private practice in Washing­
ton, and worked on a sort of board of
appeals for the D.C. circuit, and eventually
came over to Treasury. I’ve been at Treasury
for about three years.
On the daily grind:
I’d never worked a campaign before—it’s
very chaotic. I’m always suspect of people
who talk about the long hours—it’s the sort
of thing Swarthmoreans do—but for a
marathoner who’s worked hard hours virtu­
ally all my life, it’s the most exhausting
experience I’ve ever had. I’m here from 7:45
a.m. to 11 p.m. virtually every day.
My job involves me in everything from
issues proposals, whether foreign policy or
domestic, to the message through speech
writing—I’m in charge of the speech-writing
staff. Then there’s sort of a feast of other
things: debate preparation, issues favors as
Congress tries to use the last weeks to push
through an agenda that is as much politically
related to the elections as it is of substance.
My job is very operational. I participate
each morning in a small senior staff meeting
with Baker and ten other people—and I
raise any points that need to be raised. Then
I come back and have my own meeting of
policy people and speech writers and deter­
mine what needs to be done.
I am by nature a careful editor, and I do
a lot of writing in this job, too. A lot of stuff
for the vice president I’ll edit or send to
somebody else, but sometimes I end up writ­
ing a good chunk myself.
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

On being labeled a conservative:
I view myself instead as a person of a
political nature. I think most of the people
who know me will endorse that. I have
worked for a variety of accomplished people
in Washington, both in the public and
private sectors and in different parties as
well. And I think most people who look at
Secretary Baker’s tenure would consider it
accomplished in terms of overall mainstream
American internationalism, and I can give
you an example—the Canada Free Trade
Agreement, which I worked on quite a bit.
A lot of what I have done [in Washington]
consisted of trying to protect the taxpayer
from whatever interest group wants to be
bailed out.
So I mean, relative to the Swarthmore
population which I would not care to rep­
resent more than the United States popula­
tion, I tend to be moderate to conservative.
That is somewhat rare at Swarthmore.
Swarthmore is always very proud of its
consideration of those in the minority, and
here you’ve got somebody in the minority,
right?
On negative campaigning:
I would think the criticism about not focus­
ing on issues is unfair. I mean, we put out
proposals on energy, ethics, education, envi­
ronment, child care, drugs, defense, foreign
policy—they’re all over the place. For ex­
ample, we had a major foreign policy speech
in Chicago, and we set out some seven
principles for Bush foreign policy. So what
the TV news ran was a picture of a guy
nodding in the audience.
So one point is this: There are a lot of
issues and ideas out there that a lot of people
don’t get to see and hear. A second point is
that, by and large, the conduit to the Ameri­
can people, the media, don’t tend to reward
long Adlai Stevenson-type speeches.
But a third point is that there’s this blurry
category between issues and values that
actually tells a lot to the American people.
You know if you fundamentally believe in
democracy, as I do, you sometimes feel a bit
suspect of what I consider a slightly elite
opinion on how you are supposed to select
people. The American people, by and large,
make some pretty good choices.
To understand complex ideas people will
use generalized slogans or concepts. In the
debate, for example, I think people saw the
issues, but they saw something else. They
saw two very different personalities, one

who was a very good technical debater with
good facts and figures, whose diction and
sentence structure were, I think, very good
in explaining his points; but I think—put
aside my views—the columnists said he still
looked more like a machine. He doesn’t do
well on the likable test. He smiles in the
wrong places.
Now Bush, on the other hand, might
stumble over some words, but people sort of
think, hey—that’s a normal human being.
To a degree, the American people are select­
ing someone they want as a head of state, as
well as a head of government. Which I think
is one of the reasons why Reagan has been
such an enormous success. And this is some­
thing a Swarthmore intellectual may not
fully grasp: The president is both the head of
state and the head of government. He’s very
important in terms of symbolic leadership.
On Bush:
He has been the best check, a constant check,
on ideas and policy shaped by his staff. Bush
has spent much of his life in government. We
may bring him an idea that is good politics,
but he’ll say, well, gee, you know if I were
governing, I couldn’t really promise that.
And this is a very good, healthy situation.
Bush views our proposals as a responsible
person who is governing; he decides on that
basis how to accept them.
On himself and life after Nov. 8,1988:
I’ve always been interested in public service,
and I’m sort of an old-fashioned American
nationalist. I think this will have been an
interesting few months for me upon reflec­
tion, learning about the country, the election
process, the candidates.
I’ve always had a love of military history,
too. I think part of it is that military history
is an interesting way of having a sense of the
most basic essence of life and conflict. You
read about the sense of comradeship, the
community of people—I mean you get
down to some of the most basic elements of
life. It’s just sort of a personal interest.
I consider myself a private person, by and
large, so neither my wife nor I tend to have
a particularly active external life. Sherry, as
you would expect from someone from
Swarthmore, is a very independent, selfsustained person. We’ve agreed that we will
take at least ten days off on some islands in
the Caribbean when this is over.
After that it depends, but I’ll probably be
somewhere in the administration. A
15

PHOTOS BY BRUCE REEDY '68

The Fiction of Franzen
A young alumnus unveils an acclaimedfirst novel
Jonathan Franzen ’81 stands in the kitchen
at the home of his former German professor,
George Avery, and watches Mrs. Avery
break two breakfast eggs into the belly of a
pan brushed with butter. The yokes rise like
binary suns, perfect yellow orbs, and Fran­
zen waits, watching the unblemished whites
run out to full circles.
“Actually,” he says then, “I’ve changed
my tune on eggs. I like the yokes broken,
although it’s probably a violation of aesthet­
ics.” He smiles solicitously as Mrs. Avery
hurries to lacerate the plump centers, bleed­
ing together yokes and whites.
Now the mixture forms an imperfect and
violently achieved integration of colors. Fran­
zen is pleased. That’s the effect he wanted.
How the 29-year-old Franzen likes his
eggs is how he likes his fiction: plot and
characters bled together in ways that are by
turns violent, unorthodox, comic, unex­
pected, ambiguous, and utterly absorbing.
His first novel, The Twenty-Seventh City, a
517-page tale published in September by
Farrar Straus Giroux, has appeared to what
can only be labeled raves—the kind of
reviews that put your name in lights. Critics
have called his book “a clever narrative of
Pynchonesque intricacy” (The New York
Times); “perceptive as well as imaginative”
(The Philadelphia Inquirer); “unsettling and
visionary . . . a book of memorable charac­
ters, surprising situations, and provocative
ideas” (The Washington Post); “a novel of
our times” (Los Angeles Times Book Re­
view); and “a little Dickens, a touch of Ruth
Rendell, a dash of Salman Rushdie, the
literary extravagance of the nineteenth cen­
tury and the matter-of-fact weirdness of
science fiction . . . a big, lavish novel of
creepy realism” (Newsweek).
Looking at him, tall and gangly with skin
so pale he appears faint, wire rims framing
watery blue eyes that move often and rest­
lessly, you wonder where the writer hides.
He is boyish, self-effacing. So polite it’s
almost embarrassing. Funny and wry, a
straight-faced showman who might be un­
derestimated as shy. But this is a literary
novelist whose fiction reveals a tough, fear­
less quality that belies appearance. Where is
16

