A Micro-Neighborhood

This afternoon, feeling restless and wanting to take advantage of the cooler temperature, I decided to take a bike ride. I've been curious lately about a particular little wedge of the city, the one bordered by Arsenal, South Broadway, and I-55:

I took Pestalozzi all the way from Tower Grove Park to the brewery (always an interesting stretch) and then rode south. Here were a few highlights from this little niche that is hidden in plain sight:

The most notable institution in the area is St. Agatha, a Polish Catholic Church which is still in operation. Here's the school/parish hall building:

This is the church and what I assume is the rectory:

7th and 9th Streets have some nice row houses:

This house on 7th Street has a beautifully landscaped side entrance and some great decks:

Down near the end of 9th Street is this facility, a gymnasium owned by the South Broadway Athletic Club:

This is a nice little area—there's even a bed and breakfast tucked back in there. Despite being right next door to an interstate highway and a gigantic brewery, it has a kind of quiet, peaceful, private atmosphere. Wandering these streets, you get a feel for St. Louis as a river town, with streets and neighborhoods that went right up to the Mississippi. This little micro-neighborhood is like a fossil from an earlier time.

Into the Cities

For the past week I've been reading Kenneth T. Jackson's classic Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States. This morning, I read a chapter called "The Drive-In Culture of Contemporary America," which was about how the automobile eventually changed the landscape of the nation, as highways and services adapted themselves to a suburban landscape geared toward the car. Led by Sears, Jackson notes, "Large-scale retailing, long associated with central business districts, began moving away from the urban cores between the world wars."


This was the beginning of what Greg Brown describes in his song "The Poet Game":


I watched my country turn into a coast-to-coast strip mall
And I cried out in a song.
If we can do all that in thirty years
Then please tell me you all
Why does good change take so long?


"The multiple-store shopping center with free, off-street parking represented the ultimate retail adaptation to the requirements of automobility," writes Jackson, citing St. Louis's own Hampton Village (1941) as one of the earliest such enterprises.


Near the end of his chapter, Jackson nods to the rise of the enclosed shopping mall. His award-winning book was published in 1985. Since then, of course, even some enclosed shopping malls have fallen upon hard times—think of Crestwood Mall, Jamestown Mall, and Northwest Plaza—superseded to some extent by the car-friendly big box stores.


Just now, though, I read an article in the New York Times that seems to suggest we may have turned a corner back toward the urban core, that the population is turning back to the cities and that big retailers are following.


... retailers are now willing to come into cities on the cities’ terms — with all the zoning headaches, high rents and odd architecture — because that is where the growth is. Most large American cities are growing faster than their suburbs for the first time in almost a century, according to a Brookings Institution analysis of census results released last month, largely because young adults are choosing urban apartment life. That population shift, along with Internet competition, have made the car-focused, big-box model less relevant.


Is this happening in St. Louis? The Brookings Institution report notes that St. Louis's decline slowed in 2010-11. In my own small bubble of friends and acquaintances and bloggers, it certainly feels like there's a real movement back toward the city.


The suburbs, to be sure, are not languishing. The big box stores' parking lots are still packed, the malls are still thriving (think of the Galleria, South County Mall, or West County Mall), and new subdivisions are still going up out in the hinterlands.


Still, it is nice, for those of us who love the city, to envision it as a unique, thriving place at the center of the sprawling megalopolis, a place where people can live, work, play, buy what they need, invest in and repair the glorious architecture and infrastructure of the past.

St. Louis Slavery, St. Louis Freedom

Back in November, I wrote an essay about the Mary Meachum Freedom Crossing site on the St. Louis Riverfront Trail. I explored St. Louisans' historical amnesia about our city and state's role in slavery.

The November piece focused on slaves who attempted to escape from Henry Shaw. Today at the Occasional Planet I have a kind of sequel to that earlier piece. Based on a fascinating talk I went to in Tower Grove Park on Sunday, this new essay explores another route to freedom many St. Louis slaves attempted: the freedom lawsuit.

I'd be delighted if you took a look at it.

Slavery and Shaw

Here's a piece I've got up at the Occasional Planet today about a memorial to slaves who attempted to escape from estate of St. Louis's own Henry Shaw.

Stone Walls Redux

Not too long ago I did a little post about some stone walls I noticed on a bike ride through the south side of St. Louis. Today I went riding again and ended up in Carondelet, where I saw this interesting example at the intersection of Iron and Michigan:

In this case, the extensive stone wall remains even though the houses that it once framed are gone.

