Word: aikens
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...fifty, Theodore Morrison '23, has written his first novel. It is a book filled with mature characterization of men and women in an academic community. Obviously, Mr. Morrison, Lecturer on English, knows the problems of professors and administrators in a college, and he sympathizes with his characters. Andrew Aiken, the figure dominating the novel, is acting president of Rowley College. And while the trustees decide whether or not he may keep his position, Mr. Morrison hands him problems of defending academic freedom, financing a library, dealing with neurotic faculty and alumni pressure. As Aiken faces these problems, he emerges able...
...college. There is no evidence that the relation between Rowley's professors and undergraduates ever goes beyond the brief contacts in the classroom or dean's office. Perhaps one might explain this as selective pruning; "The Stones of the House" is primarily a few months in Andrew Aiken's life, and during this time the acting president is seldom directly concerned with students. But at one time, Aiken must deal with the college's daily newspaper, the "Register." Here his behavior is quite puzzling. He attacks the "Register" editors as irresponsible children playing at grown-up journalism, when they print...
...Morrison does not understand his students, he is able to sharply penetrate his contemporaries. The only inadequacy in his portrait of Aiken is his failure to pull the curtain from the man's past. For two months, the reader knows Andrew Aiken intimately--his character and his ability. But he never knows just what Andrew Aiken taught before he became an acting president, or what in his past exists to account for his actions. There is no need for Mr. Morrison to tell anything more about Aiken's wife Connie, than he does. She, the faculty members, Aiken's secretary...
...Aiken's problems and his resolutions are skillfully handled, for the most part, with a remarkable literary honesty. Only the circumstances leading up to the large library gift seem contrived, and this because Mr. Morrison has packed a bit too much coincidence within too few pages...
...creating action is clearly not the best measure of Mr. Morrison's ability. He masterfully captures simple relationships between mature people. Andrew Aiken's conversations with Connie, with old Martin Holmes, the college chaplain, with Maurice Holsberg, a confused, easily hurt Jewish professor--these are the representation of his talent. He can draw from a college community a perceptive sampling of the humor, frustration, and challenge in an academic life. But before he writes another novel, Mr. Morrison should get to know his students a lot better...