the fire in Franzen?
Other young American male writers who
have captured the worlds of book critic and
popular reader before the age of 30 often as
not meet success like rodeo cowboys—they
ride into it bucking and fighting, whiskey­
drinking or drugging or womanizing or
rocketing through the world of cocktail
parties and fame—until the pace throws
them, and they’re left unable to write at all,
or unable to write as well as they first did,
or just plain unable.
Or so it sometimes seems. There is no sign
of this wildness in Jonathan Franzen, how­
ever, not at breakfast the morning after he
has traveled to Swarthmore to read from the
novel. No scars or bloodshot eyes (Heming­
way), no rising suddenly in midsentence to
leave his hosts’ table without another word
(Faulkner), no handguns or cowboy boots
(Thomas McGuane), no Kerouacesque ro­
manticism or chemically induced walk­
abouts into the heart of darkness (Ken Kesey
or Robert Stone). Unlike, say, Jay Mclnerney (Bright Lights, Big City, age 29), Jona­
than has not come home to breakfast from
a night on the wild side. He has come back
to Swarthmore at a moment when praise,
pride, and some degree of glamour surround
him, and he greets them in an unironed,
oxford button-down shirt open at the neck,
a neat, nondescript pair of trousers, and no­
name running shoes probably acquired on
sale from an unknown shoe outlet. He looks
like a poor but tidy graduate student who
may well break in mid-dissertation and run
for a job writing catalog copy.
In truth Franzen is disciplined, toughminded, and relentless, and in the world of
fiction he’s a loner, as the remarkable and
distinct pattern of his young literary life
suggests. After graduating from Swarthmore,
he traveled on a Fulbright to Germany,
where he studied German playwrights (in
1987 he translated a Wedekind play for pro­
duction at the College). Then in 1982 he
returned to the States, married, and gave up
the academic life entirely. Both Franzen and
his new spouse, Valerie Cornell ’81, decided

by Roger Williams

to write, and they did it together in a way
that suggests just how much fortitude it takes
to succeed and how much they have.
They took part-time jobs, Franzen at
Harvard University’s Department of Earth
and Planetary Science, where he worked as
a research assistant in a seismology lab and
acquired some knowledge about earth­
quakes (important to the plot of his second
novel, he reveals), and they lived in tiny
quarters in Cambridge. Later they moved to
the Queens neighborhood of Jackson
Heights to be closer to the New York
publishing world. They wrote for eight to
ten hours each day, according to Franzen,
and then read all evening, for years. At no
time between 1982 and 1988 did Franzen or
Cornell, who has not yet published her first
novel because, says Franzen, “she hasn’t yet
found an editor smart enough for it,” ever
attend a writers workshop or enroll in one
of the hundred or so master of fine arts
writing programs around the country.
That in itself is a remarkable fact since
few writers in America publish anymore
without some form of participation in the
university network. Esquire fiction editor
Rust Hills introduced his summer fiction
issue several years ago with a comment that
continues to prove true, apparently, for al­
most all writers except the young novelist
from Swarthmore: “If one but stands back
a bit and looks, one sees that it is no longer
the book publishers and magazines, but
rather the colleges and universities that sup­
port the entire structure of the American
literary establishment—and, moreover, es­
sentially determine the nature and shape of
that structure.. . . There can scarcely be an
American writer in his 30s who hasn’t been
involved in a university writing program
somewhere, sometime in his life.”
Meet Jonathan Franzen.
Editor’s Note: Awarded a $25,000 Whiting
Writer’s Award fo r 1988 in late October,
Jonathan Franzen read from his newly pub­
lished novel, The Twenty-Seventh City, dur­
ing a recent visit to campus. Following the
reading he discussed his life as a writer and
his book, ostensibly the story o f a violent
siege o f St. Louis, Mo., by a cabal o f Indians.
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

Singh was right. It sounded bad. The Probsts
were having a putrid, corny, weepy holiday,
God and sinner reconciled, and Barbara
Probst more clearly than ever an agent for
the Thought Police, appealing to her hus­
band with a calculated tremolo, wearing
down his resistance with her self-help hon­
esty and putting him to sleep with the notion
that everything was fine. The instrument of
repression: “love.”
Jammu called Singh. “Nice going.
They’re happier than they’ve been in years.”
“On the surface, yes. But I’ve thought it
over—”
“Probst isn’t even arguably in the State
and it’s almost January.”
“As I was saying, I’ve thought it over and
I think we’re all right, because Probst will
never trust her now. She pressed her luck,
she mentioned me. She’s still nailed.”
Maybe. But with so much talent, so much
investment, so much technique and theory
trained on such a very few men in St. Louis,
Jammu thinks it’s reasonable to demand
resounding victories. She owns the scalps of
Meisner, Struthers, Hammaker, Murphy,
Wesley, Hutchinson, and she has liens on all
the rest—except Probst’s.
Singh told her to cheer up. He read her
a reference from a poem in The New Yorker.
For Gary Carter, Frank Perdue,
Bono Vox and S. Jammu!
Then he hung up.
(from The Twenty-Seventh City)

Q: I read the short story Facts that first
appeared as an entry in the fiction contest at
Swarthmore your senior year, then was
published last year. In both that story and
the novel, at some point, you drop a hapless
white suburbanite in a black urban jungle.
Is that something you think about, the
foolish white lost in blackland?
A: Yeah. I think it’s a little bit tendentious
to say blackland, but sure, it’s a fear a lot of
people have in this country. Being shot to
death in a bad neighborhood is something
you might work with if you’re trying to write
affectingly. It sounds bad to you, and you
guess it sounds bad to other people.
Q: Have you been criticized at all for your

Q: How long did the novel take you to
write?
A: I guess I started in the fall of 1981 and
had a final draft in the spring of 1986. And
I hadn’t finished cutting until the spring of
1987. So, subtracting two years for other
HARRY KALISH
things, I spent about four years. But during
those four years I was working eight, ten
hours a day.
Q: How much cutting did you do?
A: I cut about 25 percent, about 130
pages or so. In fact I typed the original
1,013-page manuscript, and then I cut 200
pages out of it and typed it again, and then
I cut out 60 more pages and retyped 300 at
that point, too. I used a typewriter.
Q: Sounds painful. But for you does that
retyping process also involve some rewrit­
ing?
A: Yeah, it forces you to see your sen­
tences. Anything that gives you another
chance to strike out something bad is good. depiction of minorities, Indians in particular,
Q: Are you surprised by the reviews?
or blacks?
A: That’s a hard question to answer. I’m
A: One review called the book a total
a little surprised by the number of them— flop, from top to bottom ribaldly written,
25 or something at this point. Two years ago preposterous, racist, insulting. People are
I was only hoping to find a publisher and sensitive to this, as they should be, and all I
expecting no more than that.
can say to them is read the book and see if

e looks like a
poor but tidy
graduate student
w ho m ay... run
for a job writing
catalog copy.