The wall rounds the corner, on which stands an unkempt in-fill home that is largely shrouded by dense tree cover.

As I rode around today, I was struck by how many beautiful and well-kept houses there are, even in areas of the city that would probably be considered sketchy by prospective home-buyers. The admirable people who stick with these houses and these neighborhoods are quixotic in their commitment to these beautiful places that have been bypassed by highways and real estate trends.

The stone wall above is an example of the sheer abundance and wealth of St. Louis's architectural past. Despite all that has vanished, there's so much that still remains—and much that retains its glory.

A couple examples:

(Boathouse in Carondelet Park)

(at Livingston and Holly Hills)

Stone Walls in South St. Louis

On Memorial Day I took an afternoon bike ride around the South side of St. Louis. On this particular ride I found myself noticing stone walls, starting with this one on Oak Hill:

These ornamental but functional walls speak of a more glorious era of craftsmanship in the city. Unlike the generic retaining walls that tend to get built these days, stone walls give neighborhoods a sense of place and history.

Notice how the stone walls frame the entryway up to this stone house, also on Oak Hill:

This modest home on Ulena is given a touch of charm by the stone wall bordering its front lawn.

And the long expanse of stone wall on both sides of Macklind as it approaches Gresham frames the street beautifully and uniquely.

The city is full of these treasures which, though they may belong to individual homeowners, seem to emanate from a more public-spirited notion of how architecture can create community space and aesthetic pleasure for all to enjoy.

Where the Sidewalk Ends

File this under South Side Curiosities. Seeking to enjoy today's lovely weather, I took a bike ride over to the intersection of Oregon and Miami, where there's a strange rupture in the continuity of the street—of Oregon, that is.

I don't understand why the street does this. Did it originally end up where the wall is, and then later get extended? But if so, why didn't they just continue the street itself, putting in some dirt to make a smooth transition down the hill?

A couple of neighborhood kids came up to me while I was taking pictures. I explained why I found this street odd.

One kid solemnly told me that it had been like this as long as he could remember.

The other kid said, "One part is a high street, the other is a low street."

Here are some views from the upper part, looking to the south.

What is the purpose of the fence and the gates?

If anyone knows the story of this rupture in the street, please fill me in.

Take a Village

Ray Hartmann demolishes the Ballpark Village, a bad idea that continues to resurface:

The latest incarnation of the project promises “a plaza for concerts,” which St. Louis—overrun with concert venues (even before the old Kiel Opera House is restored)—most certainly does not need.

It also proposes “unique stores and restaurants” for which there is no demand. If there were demand, they would already have existed around the old Busch Stadium, or the new one, since St. Louisans have been going to the same place downtown for the same purpose (to watch baseball) for 45 years.

Maybe it has to do with the fact that the average family spends hundreds of dollars and takes several hours out of the day to attend Cardinal games. Spending still more money and time in “unique” stores seems a uniquely unattractive idea.

So, too, does the notion of constructing a new, 12- or 13-story office building that would use city-government subsidy to compete with a downtown core that it is already plagued with a 25-percent vacancy rate. Adding insult to injury, the new building’s prized tenant—Stifel Nicolaus—would be lured from an existing downtown skyscraper, leaving it with a devastating six-floor hole.

St. Louis Public Schools (2)

About a year and a half ago, I wrote a blog post in which I tried to take stock of the challenges facing the St. Louis Public School system, as I understood them.

That blog post was influenced by some of my introductory experiences with SLPS as a parent, as well as by Daniel J. Monti’s book A Semblance of Justice, which takes a somewhat cynical view of the school desegregation efforts that have occurred in the St. Louis area.

I had found Monti’s book after reading Common Ground, J. Anthony Lukas’s celebrated account of school desegregation in Boston. I was looking for something that would explain and analyze St. Louis’s school desegregation with similar perceptiveness and rigor. But in comparison to Lukas’s gripping and incredibly informative narrative, Monti’s book felt abstruse and opaque—and it took for granted that its readers already understood the basic facts of the situation.

I was born in 1976 and grew up in Lindbergh school district, though I attended Catholic schools. Although the desegregation case was being negotiated and settled in my formative years, I had only a vague notion of its origins and a general understanding of its purpose and meaning.

