The Key West Citizen Newspaper, August 27, 1952, Page 8

Page 8 ‘THE KEY WEST CITIZEN Wednesday, August 27, 1952 BARNEY GOOGLE AND SNUFFY SMITH JES FOLLER ME, COUSIN'--('LL FIND “SATURDAY NIGHT WAS THE WORST NIGHT IN THE WEEK FOR THE CASSICANS’ KIDS= THEIR FATHER DANNY HATED WATER-TOO / THIMBLE THEATRE—Starring Popeye CURIOS! HEY MIGHT SEE ME IF | CHANGE “HE SIGN, By Fred Lasswell RUN OVER YONDER AN’ TELL THEM FELLERS YO'RE A REVENOOER }|“AND IF A NEW NEIGHBOR MOVED INTO THE NEIGHBORHOOD -IT WAS EVERYBODY'S BUSINESS TO SEE WHAT KIND OF HOUSE= FURNISHINGS THEY HAD = Ch [4 HAH. ANT rorsoT How ca THROW! 25()| HELL'S HORSEMAN OND IL. i Chapter 20 y™ THORNTON, alias King Ramson, leaned back in his chair, studying the face of the younger.man who was his son, Memory was flooding his mind, carrying him back to a small house near the railroad yards in Kansas City. Some things a man never forgets, and though this man with the close-cropped hair had been married again since then and come far he was seeing again in his mind a patient wife and a very small son. He was also seeing a few cattle from the surrounding Kansas plains, where a few hardy pioneers risking a wipe-out at the hands of plains Indians, brought in some head of stock to sell to the packers, Something about those ple and the cattle had fired Jim Thornton’s imagination, he now recalled, There had been weeks, there 4n Kansas City, when he had felt the’ call and couldn't find the courage to heed it. When it came he slipped quietly out, just as he had_ done from the Army, and “headed west. He went, salving his conscience by telling himself ever and over that as soon as he “made his ae he would send for them. He had been equally quick to learn that a man didn’t learn the cattle business pretty quickly, but he became an owner by saving his monthly wages: There was much wild stuff— mavericks, they were called, after a Texan who hadn’t be- lieved in branding stock and thus was considered owner of every unbranded critter in his part of the country—to be roped and worked on with a running iron. Land was cheap and grass was plentiful. Thornton had ~ pros- red. A gambling house in eyenne had helped a lot, and \it_was there, rapidly growing to jaffuence, he had married the ‘Eastern woman. With that marriage he put his past behind him. At times there ‘rose up a picture of the wife and {child he had deserted, but time ‘was obliterating this, sending it ;farther into the background the | h: {higher he climbed. By the time | out. en a BY WILLIAM. HOPSON on_his way. By the time the s' line to be abandoned the King’s wi began taking Belle back for schooling. At first the trips were tion..They gradually lengthened into nine months. Only during the summers did Ramson’s wife re- turn with Belle to the ranch. And as these trips lengthened King Ramson, accompanying them East of two or three mon’ dura- | then ht. I found out later he a horse thief himself who had a way of acquiring ownership of stock-of men he’d ‘arrested.’ By it was too late.” “Killed him, eh?” “IT had to.” . Austin sat listening intently, his coffee forgotten. . “So, you had to go on the sometimes, began to make friends, | dodge’ They came to the ranch, parties of them, and always there were in the parties young women who were taken by the owner’s power among the ranchers, his reputa- tion as a dangerous man, his bluff manners .. . and his money. . revert bce did not know at irst_about these esca, nor did Belle, then almost ieee The heal she reached that age King mson’s wife could.stand it no longer. She went East to stay for foods .and because she didn’t eve in divorce there was no di- vorce. Belle, electing to remain with her father, had grown to womanhood. She was now due at the ranch with Helen Forrest. “Tell me about... your mother,” he finally said. N “There's little to tell, and that part is past history. She aes in Kansas City until the end.” “And _you?” the man revealed as Jim Thornton asked. “I stuck around until I was sixteen, working on farms, in the stockyards, and so on, Got itchy feet and went out to Montana for a stretch of ranch work. I wanted her to come out but she didn’t care to move. So I sent enough to live on out of my wages and a fair hand at bunk- house poker.” “Try to branch out for your- edly. of gave it a try,” Montana said: ing to this man he had