H

JANUARY 1989

you think it’s racist. I think I got a lot of
mileage out of making fun of Americans,
especially middle Americans’ feeling about
people unlike themselves. I definitely see
myself more on the side of the Indians in
matters of race and culture than on the side
of the Midwesterners. But it’s true that the
stark outline of the book might appear
racist. And in fact a cooperative bookstore
in St. Louis run by former hippies—that’s
not a good way to characterize them—run
by very good, very liberal individuals had a
problem with the book, not because of its
treatment of Indians, but because of its por­
trayal of blacks as politically unorganized
and susceptible to manipulation.
Q: Is it difficult for you and your wife to
pursue the same creative process all the time
while living cheek to jowl?
A: It’s good for the writing; it’s bad for us.
We have felt that it was us against the world
for many years and continue to feel that
way, and we have been equal. Suddenly this
success drops into the household of hard­
working people, and just as suddenly we
find ourselves unequal in the eyes of the
world.
Q: How do you handle that? Do you talk
about it, laugh about it?
A: We feel everything from anger, to
laughter, to whatever. It’s been particularly
bad in New York because it’s right at the
center of the industry and you see close up
what a very commercial thing it is. When
you’re a little farther from New York, I think
it’s easier to have illusions about what drives
the publishing world. That’s impossible in
New York. Everywhere you go you’re just
reminded of what the industry is like.
Q: It’s more than just crass, though, isn’t
it? In one of your interviews you said that
you had set out to be a literary novelist, and
not something else, and the publication of
this novel suggests there are people, agents
and editors and a reading public, looking for
that kind of writing.
A: Yes, there are, but it’s a realistic busi­
ness, too, and they almost always have to see
a chance of making money. They’re hardnosed, yeah, but editors are in the very
contradictory position of appearing both
committed to literature and committed to
corporate profit.
Q: Did you work closely with a quintes­
sential big publishing house editor who sat
down and looked at your work and made
recommendations?
A: Changes were made before the manu­
script reached the editor. I have a very, very
fine editor whose chief occupation with
regard to the book has been to recognize that
it’s good. And I was so afraid of not being
able to sell it that I worked it over very
17

thoroughly on my own. Obviously Valerie is
very central, too, because it’s not possible to
keep an objectivity as you rewrite something
for the sixtieth time.
Q: That sounds very difficult, asking your
wife to look at your work and be honest
about it. That might grate upon a lot of
people. How do you avoid the irritation?
A: Well, we try to work it out. There’s no
way to make, “This is bad, change it,”
anything but hurtful. But we try to discover
the bad times of the day to say, “This is bad,
change it.”
Q: How did you organize this rather
massive plot and the many characters you
present?
A: I worked a way I wouldn’t want to try
again, very haphazardly. You go back and
forth between writing and planning. You
can’t plan anymore because you’re so sick of
planning, so you go back to writing, and
then you can’t write anymore because you
don’t know enough, so you go back to
planning, and that’s probably a pattern.
Straight dialectic.
Q: What does that mean?
A: That you go back and forth because
neither planning nor writing is complete in
itself. One contains the seed of the other,
which contains the seed of itself, and that is
the process.
Q: Do you find that part of the process
laborious, uncomfortable, unpleasant?
A: Oh, it’s all unpleasant. From top to
bottom, start to finish, the process is un­
pleasant.
Q: What compels you to do it then?
A: Well, occasionally it’s very satisfying,
and otherwise—Flannery O’Connor had
the best answer. When people asked why
she wrote, she said because it’s what I’m
good at. You have to do something, and it’s
my fortune or misfortune to do something
which is very hard but very rewarding, too.
Q: Do you feel that events that appear to
be random may be related by some kind of
providence or plan, or is this an attitude you
adopt only when you sit down at the type­
writer?
A: I would draw a very careful distinction
between literary technique and actual honest
perception of the world. What it takes to tell
a story and look at the world in the way I
want it looked at may be a point of view in
real life I don’t find applicable. So no, I’m
not a paranoid believer in conspiracy. At the
same time I’m a little paranoid, and I very
much believe in large conspiracies that are
generally common knowledge, open secrets
such as a group of 250 people conspiring to
wreck the remaining wilderness on a conti­
nent.
Q: Do you consider yourself a political
18

person in a way that might make you
attentive to the 1988 presidential election,
for example?
A: I have issues that I vote on, but I
consider myself political in the way that
academics might. They might think about
the world and history in political terms, but
it’s not necessarily related to the posters and
phone calls. I think that’s very important,
however, and I worry about my own apathy.
An election like this is so depressing. Just for
self-protection, if you’re young at this stage,
you almost have to tell yourself it doesn’t
really matter because if you persuade yourself
it matters, you go crazy with despair.
Q: Are you a fatalist or a determinist, as
your plot might suggest?
A: Not a fatalist, not determinist, just a
moralist, maybe.
Q: I remember hearing Adrienne Rich
say that all writers have to be moral and
political. Do you think that’s true?
A: I always like to avoid generalizations
about what writers should be or must be. I
know what kinds of writers I prefer, but
there are many ways to skin a cat. I think
people who write from a purely aesthetic
standpoint, who care about nothing but the
beauty of what they are doing and allow no

f you don’t also
have an
unreasonable
attachment to
beauty and the
aesthetics of your art,
then w ho cares?”

I

other considerations like politics—they’re
just fine, and it would be poorer for literature
if they weren’t working that way. Nobody
should write badly. You can be the most
moral and political person in the world and
have the most heartfelt beliefs, but if you
don’t also have an unreasonable attachment
to beauty and the aesthetics of your art, then
who cares?
Q: What writers do you admire the most?
A: This is a frequently asked question,
and I have it down to a list: Dostoyevski,
Dickens, Kafka, Flannery O’Connor,
Thomas Pynchon, Joan Chase, Dennis John­
son, Joan Didion—I could rattle on and on.
Kafka has been very important to me,
although it may not show.