Through an old article in the Riverfront Times I discovered another book on St. Louis school desegregation, Stepping Over the Color Line: African American Students in White Suburban Schools, by Amy Stuart Wells and Robert L. Crain. This book, published by Yale University Press in 1997, finally gave me what I was looking for: deep background on the roots of school desegregation in St. Louis; a clear description of the voluntary interdistrict transfer program; an analysis of its execution and consequences; a sense of how St. Louisans, black, white, urban, and suburban, felt about the program; and an understanding of the political realities involved with the program.

After reading this book, I took another look at my previous post about SLPS. I’m surprised and gratified to find that much of it still seems true. But Wells and Crain’s book has given me a much deeper context for understanding the issues I was struggling with.

Most significantly, I have a more nuanced response to Daniel J. Monti’s central thesis, as I understood it: that the desegregation program was mostly a symbolic gesture that purported to address deep-seated issues of inequality while in actuality not doing much to deliver justice.

On the one hand, I can see Monti’s point. I was startled to read, near the end of Stepping Over the Color Line, that in a representative year of the deseg program (1993), it consumed only 3 percent of the state’s total budget, compared to the separate 25 percent of the state budget that went to education. Though politicians may have used the program demagogically as a symbol of government waste and handouts to the undeserving black poor, in the end the amount of the budget devoted to the desgregation program was relatively small. And many black students, victims of Missouri’s long and ongoing pattern of unequal housing, educational, and employment opportunity, did not benefit at all from the program.

On the other hand, many of those who did participate in the program did benefit significantly. I’ve met several of them since I wrote my original post, actually. Wells and Crain, in addition to documenting convincingly that black city students benefit from attending suburban schools, also show the falseness of the alternative that opponents of the program often proposed: to use the deseg money to fix up the city schools instead. Politically, that was never an option. The deseg money was there because the courts forced the state to provide it.

Or, more accurately, the suburban and city school districts that agreed on the out-of-court settlement, in combination with the courts, forced the state of Missouri (which refused to participate in the settlement talks) to provide the money.

These St. Louis-area school districts agreed to the settlement not because they acknowledged that they had helped to create a racially unjust system and wanted to atone for their sins. Instead they agreed to the settlement because (1) they didn’t want to risk losing local control of their district, and (2) they realized that the settlement would mean lots of money for them. (And thus the settlement proved a fact of politics that I’ve come to understand: For the poor to get anything, the middle-class and wealthy have to get something too.)

In my original post, I explored the idea that the St. Louis Public Schools were the biggest losers in the desegregation settlement. My reasoning was that they had lost some of their best students and most committed parents, while also having to open up some of their most coveted spots to white county students. But, having read Wells and Crain, I now see that in fact SLPS saw significant gains from the settlement: for each student who left the district for one in the county, SLPS still received 50 percent of the funds they would normally have spent on that student. In addition, SLPS got additional funding for curriculum development, personnel, and capital improvements; and for the creation and maintenance of the magnet school program.

The biggest losers, I now realize, were the county districts—like Wellston, Jennings, Normandy, and others—that were “on the wrong side” of the lawsuit, according to one of the SLPS lawyers involved in the case. They were on the wrong side because they were already predominantly black and therefore received none of the money that flowed to the city and the rest of the county during the desegregation project. They were basically in the same plight as the all-black schools and neighborhoods in the city, yet they received no help from the state in the desegregation agreement.

SLPS, Wells and Crain helped me see, were both victims and perpetrators of segregation and attempts to remedy it. They created a separate and unequal system before Brown v. Board of Education and were slow and ineffective in dismantling it after that 1954 decision. At the same time, they were also in a bind because of the racial politics of the time, with rapid white flight (often spurred by racial fear) from the city and intense racially motivated demands from the white families who remained. They were stuck with the challenge of educating a largely racially segregated and impoverished population—stuck with this challenge by the suburban districts who thrived on the tax base that St. Louis County sucked out of the city. Yet the city schools often did a mediocre job, at best, of actually using their resources to help that population. This mediocrity is not surprising when one considers not only the daunting nature of the task, but also that in the late 1980s and early 1990s the school board included a powerful contingent of anti-desegregation members with ties to a local white supremacist group.

