January 1955
In This Issue
Explore the January 1955 print edition below. Or to discover more writing from the pages of The Atlantic, browse the full archive.
Articles
British Honduras & Guiana
Japan Speaks to America
Japan's Place in Asia
A New Japan? Political, Economic, and Social Aspects of Postwar Japan
Two Poems
The Izu Dancer: A Story
The Japanese Theater: A Rich Tradition of Drama and Dance
An Imperial Tanka
The Religions of Japan: Past Tradition and Present Tendencies
Two Samurai Tales: Romance and Realism in Old Japan
Contemporary Japanese Art: Some Examples of Its Various Tendencies
The New Road of Koide
In Praise of Shadows: A Prose Elegy
Of Women: A Story
Two Poems
Popular Entertainments of Japan: A Rapidly Changing Pattern
Poetry Going Out
Japanese Architecture: A Visit to Some Typical Buildings
Beauty in Japanese Architecture
Rural India
The Surplus Bride: A Story
Two Poems
Modern Japanese Literature: Two Views of the Novel
Forms of Japanese Poetry
Japan's "Cultural Democracy": A Challenging Interpretation of History
A Chronology of Japanese History
A Glossary of Japanese Words
Acknowledgments
Books on Japan
The Corporate Alumnus Program: A New Plan for College Giving
American colleges and universities, large and small, find themselves urgently in need of new sources of financial support. Enrollment is going up faster than the endowment and in this predicament the institutions have asked for corporate aid to supplement the gifts of their alumni. It calls for industrial statesmanship to devise a plan which would be at once generous and fair to the many needy institutions. The Atlantic is happy to commend this new program now being put into effect by the General Electric Educational and Charitable Fund.
The Freedom to Think
A son of Rhode Island who was educated at Brown University and Harvard Law School. ZECHARIAH CHAFEE. JR., was appointed to the law faculty at Harvard in 1916. Since 1950 he has been one of Harvard’s University Professors. A most trenchant defender of civil rights, he is best known for his authoritative book. Free Speech in the United States (1941). a subject which he has been studying intensively since 1916. The article which follows contains the gist of a recent address delivered at the University of Oregon.
Debussy, the Man I Knew
GEORGE COPELAND introduced the piano works of Debussy to the United States, and among interpreters of Debussy he is regarded as supreme. Mr. Copeland was born in Boston, studied with Carl Baermann, Teresa Carreño, and Buonamici, and completed his study of the piano with Harold Bauer. As a concert pianist and specialist in the works of modern French and Spanish composers, he has gained a world-wide reputation.
Helen
An Englishman whose family has lived in India for four generations, JOHN MASTERSwas born in Calcutta and observed the family tradition by serving for fourteen years in the British Army, in the course of which he was awarded the DSO. In 1948 he moved to this country and made his first appearance in the Atlantic — “a success,”he says, “which encouraged me to persevere.”With his first novel, Nightrunners of Bengal, he took command of a large audience, and each new book thereafter has added to his reputation and his popularity. Bhowani Junction was selected by the Book-of-the-Month Club last year, and his fifth book, Coromandel, will appear in March.
The Atlantic Report on the World Today: Washington
The Louisiana Purchase: Chance or Destiny?
“Pondering the degree to which accident could overturn the schemes of wise men, Prince Bismarck once concluded that there was a special providence for drunkards, fools, and the United States. Indeed there is much to be said for the argument that America has survived and grown strong by a miraculous streak of luck that, at one turning point after another, has directed fortune its way.”So writes OSCAR HANDLIN, Professor of History at Harvard and author of The Uprooted, which won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1951. This is the second of a series of five articles, each focused on a major event in American history.
The Common Cold
A doctor of medicine, now in his thirty-third year, RICHARD GORDONstarted practice in 1945 as an anesthetist and worked for a time as a ship’s doctor. Out of his experience he has written two humorous books which have had an enormous success in England and which have been published in this country by Harcourt, Brace: Doctor in the House and Doctor at Sea. J. Arthur Rank has made a motion picture of the first, and the second is in process of being filmed. Mr. Gordon lives in Oxford with his wife and ten-month-old son and is now devoting his full time to writing. His first novel, The Captain’s Table, recently made its debut in England.
The Golden Palace
White Commencement
The wife of Everett Case, President of Colgate University. JOSEPHINE YOUNG CASE has written this moving and evocative account of a wartime commencement such as was taking place on campuses all over this country a decade ago. There is idealism here, as there is in her poetry. She is the author of At Midnight On the 31st of March, Written in Sand, and Freedom’s Farm, published by Houghton Mifflin Company.
How Can You Shame a Donkey?
A native New Yorker, MARJORIE HOUSEPIANgrew up near Gramercy Park not far from the Armenian section where most of her Armenian relatives still live. In her early teens she spent two rears abroad; she attended the New York public schools and graduated from Barnard College in 1914. She is now working as secretary to the President of Barnard, and has been studying writing at Columbia under Martha Foley.
A Festival Theater
When JOHN MASEFIELD,who has been poet laureate of England since 1930, was a young man learning his craft in London, there were few Elizabethan rerivals; and it was not until he had seen Charles Ashbee’s production of The New Inn by Ben Jonson that the glory of England’s most creative age burst upon him. “I determined,” he wrote, ”to try to learn rather more of the theater, that I might the better understand the miracle of Shakespeare, and the still unsolved uncomprehended miracle of the theater of his time.”In the essay which follows. Mr. Masefield calls for a national undertaking which would make the Elizabethans as accessible as they ought to be.