Q: In what way?
A: Because I started out with a conception
of the book that would not make clear
whether the conspirators were good or bad
for their so-called victims, and the form that
the conspiracy takes is to precipitate crisis in
the family. It remains ambiguous throughout
whether the same thing would have hap­
pened in the same way even without any
intervention. I wanted there to be room for
the possibility that the Probsts are not the
victims they seem at first glance to be.
Q: You seem to have written and pub­
lished this novel independently, and appar­
ently you haven’t acquired an M.F.A. from
a writing program or hobnobbed in fiction
workshops as most writers do.
A: No, I haven’t, and it’s not easy to say
why. In part, I think, because you have to
pay for those things, and there were two of
us so we weren’t in such acute need of
emotional support. Also I don’t particularly
like the prevailing style—these workshops
are made to order for short stories. And we
wanted to get far away from the academic
scene, having gone for it hook, line, and
sinker while we were at Swarthmore. I felt
that the study of literature and the academic
treatment of literature were really very much
at odds with the actual production of it. I
think it’s important not to receive false
encouragement and not to think that the
way literature is taught is the way it’s ac­
tually read in this country.
And at one point Valerie and I did apply
to a couple of schools when we were just
acutely lonely, and the reason we did it is we
wanted to make some friends who were
writers. We didn’t care about the instruction,
but we thought we might get some money,
and someone would pay our bills, and we’d
get to know some people, and, hell, it
wouldn’t hurt to take these workshops.
Stanford didn’t want either of us, and Brown
wouldn’t offer us any money. That’s partly
because an excerpt from a novel, especially
one based very much on context and on
large structure, just can’t compete with a
well-made short story someone has slaved
over for six months to make it absolutely
sing. At the same time, what the country
wants is the other way around. People don’t
really care about a finely tuned short story
the way they do about a sprawling book. So
I somewhat smugly felt popular culture was
on my side.
Q: A final flip question. If you had to take
a short passage of fiction and have it in­
scribed on your wall, what would you
choose?
A: The end of A Good Man Is Hard To
Find [Flannery O’Connor]: “Shut up, Bobby
Lee, it’s no real pleasure in life.” J9k,
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

A View
From
The Border
In the hard hills
once ridden by Geronimo
andP ancho Villa,
a Swarthm ore senior sneaks
a refugee into sanctuary
by Tristan Reader ’89

Over the past eight years, an estimated 1 to
2 million refugees have fled the wars and
political violence of Central America. The
sanctuary movement is the organized re­
sponse of hundreds of churches and syna­
gogues and thousands of people throughout
the United States to the Central American
refugee crisis. In contrast to governments
which arrest and deport refugees, sanctuary
provides them with direct, humanitarian
assistance.
As part of a Swarthmore College Eugene
M. Lang Project of Social Change, I worked
with the sanctuary movement along the U.SMexico border from June 1987 to January
1988, interviewing and counseling refugees,
facilitating press coverage, and assisting refu­
gees in reaching safe haven in the U.S. This
account, using fictitious names, describes
how sanctuary helped one refugee reach safe
haven along la frontera, the border.
As we sat in the coffee shop of the historic
Gadsden Hotel in Douglas, Ariz., waiting
for Ben, a fellow sanctuary worker, my
nerves were just about shot. Later in the day

we were to begin a multiday trek from the
U.S.-Mexico border northw ard, following a
long, rugged route, w ith a young Salvadoran
refugee. Three weeks earlier the w om an’s
nam e had appeared on a death squad list
that was circulating in El Salvador. If we
were caught by M exican or American
authorities, M aria w ould be deported and
most likely killed upon her return to El
Salvador; we might be tried and imprisoned.
A nd she ran an even greater risk staying in
Mexico than coming into the U.S., for the
tentacles of the Salvadoran death squads
have been known to reach up through
Mexico, and on m any occasions Salvadoran
women in Mexico have been forced into
prostitution.
A sanctuary w orker, D aniel, had spent
days looking for M aria in M exico City and
had finally located her. The tw o had traveled
20

by bus to a city near the U.S-M exico border.
From there a series of frantic and almost
surely tapped phone calls led to the plan to
use a m ultiday crossing through the desert
canyonlands. W e were to meet M aria and
D aniel at the ragged, barbed-w ire cattle
fence that extends for 2,000 miles, separating
the U nited States from Mexico. Then we
planned to hike north for several days before
driving to Tucson. Jt would, we knew, be a
long and difficult week.
A uthor A lan W eism an writes in L a Frontera: The U nited States B order W ith M exi­
co:
W est of the Rio G rande, the border
ignores nature. Except for one short jog
at the Colorado River, a series of
straight lines adhering to treaty, not
topography, define the boundary. As a
result, the terrain along these political

Top: The unforgiving landscape faced by Central
American refugees. The deaths o f 13 Salvadorans
in 1980 near this border location sparked the
origins o f the sanctuary movement. Right: A
rancher’s evil-tempered ponies go into a defensive
circle near the Arizona-Sonora border. One refu­
gee described a night spent in fea r as he listened
to a mountain lion yowling near his hiding place.

extremities often refuses to cooperate.
W ater flows where we don’t w ant it; the
land tilts unfavorably in one direction
or another; and m uch of the frontier
discourages access, even by the Border
Patrol___Like retribution for imposing
distinctions where none should exist,
the faint delineation betw een O ld and
N ew Mexico beyond Juarez and El
Paso is one of the border’s most violent
excesses.
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

This m ade the area the logical, albeit diffi­
cult, choice for such a high-risk crossing.
But for the moment, I sat w ith Lillian,
waiting, ignoring my coffee, in the aging
hotel where Pancho Villa had often gam bled
and caroused. “Built in the early part of the
century,” W eism an writes, “the ceiling of its
gilded rococo lobby rests on columns of rich
French marble. O pposite the w alnut registry
is a grand staircase, slightly chipped from
w hen Pancho Villa once ascended it on his
horse.” Villa had come across the border to
this frontier tow n that had grown up around
the copper mines and smelters that now lie
idle, victims of cheap imports. Although
alive and vibrant for Pancho Villa, Douglas
has become a dying town. A nd I w ondered
if the famous revolutionary had ever been so
scared and nervous that he could not eat.
Finally Ben appeared. His build and beard
m ade him look like a giant, rough-andtum ble teddy bear. The three of us tossed
three backpacks into the back of the truck
and headed into the canyonlands. Driving
dow n dusty roads through the hard-bitten
country, no one said much. W e drew near
the meeting point, and the truck came to a

