Carlos Fuentes, Mexico s former ambassador to France and famed novelist, short story writer, and essayist, spent the 197980 academic year teaching at Princeton. While Fuentes was visiting the University of Notre Dame at the invitation of the Spanish Department, Jose Anadbn had the opportunity to ask him several ques tions, as did some of the students.

Seventy-three-year-old Sam Fischman, while not a poor man, is certainly not rich, and is never going to be rich. Over and over he insists that this fact doesn't bother him, for he's had all the rich friends a man ever needed. But it takes no special sensitivity to recognize how disappointed he is with his own lack of success, and what he perceives as his son's preordained series of failures.

The moment in history is mid-January, 1945. The journalist from Time-Life is in the field with the Chinese army overlooking the junction of the historic road where Burma meets China. To take the last Japanese stronghold, 7,500 foot-high Mount Huilungsham, and reopen the Burma Road, American planes have dropped their tons of napalm, fragmentation, and heavy bombs, and the artillery has pounded away with eight-minute salvos every hour. Between salvos three divisions of American-trained Chinese troops, bayonets fixed, triumphantly storm the crest.

This was Wednesday, another day of intolerable heat. When I awoke, the sun was already high in the sky— it must have been well past eight o'clock. I looked at my watch, but, alas, it had stopped again during the night. This broken watch I have worn the last seven-eight years now is long overdue for a cleaning-but that would cost two-and-a-half yuan! Never mind, my stomach knows the time, anyway. When it begins to mumble-grumble, it is mealtime. It never goes wrong.

William Wordsworth, born in 1770 and a "blissful" twentytwo when in Paris in the Year One of the new Republic, has given us The Prelude (1805), a very intelligible retrospective account of his enthusiasm and commitment during the heavenly dawn of the great Rebellion called the French Revolution. But he also hints, rather ambiguously, at involvement in some pathetic abortive rebellion during his "Residence in France," some murderous scheme of action in which, if he had continued in France, he might have "perished.... A poor mistaken and bewildered offering."