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everything "Out There" is bad; no dialectic because there is only
one side to the argument: no dramatic interest, no vision.
Jack Ludwig's
Confusions
is a warm, peppery comic novel about
academic life, Jews, and the contemporary scene. "I sing confusion," the
novel begins, "I, Joseph Gillis, myself confused, or, to put it another
way, an American." Gillis, ne Galsky, from Roxbury, Mass., changed
his name on entering college "to prevent the sacrilege of 'Galsky'
appearing on a Harvard degree
in Latin."
The novel traces the external
adventures of its hero from his boyhood romps with full-breasted and
only-too-willing "boat-fresh Scottish housemaids," into his Harvard
days where he meets and marries a stunning, green-eyed Radcliffe
lute-player (a
shikseh,
full of moral earnestness) through his appoint–
ment at a second-rate and poisonous California college. But the real
adventure of the book is the internal one: Galsky-Gillis's effort to
unify the topsy-turvy circus of his own nature, to reconcile the para–
doxes and contradictions inside himself which are, as he knows, a fairly
apt reflection of the ones outside him. "Pity me," he pleads, "my
confusions are the culture's schizophrenia. Galsky; Gillis. I live by the
climate of opinion's injunctions:
KNOW THYSELVES."
THE SCHOOL OF LETTERS
INDIANA UNIVERSITY
1964
Summer, Fall, and Spring Courses
On the graduate level in the theory and practice of
Literary Criticism
Including work toward advanced degrees in
Criticism, English Literature, and Comparative Literature
1964 Summer courses
by:
ROBERT FITZGERALD
IHAB HASSAN
GEORGE STEINER
JOHN HOLLANDER
Scholarships available to qualified students for
both summer session and regular academic year
Address inquiries to:
THE SCHOOL OF LEITERS
Indiana University
208 S. Indiana Avenue, B:oomington, Indiana