stop in front of a locked gate. M onths earlier,
a sym pathetic rancher had given us the
com bination to the lock, but I still feared a
changed lock or a new com bination. In my
anxiety I felt my heart surge w hen the
tum bler clicked in Lillian’s hand and the
lock fell open.
O n w e drove until the road intersected
w ith a dry arroyo that led to the border
fence, and beyond, into Mexico. As we got
out of the truck, Daniel, the young Salva­
doran w om an, and a young Anglo w om an
emerged from behind some cottonw ood
trees that stood gathered around the sporadic
w aterway. W e all shook hands and ex­
changed nervous smiles. Because o f our care
not to reveal too m uch on the phone calls to
and from Mexico, signals had gotten crossed;
the Anglo w om an, Laura, had befriended
the terrified M aria in M exico City and had
promised to accom pany her to Tucson. But
we had only enough food and w ater for
three people. A hasty discussion took place
under the cover o f the trees: Ben knew the
first few days o f the route; I knew the last
few; M aria, having been raised very tradi­
tionally in El Salvador, would have been

placed in a very uncomfortable situation
hiking, eating, and sleeping with two men
for several days, and she had grown very
attached to Laura.
It was decided that Ben would lead Maria
and Laura north for the first half of the trip;
I would then meet them with more supplies
and hike the rest of the way with them. Ben,
Maria, and Laura quickly hefted packs onto
their backs and headed off. Lillian, Daniel,
and I got into the truck and started back
toward Douglas. As I wrestled the pickup
over the rough terrain, I remembered what
a Swarthmore alumna and fellow sanctuary
worker had once said to me: “Anyone who
wants to do this work is crazy. It is something
that we must do, not something that we
enjoy doing.” I couldn’t relax yet, not until
everyone was back safely. So the waiting
began___
The chill that descends upon the desert on
winter nights seeped into my bones as I
waited for Daniel to come pick me up. In
order to get to the rendezvous with the three
hikers, we had to leave hours before dawn.
And I’ve never been a morning person. But
Daniel was, and as we drove, he told me
stories recalled from his days as a shepherd
in Montana: The sheep, he said, always
began to move at dawn, and so did he and
his dogs. This morning’s 3:30 a.m. wake-up
had been routine for him. For me, however,
nervousness was only overcome by drowsi­
ness.
As we neared the rendezvous, the gentle
hues of the desert dawn were becoming
visible. In contrast to the dramatic harshness
of the mountains, the subtle yellows, reds,
and tans of the earth were calming and
beautiful. It was often hard to believe that
the violence of humans could infringe so far
into such a beautiful world. Yet I looked
forward to a few days of hiking through that
natural world, fleeing from the “authorities”
who wished to send Maria back to the
violence of her home. Weeks earlier, I had
scouted this area with a Native American.
With sadness and anger I recalled that in this
same country, for years, the tenacious
Apache chief Geronimo had eluded capture
by government troops bent on extinguishing
an entire race of people and its culture. Both
sorrow and hope existed in these desert
mountains I had come to know.
After miles on an old, dirt road, we turned
off onto an unmarked jeep trail. Shortly we
stopped and stepped out into the cold, gusty
wind. The desert weather is harsh: cold,
snowy, and windy in winter, hot and arid in
the summer. We were worried about how
the three hikers were holding up; the
temperature had dropped into the low 30s
22

the night before. As Daniel waited with the
truck and extra supplies, I hiked in a couple
of miles to the rendezvous point. Ben
emerged from the brush, and we touched
hands and exchanged a quiet greeting. He
disappeared back into the brush for a few
minutes and returned with Maria and Laura.
Although Ben and Laura were looking fine,
Maria was not. The long days of hiking had
taken their toll; her feet were swollen and
blistered, and never having been out of El
Salvador’s tropical climate, she was worn
down by the cold weather, both emotionally
and physically. I took Maria’s pack, and we
walked back to the truck.
There we sat down to evaluate our situ-

s w e approached
. the Border
Patrol car, it pulled
into the opposite
lane and moved
toward us.

A

ation. The hike so far had been mostly
uneventful. But now, the rugged terrain and
weather had worked upon the somewhat
frail Maria, and she was close to exhaustion.
Realizing that it was she who had the most
to lose if caught, Daniel carefully explained
her options for getting to Tucson. We could
follow our plan and continue the trek on
foot, or we could drive out that morning.
The risk of injury, which runs high when ex­
haustion begins to set in, would be avoided.
But there would be a higher chance of being
spotted by the Border Patrol as we headed
out of the area.
Maria sat quietly, then asked our opinions.
As we discussed it, a consensus formed:
Given the state of Maria’s health, to drive out
that morning would be the best option. She
was visibly relieved and agreed. So we
started to load the truck. There was a shell
over the back, and a platform had been
placed there which made sleeping comfort­
able. But in this case, it served another
purpose; there was enough room created
beneath it to allow a small person or two,
like Maria, to crawl under and hide. I drove,
and Laura joined me in the front; Maria and
Daniel were hidden in the back; Ben headed

home on his own. All situated, we headed
off toward Douglas. With this arrangement,
it would appear to an observer along the
road that a young couple was heading home
from a weekend of camping.
The drive to Tucson was relaxing at first.
The stress of having to lead a refugee through
a route which I had hiked only once was
gone, and as the long journey commenced,
Laura and I began to talk. She had aban­
doned a well-paying job in a multinational
corporation six months earlier and had
begun working with community organiza­
tions in and around Mexico City. She had
no regrets, she claimed, about giving up all
of the things that our society equates with
success to help make the lives of a few
people a little better. My thoughts have
returned to that conversation many times
since then, and I have been challenged by
this woman with whom I have only spoken
once. What will I do when I leave Swarth­
more? How will I live my life? I still don’t
know.
Shortly after leaving Douglas, all of the
tension that I had felt earlier returned in a
sudden wave. A quarter mile ahead, omi­
nously parked on the side of the road, sat a
car painted in the characteristic gray-green
of the Border Patrol. I looked around des­
perately but saw no roads onto which I
could turn. Neither Daniel nor Maria, lying
in the back, had any idea of the risk we were
now being forced to take. So there was
nothing to do but keep driving. And pray.
As we approached the Border Patrol car,
it pulled into the opposite lane and moved
toward us. Laura and I held our breaths and
tried to look relaxed. Was the car slowing
down to study our truck? I focused my eyes
on a point far down the road and tried to
draw us into that safe distance by sheer
concentration. When the Border Patrol car
passed us, my eyes locked on the rearview
mirror, expecting to see it swing around. But
it drew away, and we did not breathe easily
again until its gray form had vanished in the
distance.
A few hours later, we arrived at a convent
in Tucson. There Maria would remain for a
couple of days until she was able to join her
relatives, already in exile somewhere in the
U.S. After a brief goodbye to Maria and
Laura, I drove home. Then, finally, all of the
fear, nervousness, and tension flowed out of
my body, leaving only exhaustion and the
emptiness of sleep. A
Tristan Reader reports that one week after
arriving in Tucson, Maria was reunited with
her fam ily in a large city in the U.S. She
remains in hiding, awaiting a time that
promises her safe return to El Salvador.
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