For that reason, in addition to the suburban districts that were largely African American, the black students left behind in neighborhood schools also got the rawest deal in the desegregation agreement. It’s understandable, from that perspective, that a group of black city dwellers would turn against the program. Their views were shared by Freeman Bosley, Jr., who found an anti-desegregation stance a useful political strategy for capturing both black and white votes and becoming the first African American mayor of the city.

As Wells and Crain acknowledge, there were political casualties of the desegregation agreement, and significant monetary benefits went to the very suburban districts who had helped to create the problem in the first place. (Though many suburbanites were ignorant of this basic fact.) Yet the book convinces me that the St. Louis city-county voluntary transfer program was something extraordinary. It was a real if small step in the direction of justice, one that gave black students a real chance, in fact, to achieve success in the way that conservatives always prescribe—to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.

After all, don’t the images of black students standing on deserted corners by despair-filled housing projects waiting at 5:30 a.m. for buses to take them on the long ride to school call to mind other famous bootstrap examples of black Americans who endured discomfort and hardship in order to grasp the rare chance at an education?

Think of Frederick Douglass learning to read with the cast-off books of his master’s son. Or Booker T. Washington sleeping under a sidewalk while on a walking journey to a school that would be open to him. Or Ralph Ellison hopping a freight car in order to make his way to Tuskegee Institute because he couldn’t afford to get there any other way.

For the most part, however, white suburban St. Louisans didn’t see it that way. They just saw those students’ long journeys as a waste of money. Or they focused on the taxi cabs that took home the ones who had to stay late for some athletic contest or disciplinary consequence. Or they felt pity for the transfer student, a pity born of an aesthetic distaste for such a seemingly nonsensical arrangement—without understanding the much more disturbing nonsense of the historical and present color line in St. Louis.

With the desegregation plan set to end in 2014, what is next? Do all of the resources that went to provide at least a semblance of justice to black students simply melt back into the general budget for the state, or get returned to the taxpayers?

It’s clear that ignoring the educational problems caused by segregation does not work. In recent years, a number of the virtually all-black suburban districts passed over by the desegregation settlement have lost their accreditation, and the Supreme Court has ruled that parents in those districts have a right to send their kids to schools elsewhere. It’s the same issue that led to the desegregation settlement that will end in three years. The underlying racial, economic, and political realities have not really changed. It’s just that now the conflict is even more pronounced within St. Louis County.

Looking at a district like Wellston or Riverview Gardens, one realizes that, were it not for all the desegregation money pouring in from the state, SLPS would be in much, much worse shape than it is today. If middle-class whites (like my family) are to some degree moving in to the city, surely it has something to do with the fact that there’s still some hope left for the district. Would that be the case if not for the desegregation arrangement?

Reading Wells and Crain, however, I also come to understand more deeply how even well-meaning whites get caught inexorably in a system that perpetuates racial inequality. As the city scrambles for students, competing with private schools and charter schools and the ever-present alternative of exodus to the suburbs, and the racial balance requirements for the magnet schools fade, the best schools in the city system become whiter. This happens because white parents, who tend to have more connections, more time to make pestering phone calls, and more personal and cultural resources, will naturally do all they can to give their children the best chance at a worthwhile education.

From one perspective, there’s nothing wrong with that—just as there’s nothing wrong with a family moving to a suburban neighborhood that’s safer and has better schools. Yet, from another perspective, it’s exactly what perpetuates racial inequality, and exactly what led to the lawsuit that eventuated in the desegregation agreement.

Apart from straight-up racism, much of St. Louis whites’ distaste for the desegregation plan comes from the loss of local control (which feels to many like a basic American tenet) and a sense that the government is unfairly giving something to someone who hasn’t earned it. What this perspective misses, though, is how long the government unfairly took away something—opportunity in education, housing, and employment—from African Americans, how recently it stopped doing so, how long the legacy of that injustice will take to remedy, and what type of steps will need to be taken in order to do so.

For St. Louisans, these perspectives are a determinative part of “the cultural framework through which they view the world,” to use a phrase from Wells and Crain. In our segregated city, it’s all too easy for whites and blacks to develop quite different frameworks and thus to respond to the world in very different ways. The voluntary transfer program forced white St. Louisans to think about their frameworks. Some, Wells and Crain show, responded by becoming resistors, actively criticizing the program and hoping it would go away. Others became sympathizers, feeling a sense of charity toward the transfer students but no real strong enthusiasm for the notion of desegregation. A smaller group, mostly teachers, became visionaries, embracing the new perspectives offered by desegregation and changing their own behaviors in ways that ended up making life better for everyone involved, not only the transfer students.