hated alt his life, but “Ramson” seemed to: ave a way of drawing a man “I began buying and perl Thornton asked interest- }é “I had to clear out, if that’s what you mean,” Montana an- Swered. “I drifted over east around Billings and went to work again, being pretty careful about not giving my name out. The at one of the outfits got to call- ing me Montana. It didn’t mean anything until a gent named Joe Bostock went on a drunk in town one night andi hit the prod. I had to down him and light out again. I swung west, figgering on a be-|at the mines for a cha M4 Mother got sick and I to go back to Kansas City. That was last spring. There was a cattle buyer there in town with a bi, shipment of part Mexican he'd picked ge along the line. I'd. sold a fer " claimed. “You old _ Thatch?” “Pretty well.” “Why,” Montana's father said, smiling, “old Thatch and I were: in the war together. long ago that seems now!' “Not so long Sree that recognized you when he ran you in Cheyenne,” Mi ed shortly. “So he us you were and last fall I headed this there he didn’t know why he was talk- }t KEY BOOKS (ROCK BOTTOM by Earl Conrad, | novel published by Doubleday Pub- lishing Co., New York City, yy pages.) Leeha Whitfield, the principal | By A. de T. GINGRAS drama in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the book was shooting at something fundamentally wrong and so is this book. Slavery, whether it be practised Boys." Witt You PLease \ [LI/ GO OUTSIDE AND sToP ANNOYING MISS N WINSOME. a RSPR TNE BE 2 LL SHOW ~~ HER Room /? 4 YOu YOUR ROOM. WHAT GOES HERE £? character in this novel, is a dark | through sharecropping or owning female Candide. In her journey | slaves, against white man or Negro through the states of the United man or Jew, whether it exists in States from Mississippi to Harlem, | soviet Russia or in Nazi concen- she manages to gather maturity tration camps, is wrong, Decent and a certezn amount of wisdom | men and women everywhere want unto herself. : to put a stop to disease spots in She works at everything from | our civilization. If Mr. Conrad’s baby Sitting to fruit picking. She | pook helps to lessen any economic begs at the back doors of white | slavery now existing anywhere in people and at the front doors of this country or in any other, as colored people. She analyzes and well as being an interesting work listens to Lord God Ames, the from a literary. viewpoint, he has’ Father Devine of the book. She made two contributions with his marries and has a child. She takes | new novel. poison in protest against a state- | ment made in a court against a | Negro. She works at bean picking (THE KENYON CRITICS, studies | in modern literature from the Kenyon Review. Edited by John in the Florida everglades. She ex- | Crowe Ransom. World Publishing periences the North and Harlem. And in her travels she meets good white people. This is an exciting and well writ- | ten book. It is told in the first | person and the style seems partic- ularly suited to a story of a Negro woman’s journey from Mississippi | to Harlem. Some of the images which the author puts in the mouth of Leeha Whitfield to express what she sees, are from the uncon- sciously poetic speech of a race artistically and emotionally great. “Us black in sharecropping,” says Leeha, “we was like trees | Co., 342 pp.) (Guest Review by A. Watney, English journalist.) The writing in this collection is | of high quality and the contents | sufficiently varied to please the | most readers. ! One of the outstanding essays is | Philip Blair Rice's exposition of | the existentialist philosophy of | Jean-Paul Sartre. From the | French writer’s obscurity Mr. | Rice has had to untangle Sartre's | conception of man and the duality | which exists between the “etre- poursoi” and the “etre pour autri.” | effective phrases to say what she | like the original Sartrian books, he that wanted to blossom, but the | He has succeeded in giving the white frost wouldn’t let us.” And reader a fairly concise explanation all through the book are sprinkled , of existentialist thought, although wants to say. “He (the doctor) | sometimes lacks lucidity. He has would call in if he believed you , gathered Sartre’s ideas mainly | was low-sick to dying.....we going | from “‘L‘Etre et le Neant” and “La north some day.....mother always told how father said that, and