Clowning Around
Continuedfrom page 7
lot of acting, and he could ride the unicycle.
Sort of, in one direction only. “So I called
them and arranged to audition for Clown
College, and they did the auditions in the
afternoon while they were setting up for the
evening show. We were out there audition­
ing while lions and tigers and elephants were
being led in, and people were working—it
was really exciting.”
There’s more to getting into Clown Col­
lege than clowning around or proving you
can sit on a unicycle though—you have to
answer some very unusual questions. On the
application form you encounter such per­
sonal queries as, “What is your worst pho­
bia?”
It better not be falling.
The people at Clown College also want to
know which foreigners intrigue you the most
and which you dislike the most (they have
a show in Japan these days). And when you
last cried and why. And what it takes to get
you mad. And a lot more.
Simon passed the initial audition and test
and found himself traveling in August into
the stifling flatlands of western Florida,
south of Sarasota near Venice. The home of
Ringling Bros, and Barnum & Bailey Clown
College. “From day one it was really in­
tense,” he says. “Every day, all day.
“Several things become clear immedi­
ately. You have to get used to pain—things
hurt there. People are always spraining an­
kles and necks, but for the dangerous stuff
you have a mechanic around your waist—
that’s a sort of halter that catches you before
you hit the ground. You learn all sorts of
ways to hurl yourself to the ground, and you
have to do it over and over. You’re motivat­
ing yourself; nobody is telling you to do
this.”
What could be more fun than hurling
yourself to the ground every day for two
months? Simon learned to walk on the
6-foot stilts, ride the unicycle any direction
but up, and walk on the rolling globe, a
sphere measuring about 3 feet in diameter.
Like any good clown, he can juggle on the
unicycle and the globe, perform a range of
rope tricks, work the trapeze (“sort of,” he

Cream pie humility is part o f a clown’s life. Simon
Hawkins ’87 (right) gives as much as he gets at
Clown College in Florida.

says) and the teeterboard (one clown is
launched into the air by another who lands
on the opposite end of the board), and do
flips off the trampoline.
“It’s great training for an actor,” he re­
ports, “but much more physical. Clowning,
you know, is acting but acting broadly done.
Every emotion you express has to be deeply
and purely felt and expressed sweepingly so
nobody will miss the point. You have to be
pumped up all the time—I’m ANGRY, I’m
SAD.”
Among the 15 women and 40 men at
Clown College, Simon reveals, were selfdescribed hillbillies, a former rodeo cowboy,
college graduates, high school graduates,
even four Japanese. Each aspiring clown
finally selected one of the clown types basic
to American clowning: the classic white­
faced clown fashioned after the 18th- and
19th-century French Pierrot; the character
clown who plays off real features by exag­
gerating them—perhaps a bulbous nose,
cauliflower ears, a twisted face that comes as
a gift of nature, or a strange pattern of
balding hair; or the Auguste clown of pink
or red face and white eyes and of German
origin (the word means silly or stupid in
German, according to circus literature).
“I became the Auguste clown because
that makeup worked for me and I felt better
with it,” he says. “He’s dumber, the butt of
tricks, slow to get the idea. Violence is a
large part of clown humor, but it’s caricaturized or surreal. It has to be amazingly
broad so it never looks real. You’re taught to
portray yourself as a cartoon; it’s all fantasy,
and you don’t want the reality offered by TV
or the movies. We spent a lot of time
watching old silent films, Laurel and Hardy
and the rest, and studying their gags.”
For a future graduate student in interna­
tional studies who plans to take the foreign
service examination someday, Simon has
chosen an unusual avocation. “Maybe,” he
says. “But when you’re behind the mask,
you’re empowered. You feel that you can do
anything, absolutely anything, so there’s a
wonderful freedom in being a clown.”
As a Clown College graduate, Simon will
free-lance and offer the healing hilarity of
his clown in occasional volunteer work, he
says. And if Ringling Brothers should give
him a call to offer him an open spot in the
road show?
“I’m gone. I’ll join ’em in a moment.” Stk
23

ï COLLEGE
Lang retires from the
Board
Eugene M. Lang ’38 formally
retired as chairman of the Col­
lege’s Board of Managers Dec.
2, passing the baton of Board
leadership to Neil Austrian ’61.
“The most important thing
we can do if we believe in
democracy is to make educa­
tion accessible to all,” Lang
observed at a party in his
honor. He exhorted Austrian
to help Swarthmore “reach
out into the community, to
make education relevant to
the needs of all Americans,
and to take leadership—be­
cause if we don’t, who will?”
Some 200 friends and
family members attended a
dinner for Lang given by the
Board of Managers in Tarble
in Clothier. Austrian, a
10-year veteran of the Board
who serves as chairman of the
Development Committee and
head of the $75 million Cam­
paign for Swarthmore, an­
nounced that the Board has
commissioned a portrait of
Lang to be given to the Col­
lege.
In the meantime the Board
presented Lang with a 30-inch
by 40-inch photograph of
himself (reputedly one of his
favorites) in which the newly
minted 1938 graduate is pic­
tured in the shadowy back­
ground near commencement
speaker Albert Einstein and
College President Frank Aydelotte.
Salem Shuchman ’85,
speaking on behalf of the
Lang Scholars, observed,
“There are three things a per­
son can give to Swarthmore:
money, time, and ideas. Gene
has given all three.”
To these, Austrian said later
in the program, “I would like
to add a fourth—love.”
Lang devoted eighteen
years of service to the Board,
including six as chairman.

Lang dinner celebrants (from the
top): Former Swarthmore Presi­
dent John W Nason and Vice
President Kendall Landis ’48;
Chairman o f the Board Neil R.
Austrian ’61 and Chairman
Emeritus Eugene M. Lang ’38;
Sara Lawrence Lightfoot ’66;
form er Swarthmore President
Robert D. Cross; Lang with Lang
Scholars Spring Haughton ’84,
Barbara K lock ’86, and Salem
Shuchman ’85.