As I finish reading Stepping Over the Color Line, I ask myself what my own response has been. On the one hand, I’ve largely been on the sidelines: educated in parochial, Catholic schools, I now teach in a prestigious and very predominantly white private Catholic school. In that school’s library, a reading room is named in honor of Daniel Schlafly, an alumnus who sent his own kids to Catholic schools but spent decades on the St. Louis school board, playing an important but ultimately ambiguous role.

There are many things I love about the school where I teach (of which I am also an alumnus), yet I also recognize how it is implicated in the racial injustice of the St. Louis area. I love the city magnet school my daughters attend, but I understand the privilege my white family has secured by obtaining coveted spots in this school while other city students are mired in failing, segregated schools.

What might “being a visionary” mean for me?

This past semester, for the first time, I taught an African American literature class. I learned a lot, not only from the large amount of reading I did to prepare for the course, but also from talking about race every day with a group of high school seniors that was 25 percent black (much higher than the overall percentage of black students in the school). For me, teaching that course is part of being a visionary, but it can’t be the end. After reading Stepping Over the Color Line, I realize that I need to do more. I need to get involved with the student group at my school that works to promote intercultural understanding. I need to get on the diversity committee at my daughters’ school, to help ensure that this great school doesn’t become a haven only for white students.

And I need to keep reading.

Mapping St. Louis

In 2008 I published an essay about racial segregation in St. Louis. The piece was partly a review of Colin Gordon's book Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City.

Gordon has now put together an interactive series of maps that show the progression of white flight, redlining, and more in twentieth-century St. Louis. They're pretty fascinating.

South Side Wanderings

Urban wandering is my preferred manner of bike riding. I like to explore and get lost and then find my way again. Riding around the South Side, you see some pretty cool things that are tucked away in the neighborhoods that have been bypassed by interstates and made less accessible by one-way and dead-end schemes. Today I went for such a ride. Here are some highlights.

Most people are familiar with the newer face of St. Elizabeth's, a high school for girls that was founded in 1882. This part of the school building faces Arsenal:

But the old entrance to the school is at Crittenden and Tennessee. This part of Crittenden is closed to Grand, where it would otherwise empty out, so it's essentially a cul-de-sac now, very quiet and untraveled, ending with this lovely view:

I turned down Louisiana, heading past Roosevelt High School, another venerable and quite beautiful educational institution whose future may be in doubt. As I approached Connecticut, I noticed a pungent smell. It turned out to be a car on fire. There was a man on the sidewalk alongside the school grounds, yelling at a woman to move her car, which was directly behind the burning vehicle. In this picture you can see her heeding his advice:

I took Louisiana down to Osage and turned there at Marquette Park, another little treasure that's tucked away in a somewhat forgotten neighborhood. There's an outdoor pool there, which costs $2 to swim in for adults, $1 for kids. (I asked.)

If you ride around to the front of this complex, on Minnesota, you can see evidence of St. Louis's old public spirit in this fine pool building.

This section of Minnesota, incidentally, is still constructed of brick, so it feels like a time warp back to an earlier era.

Also part of this complex is something called the Thomas Dunn Learning Center, a more recent edifice that is not without its own charm:

I took Gasconade up to Laclede Park, where I noticed this sign on the back of Meramec Elementary School:

I rode toward Broadway, past St. Alexian Hospital, then across Broadway. This spooky-looking abandoned house was on Illinois, between Osage and Keokuk:

I like this house, at Marine and Miami, though I imagine it'd be worth a lot more if it were located somewhere else:

The old Lemp brewery complex, another dramatic and sadly beautiful reminder of St. Louis's past—and perhaps, one fears, a harbinger of the future should InBev decide to close the Anheuser-Busch brewery.

I seem to recall going to this dairy on Cherokee for ice cream with my uncle and cousins when I was about 15, but I might be mistaken. In any case, it's a cool sign:

My friend Ben edited a documentary about this place, which is an assisted-living facility for adults. It's at Utah and Texas, an intersection that is the inspiration for its southwestern theme and name, Silver Spur. I had completely forgotten about this place and was delighted to come upon it unexpectedly.

