A Place in Colusa, and: Let A Single Flower Blossom (review)

REVIEWS 125 bility, Inc., 33 West 44th Street, New York, N.Y. 10017, is developing an index of figures mentioned in the Rosenberg Case. The files available so far reveal a familiar and depressing pattern of the hounding of former,Communists about their radical pasts of the 1930s, inculcating a fear in later decades which has been so central to the building of cases against unrepentant radicals. ERRATA pg. 1 - Chambers charged Hiss on August 3, 1948, not August 2. pg. 2 - Congressman Edward Hebert of Louisiana (not John Rankin of Mississippi) made the remark about "one of the greatest actors" pg. 13 - words should be added (underlined below) to the Gornick pg. 21 quote: "opposition to the human falsifications in the Communist passion, and in the process are committing human falsifications." ADDENDUM On July 27, 1978, the formal coram nobis petition was filed in New York federal district court by Alger Hiss and his lawyer Victor Rabinowitz. They request an expunging of his conviction or a hearing based on new information in the case which, they assert, reveals that "the prosecution maintained an informer in the legal councils of the defense for several critical months before the trial; pre-trial statements given by Chambers to the F.B.I, and the prosecution were concealed and the very existence of the statements was falsely denied; critical facts concerning the typewriter on which, the government claimed, the stolen documents were copied or extracted were kept from the defense, the court and the jury; and the prosecution suffered perjury to be committed by its witnesses without protest." (p. 18) The writ and the vast amount of other documentation of the defense are available for study at the office of the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, 175 Fifth Avenue, Room 712, New York, N.Y. 10003. A ruling on coram nobis is not expected until early 1979, but the continuing interest in the Hiss case is reflected in the documentaries being prepared for late 1979. They include a three-part British television documentary and the work of Professor John Lowenthal of the Rutgers University Law School, whose full-length historical documentary film is now in preparation. George Benet./l Place in Colusa. San Pedro: Singlejack Books, Box 1906, San Pedro CA 90733, 1977. 62pp. $2.95. Gary Allen Kizer, Let A Single Flower Blossom. Greenfield Center, New York: The Greenfield Review Press, 1977. 47pp. $2. George Benêt, a West Coast docker, writes about moments in the lives of men who appear to have been crushed in which apparent disaster masks a fierce will to live. His is a world of aging men in which most everything is relentless. The obvious battles of the job, the bar, and marriage are mainly done with before his stories begin, and damage wildly out of proportion to one's due has befallen his héroes before the enacted action. Not that Benet's working class men are passive. But in the enclaves where we find them, usually the reduced territory of a disordered room-all that's left to them-in the family home, the force of what threatens their survival is far greater than the strength left his characters. Nothing so unequivocal as triumph therefore appears within reach. Rather what Benet illuminates is how in their befallen condition 126 THEMINNESOTA REVIEW each of his heroes manages a tentative survival which comes as close to disillusioned glory as the brute power of circumstances makes room for. In "The Cathedral," for example, an old man condemned to the basement of his son's (but in legal fact his own) house, pitted in a life-and-death struggle with his son's wife, cramped by arthritis and fading control over his body, tenaciously creates in his glum basement an elaborate carving of a cathedral. Benet does not sentimentalize this. The wife mangles the cathedral and, in a fit of rage, the old man attacks her, backing himself into flight from what appears to be his last home. The story leaves him literally up in the air on a plane heading south from Anchorage, where his son lives. Like the ending of his other stories, this one is tentative. Benet...