Survey surveyed
The College’s 1988 alumni
survey has produced its first
statistic: an amazing return of
nearly 70 percent.
As of the middle of Decem­
ber, 10,405 surveys were re­
ceived out of the 15,047
mailed during the spring, with
more coming in each day.
The directory, with updated
addresses, class lists, and infor­
mation on occupations, will
be mailed to all alumni late
this spring.
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

24

E
Robert Walker dies
Robert M. Walker, professor
emeritus of art history who
chaired the department during
and shortly after World War
II, died of a brain tumor
Nov. 9 in Needham, Mass.
A specialist in the history of
European prints and drawings,
he was known as a great
teacher for more than thirty
years at the College.
Walker was a graduate of
Phillips Academy and Prince­
ton University and received a
master of fine arts degree from
Princeton and a doctorate
from Harvard University. He
began his teaching career at
Williams College in 1936 but
left in 1938 to serve with the

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Office of Strategic Services.
Following his retirement
from Swarthmore in 1974,
Walker and his wife Alice
continued to live in Swarth­
more, then moved in 1980 to
Wayland, Mass., and later to
Needham.
He was a member of the
College Art Association of
America, the Society of
Architectural History, the
Print Council of America, and
the Print Club of Philadelphia,
where he was a past president
and director. He also served
on the advisory committee of
the Department of Prints,
Drawings, and Photography
of the Philadelphia Museum
of Art.

Playful Race Relations

Michigan Senator Carl Levin ’55 joined students recently on campus.

Riddle
My skin is brick, mortar, stone.
My heart’s a room—a stair’s my bone.
I was born just after the century’s turn;
It took 79 years for my head to burn.
In the beginning I gobbled books—
Readers jammed my crannied nooks.
Then grand McCabe climbed up the hill,
Stole my knowledge, leaving me to thrill
My denizens with pool, pingpong, burgers, fries,
Darts, dances, plays, parties—
Till a thief in the night smoked my back
And face, an unknown pyromanic.
Now a sweet surgeon with a brush
Has painted my scars a winter blush,
Veined my face with clouds and limbs
Blue and coral as lighted hymns.
Say who I am, stone and gossamer—
Body by Tarble, blush by Hollister.
— CRAIG WILLIAMSON
PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

Editor’s note: For visual answer to “Riddle, ”
see inside front cover.

JANUARY 1989

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Under Our Skin, a musical
play designed to lay bare
racial prejudices, recently
came to Swarthmore College.
The performance represented
the culmination of a year-long
project to make young people
in the Philadelphia area more
aware of the racism that they
encounter in their daily lives.
After rehearsing at Swarth­
more over the summer, Under
Our Skin found an audience
at several local high schools
and then returned to campus
on Oct. 5, where it was pre­
sented in Lang concert hall.
Although most of the ten
members of the cast are high
school students, Katy Albright
’88 tried out for Under Our
Skin last May and found a job
waiting for her when she
graduated shortly thereafter.
The job wasn’t an easy one
either. Zara Joffe, one of the
co-producers, commented,
“Racial and cultural identity is
fraught with misconception
and myth in society___By

observing high school and
college students as the per­
formers, audiences will see
their peers modeling the con­
cerns, feelings, and behaviors
that we all try so desperately
to pretend aren’t there.” The
other co-producer was Cyn­
thia Jetter ’74, who along
with Joffe is a member of the
Community Housing Re­
source Board of Delaware
County.
The genesis of the project
was a series of workshops last
winter that explored racial
issues and tensions among
Delaware County students.
From their input came Under
Our Skin, which local author
and playwright Don Belton
wrote and for which Heath
Allen, a music instructor at
the Agnes Irwin School, com­
posed the original score.
The play’s other Swarth­
more connection was Paula
Sepinuck, one of the dance
faculty at the College, who
was responsible for the chore­
ography and stage direction.
— Togo Travalia ’88
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Minority scholars
program spearheaded
by Fraser
Swarthmore College has led
the way in creating a new pro­
gram known as Minority
Scholars in Residence, to be
adopted by 19 highly selective
private liberal arts colleges.
President David Fraser says
the program will begin in the
1989-90 academic year and
provide up to 30 fellowships a
year for minority scholars to
teach on the campuses.
Swarthmore will host two
scholars each year for the
one-year appointments.
In an article in The Phila­
delphia Inquirer, Fraser noted
that the program will help the

schools demonstrate a com­
mitment to the concerns of
minority students.
“The particular kind of
education that our selective
liberal arts colleges offer is

Layiwola Shoyinka ’55, a Nigerian civil engineer and member o f the
Yoruba tribe, recalled his friendship with classmate Michael D ukakis
in a fa ll interview with The New York Times. Shoyinka is closely
scrutinizing the July 1987 issue o f the Swarthmore College Bulletin.
26

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very good for some of the
brightest students in the coun­
try,” he said. “But we haven’t
been successful in alerting mi­
nority students to our interest
in them and what we have to
offer them.
“By joining together we can
send out that message more
clearly.”
The consortium of colleges
includes Bates, Bowdoin, Bryn
Mawr, Colby, Colorado Col­
lege, Davidson, Franklin and
Marshall, Grinnell, Oberlin,
Pomona, Reed, and Wellesley,
among others. “Possibly no
other colleges are working to­
gether to address the changes
that need to be made to make
minority students feel wel­
come,” Fraser observed.
According to the Inquirer,
blacks represent 2.3 percent
and Hispanics 1.8 percent of
faculty members at tradition­
ally non-black colleges nation­
wide. At Swarthmore, black,
Asian, and Hispanic faculty
number 9.8 percent of the
College’s 182 faculty mem­
bers. That figure includes full­
time, part-time, and visiting
faculty members.
Two classifications of schol­
ars have been defined by the
program: Dissertation Fellows
(still in the process of com­
pleting their dissertations); and
Postdoctoral Fellows (doing a
year or more of additional
academic work).
The Dissertation Fellows
will be expected to teach one
semester course or its equiva­
lent during the year of resi­
dency, to participate in de­
partmental seminars, and to
interact with students. They
will receive a salary based on
an average of the salaries paid
to starting instructors by par­
ticipating schools.
The Postdoctoral Fellows
will teach one course in each
academic term of their resi­
dency, will participate in de­
partmental seminars, and will
interact with students. They
will receive compensation
based on an average of the

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salaries paid by participating
schools to beginning assistant
professors. In addition, “start­
up” funds of between $3,000
and $5,000 will be made
available to finance proposed
research, subject to the usual
institutional procedures.
The Minority Scholars in
Residence program was first
conceived at a Swarthmore
College meeting of 30 private
liberal arts colleges in Febru­
ary of 1987.