This leaning house, further west on Utah, looks to be in desperate need of piering:

Even further west on Utah, just past Grand, the homeowners seem to have more resources at their disposal:

I've always loved this urbane little spot on Spring Avenue:

So that was today's hour-long ramble through the south side of St. Louis. Is there any other place in the metro area that features such a richness of architectural beauty, historical evocativeness, decaying grandeur, neighborhood revitilization, and ethnic, racial, and economic diversity?

Shutter to Think

Although I haven't re-read it in years, I would still say that The Mezzanine, by Nicholson Baker, is one of my favorite books of all time. In my fiction writing classes, I sometimes mention it as an example of a book without a plot—although it actually has more of a storyline than some of Baker's other novels such as Room Temperature or A Box of Matches.

Baker uses a series of mundane events during the narrator's day at the office as a chance to ruminate, often in gloriously extended footnotes, about the tiny details of the world. There's a great section in which the narrator demolishes the rhetorical claims made by the bit of text bolted to the bathroom hand-blower extolling its superiority over paper towels. There's another section in which the narrator weighs the relative merits of two different methods of putting on one's socks—bunching them vs. pulling their entire lengths over the feet. There's a mini-history of the design of drinking straws, and one that compares the evolutionary design of staplers to that of locomotives. This is a novel in which the narrator asserts that one of the key moments in his attainment of adulthood was when he realized that, if necessary, he could put on his deodorant even after he had already buttoned and tucked in his Oxford shirt.

In short, it's a novel that finds wonder and delight in details that might commonly be overlooked.

Toby Weiss, in this recent post (and this even more recent one) at her blog B.E.L.T., does something worthy of Nicholson Baker at his best: she unpacks the history of shutters, with great local examples, explaining how they have evolved from something necessary to something vestigial, and suggesting the atavistic desire some homeowners satisfy by installing them.

This Old House

This is the house my mom lived in for most of her childhood. It's on a little butt-end of Portis Avenue, south of Tower Grove Park.

I have fond memories of this place—Christmas Eves in my early childhood, Easter egg hunts in the backyard, riding my Big Wheel up and down the sidewalk, eating cookies in the living room while watching Scooby Doo. On the second floor, my mom's siblings had affixed room numbers to the lintels, thus naming the rooms 201, 203, 205, etc. There was a balcony off one of the second-floor bedrooms. It used to open onto a staircase that would lead to the backyard, but at some point that was torn down, so the balcony, which had no railing (and was in fact never accessible in my experience) looked out on a sheer drop.

Living in a ranch house in the suburbs, this house was magical to me as a child—partly because I loved my grandma (who lived here, with grandpa) so much, but also simply because of the architecture and atmosphere of the place. It looks pretty shabby now (and was probably pretty shabby back then, too—my mom once told me how ashamed she was of the place when she was growing up), but to me back then it possessed a grandeur that couldn't be found where I lived.

I was impressed by its age. My mom told me one time that the house had actually been moved from another location, which seems a bit unlikely to me now. She also told me that it used to be a two-family dwelling but was renovated for single-family use. I was impressed by its height—four stories, from its dank basement to its mysterious attic, which I never got to explore until my grandpa died (I was about 10; my grandma had died a few years earlier) and my parents and aunts and uncles were cleaning it out and preparing to sell it.

Its location is so out of the way that there's never any reason to drive past it. Yet every once in a while I'll ride my bike over there to take a look at how it's holding up, and to remind myself of the past.

Hamlet and the Improvisation of Life

Last night I saw Hamlet in the park with my brother. It was a great evening—the weather, the companionship, the production of the play.

My brother brought along, for reference, an old Signet Classic edition of the play. I borrowed it from him afterwards. This morning I was looking through some of the essays in the back, and I found this interesting comment by Robert Orenstein:

Subjected to philosophical analysis the great speeches in Hamlet yield commonplaces. We treasure them for their incomparable poetry, not for their depth and originality of thought—for their revelation of Hamlet's soul, not for their discovery of the human condition. Many questions are raised in the play but few are answered.... Even when Shakespeare seems to dramatize a thesis, he does not debate philosophical positions. He is not interested in abstract thought but in characters who think, who have intellectual as well as physical needs, and who, like Pirandello's characters, cry aloud the reason of their suffering. The "problem" of Hamlet is not an intellectual puzzle. It arises because the play creates so marvelous a sense of the actual improvisation of life that we can find no simple logic in its sprawling action.