it | took deep in me . fear gave me more hurry-strength . . . was get- | ting height. . . haa a not-here,not- | there look. . . people lived in shot gun houses. . . houses thrown up quick like a shot. . the house had four high white pillars in front, a real Southstyle house. . . a phono- gtaph was there. . . it played screechy-style white music. . . I didn’t want to steal or do nothing out of the law, but I was bad | hungry. . . that mother-hungry | feel stayed with me all through the wandertime. . . A, that’s the ladder letter. . . B, 1 called that the big belly letter. The FP, that was the flagpole letter. . . even the trees looked clean, not a naked clean, but fresh and clean like all dressed up. . . you keep your eyes open from sun-come-up to moon- go-down. . .” This reviewer is not competent. however, to judze the authenti city nor the prevalence of the con- dions which the Negro girl ob. serves in the period of her story from 1915 to 1999. The dust jacket claims it is a true story. The author is a newspaper man living in New York City who has long been a crusader against prejudice. ‘The book is an Uncle Tom's eabin of @ book with much of the melo- dramatic about many of its situa tions. But regardless of any melo- | Yet it is in his plays and in the Nausee”. These two books do con- tain Sartre’s theory of existence. works of his followers that the real Sartre and the essential meaning of his philosophy are more easily understood by the average indivi- dual. In the Orestes of “‘Les Mou- ches”, the Garcin of “Huis Clos” and the main characters of “Morts Sans Sepulture” the Sartrian in- dividual is seen moving about in his milieu. Another interesting piece is Adrienne Monnier’s analysis of James Joyce's “Ulysses.” It is hard to be objective about this book. It must in itself provoke some emotion - admiration, enthusiasm, disgust. Miss Monnier has endea voured to place it in its rightful category, not as a “succes de scandale”, but as a panoramic novel which touches all levels and | shades from the sublime to the obscene, a revelation of humanity as it is, rather than as we would like to see it. Joyce has dissolved our rosy haze and forced us see both the good and the bad mankind. Miss Monnier does minimize the difficulties of - preting and reading Joyce, she does give the reader a key to understanding him. The key he must use himself. | Lionel Trilling’s essay on Words- worth is 2 valuable contribution to the mass of literature written &- round the poet’s work, The critie compares Wordsworth’s religious and philosophical outlook to that found in the writings of the Jew- ish fathers. It is concise and direct in its approach, and raises inter. esting questions. Was Wordsworth sion, and teaches the yalue of quiet contemplation and action which brings the soul nearer to the source of Good. Mr. Trilling re. stores Wordsworth to a place of honour from which he has slipped these past years. His criticism is a fitting tribute on the occasion of the poet's centenary. A short review by Dudley Fitts of the “Medea” of Euripides, a- dapted by Jeffers is another thought provoking critique. The work proves the perennial interest of the theme. Mr. Fitts complains that the play is too sacrosanct by tradition to be subjected to such daring modification. In this he is somewhat too hard. “Medea” has been tampered with so often! The mew version’ may not have much affinity with the Greek original. But did Corneille’s or Anouilh'’s? They are all portraits of the same woman, yet each is colored by her creator's thought. Medea’s tragedy lies in the sul fering that turns her to steel. “Lee there be naught of softness now. .” Eurpides had her say. In Corm eille’s version, her pride sustaing her - when asked what remains of her past glory and joy she answers, . «myself, that is enough. Anouilh’s Medea has her origin in the Greek, But she is his own creation - an emotional cruel, trapped little ani- mal who fights back in panic be- cause there is no retreat. It is de- sire which holds her, a love of daughter which she bears in an- guish. Jeffers has only followed ta the footsteps of his predecessors. Mr. Fitts’ reproach is that he lacks the genius which makes such “tam- Dr. J. A. Valdes COMPLETE SERVICE ON DUPLICATION of LENSES 30 YEARS EXPERIENCE IM THIS COMMUNITY We Use Bausch and Lomb Products i