The sporting life
Men’s Soccer (8-9-2):
The Garnet just missed a win­
ning season, but the even rec­
ord of the men’s soccer team
in the Middle Atlantic Confer­
ence (MAC) at 2-2-1 was
good enough for third place
and a successful end to the
careers of several graduating
players. Goalie Brian Barry
’89 accumulated 35 saves and
allowed only 8 goals, while
achieving a save percentage of
.813 for his nine MAC games.
The star of the offensive at­
tack was another senior, Rob
Oliver, who led individual
scoring with 5 goals and 3 as­
sists in his MAC appearances.
Women’s Soccer (8-8-1):
The women strikers only
broke even for the year in
spite of the efforts of goalie
Jeannine Mastre ’91, who ac­
counted for a superlative 74
saves and a save percentage of
.866. Mastre and junior for­
ward Kristen Tucker, who led
the team with an average 2.4
points per game, promise to
be important keys to the
team’s success next year.
Field Hockey (13-8):
Squad spirit was responsible
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

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for lifting the field hockey
team’s record to 13-8, despite
a poor showing in the MAC
playoffs. It is unfortunate for
the team, however, that two of
the tri-captains, forward
Jackie Trockenbrod and mid­
fielder Penny Berrier, will
graduate from the team. Both
were named to the PAIAW
All-Star team. They are not
the only ones leaving the Gar­
net: Lee Fineman, named AllTournament forward at the
Seven Sisters, and goalie Jes­
sica Wagner are also graduat­
ing seniors. Fineman was third
in scoring this year, and
Wagner closed out her goal­
tending career with an impres­
sive 72 saves, as well as a save
percentage of .888 for seven
MAC games. The Garnet
won’t be left dry, though: A
host of new talent led by
three-year veteran Whitney
Nelson ’90, recuperated from
her ankle injury and back in
PAIAW All-Star form, will be
sticking with it come next fall.
Volleyball (10-21): The
Garnet spikers were inspired
to come back fighting next
year as they closed out the
season with a resounding vic­
tory over Washington College.
When they return to the court,
it will be once more under the
leadership of captain Barbara
Schaefer ’90. Schaefer, also an
ace softball pitcher during the
spring, used her powerful right
arm to rack up 289 kills and
31 aces as the top performer
at the net and from the service
line. An important season
landmark came when the
team won Coach Strawbridge’s 100th Garnet victory,
and two additonal upset vic­
tories over Division II rivals
West Chester and Ursinus sug-

JANUARY 1989

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gest that Swarthmore volley­
ball will be hard to beat next
season.

Men’s Cross Country
(8-3): The men’s team came
out running and didn’t stop,
finishing with winning records
and a promise of a bright fu­
ture. The team registered an
excellent season total, placing
high in the MAC finals (3rd
out of 24 teams), as well as in
the regionals (8th/30) and
the Allentown Invitational
(7th/18). Junior star Robert
Marx led the charge with firstplace finishes in 9 of 11 dual
meets and a close-up 7th in
the regionals in a field of 217
runners. He was nipped by
senior teammate Ken Leonard
’89 in the MAC finals, but
Marx will be able to concen­
trate on the competition and
gun for another selection to
the All-NCAA Mideast team.
Women’s Cross Country
(5-3): The women’s team
achieved superb big-meet re­
sults (2nd of 8 at the PAIAW
and 4th of 8 at the Seven Sis­
ters), proving that the team is
stronger than it’s been in
years. In co-captain Kitty
Keller ’90, the women runners
have a star and a leader.
Named All-Regional for the
second consecutive year and
All-MAC for the third con­
secutive year, she will no
doubt extend those streaks to
three and four, respectively, as
she leads the Garnet pack next
year. Keller will also be trying
to lower her personal mark of
19:36, which she ran in the
regionals, just missing qualify­
ing for the nationals.
Football (2-8): The Garnet
gridiron didn’t quite set the

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Centennial Conference or the
world on fire with a confer­
ence record of 2-5 and three
more losses against outside
opponents; however, a quintet
of senior stars bid farewell to
their fans in fitting style. The
dynamic duo of quarterback
Brian Jones and wide receiver
Bob McCann notched their
places in Swarthmore lore
with single season marks for
passing attempts (285), com­
pletions (139), completion
percentage (.488), passing
yards (1,637), receptions (53),
and receiving yards (767). The
co-captains, running back
Duane Seward and offensive
lineman Matt Squire, are also
seniors, and their leadership
will be missed. Last but not
least, cornerback Jay Peichel
will depart from the Garnet,
leaving the “Tide” with two
selections to All-Conference
and record kickoff return
statistics: 28 returns for 535
yards. Nevertheless, the future
is already in view as junior
offensive tackle Marshall
Happer was named All-Con­
ference and led the team in
both tackles and sacks.
— Togo Travalia ’88

Wanted: Biographer
A search committee has been
established to locate a biogra­
pher for Courtney C. Smith,
ninth president of Swarthmore
College. The committee is
chaired by Professor Emeritus
J. Roland Pennock ’27 (215543-2207) and staffed by
Jeremy J. Stone ’57 (202546-3300). Interested persons
or persons who have leads for
the committee should contact
Professor Pennock or Jeremy
Stone.

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A letter to the editor
As a former Peace Corps
volunteer serving in Malaysia,
I was particularly interested in
the story of Cecilia Ng ’75 in
the September 1988 issue of
the Swarthmore College Bulle­
tin. Fortunately during the time
I served (1963-66) there was
relatively little racial violence
in that country, and I had a
marvelous 2xk years of teaching
students in Malaysia and
learning to enjoy the country.
Although I could not vote
for Governor Dukakis [’55]
because of his views on abor­
tion, I was touched by his
willingness to write to the
Malaysian government on
Ms. Ng’s behalf. Hopefully his
letter was partially responsible
for her release. I think her ex­
perience emphasizes the pre­
cious freedoms we have in
America, the freedom to dis­
sent without fear of imprison­
ment.
I also wish to comment on
the letter by Richard Stone ’65
in the same issue. Like Stone,
when I consider investing in a
college, I look elsewhere. I be­
lieve there is a great difference
between knowledge gained in
the classroom and the wisdom
necessary to put that knowl­
edge to constructive use. In the
book of Proverbs, the author
Solomon states that the begin­
ning of wisdom is the fear of
God. In the beginning chapters
of this book, he extols wisdom
and urges his readers to con­
sider it more precious than
gold or silver.
So hopefully in the future
when Swarthmore leaders are
considering curriculum
changes, they will work for
ways to encourage students to
strengthen their spiritual
values. In this way the students
will then be much more likely
to seek the wisdom necessary
to make a positive impact on
their society. They will be en­
couraged to develop both intel­
lectually and spiritually.
Michael M. Lister ’63,
Perry, Ohio
27

It’s a blast— I love it!
I always recruit my
friends to come
be hosts, too.
Come and join us!

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BOB WOOD

Swarthmore alumni seem to have a
special affinity for each other that
transcends the separations of time and
distance. Alumni Weekend offers the
perfect opportunity to catch up with
old friends and discover new ones

and to share experiences of life in the
real world. Joining you in celebrating
an anniversary will be Swarthmore
itself, marking its 125th, and the Scott
Arboretum, its 60th.

Come back for one more rap session
in the dorm and sniff the azaleas—
your friends will be glad you did!

ALUMNI WEEKEND
JUNE 9-11,1989