Our merry Mardi-Gras town looks beyond its wrought iron facade. In the musical chair struggle for the New World, Spain held but never kept New Orleans. A Spaniard discovered the land, a Spanish millionaire financed its colonial public buildings, a Spanish ruler laid down the city's first tax, and a Spaniard built the famous French Market. Yet France seemed to leave a greater imprint. In the eyes of the world, New Orleans always has been a bit of France, an outpost of the French language in a barbarian land. Lately the eyes have not seen clearly, for quietly and calmly New Orleans has been recaptured by the descendants of the people who lost it. Since World War II, Latin Americans have moved leisurely into New Orleans. You can not walk past the shops of Canal Street without hearing Spanish. The night clubs of the French Quarter fill up with Latin American businessmen vying with Texas oilmen in a race to spend money. The city's universities are enriched by Latin scholars and doctors studying cures for the medical, economic and engineering ills of their countries...

For many years Howard Fast the Communist obscured our view of Howard Fast the writer. Flaunting contempt at Congress, issuing tracts against "bourgeois, decadent" authors, rallying sympathy for the Soviet Union, he stood between us and his books and kept us from a special insight into the intellect of an American Communist. Fast, who has left the party, may have represented, in some ways, the essence of America's own brand of communism. The clues to understanding him as a Communist lie in understanding him as a writer. Fast's novels had tremendous circulation in the Communist world after World War II and, in fact, enjoyed much popularity here until the press advertised his link with the Communist Party in the late 1940s. His Soviet popularity ended when he left the party in 1957. Although his resignation helped reopen doors to American publishers and movie producers, most of the fiction of his Communist period has remained unread here. We have slipped Fast into our stereotype of the ex-Communist and perfunctorily welcomed him as one more defector who finally has seen the light...

A potful of hot water gurgled down on us as we waited, caught in a giggling, shoving crowd, outside Washington’s Coffee ‘n Confusion Club, a beatnik haven marking its first Saturday night of business in the nation’s capital. An irate neighbor in an upstairs apartment had tossed out the hot but not boiling water. The sprinkles from above alighting on the sprinkle of beards in the crowd symbolized one of the oddest clashes in the history of this clash-ridden federal town. For several months now, the prudery of Washington has been at war with the rebellion of its youth. The war started when a 24-year-old self-styled poet, William A. Walker, decided to open his club. Following the style of shops in San Francisco’s North Beach, it would sell coffee, pastries, biscuits, cream cheese, bagels and poetry. But Walker and his wife, Ruth, a 22-year-old graduate of Vassar, erred strategically in their first attempt by failing to consult officialdom before opening. Zoning laws promptly descended upon them, and police shut down the shop. In their second attempt, the Walkers, moving gingerly, followed every step of the law. They found an abandoned cellar restaurant at 945 K Street, Northwest, rented it, decorated it, and applied for a license. And then the smug traditions of Washington, sensing that the venture might succeed, began to stir and swat at this pesky, tiny threat of non-conformity...

MEXICO CITY’S Concordia, a restaurant doubling as a playhouse, introduced me to Mexican theatre. As I approached the place, several young people were milling about on the street in front, including a huge ruffian with a black eye. Spotting him, I thought that excursions to the Mexican stage were perhaps not for me. But, suddenly, he pushed open the door and jumped into the restaurant, the others rushing after him. My ruffian and his friends were actors waiting for their cues during the evening’s first performance of Las cosas simples (The Simple Things), a play by a twenty-seven-year-old Mexican, Hector Mendoza. Inside, watching the second performance, I discovered that mistaking actors for spectators was part of the production’s charm. The play was about life in a diner near a college, and the Concordia looked just like that. The actors performed around a luncheon counter and five tables in front, while the audience munched their supper and followed the play from the other twenty-five tables. At times the actors moved into the audience to borrow a napkin or ask for a match — on one occasion, to kiss a bald patron on the head. The Concordia and Las cosas simples, which evoked a Saroyanesque atmosphere, are not entirely typical of Mexican theatre, but they offered a promise that the Mexican stage bristled with vitality. Several weeks of theatre-going have fulfilled that promise...

IT IS fashionable in literary circles to snicker at Arthur E. Summerfield, the former Chevrolet dealer who may have produced one of the most publicized cases of poor judgment in the history of criticism. But the Postmaster General merely carried the logic of traditional Post Office procedures to their proper conclusion. Through the years, these procedures have led to the seizure of Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata, Boccaccio’s Decameron, Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls and Caldwell’s Tobacco Road as obscene literature, and Sholom Aleichem’s Bewitched Tailor, abolitionist pamphlets, discussions of the French Revolution, the Economist (London), and a Russian chess book as political propaganda. Vested with these traditional powers of censorship, Summerfield, a man who admits to reading little fiction, decided that D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover “taken as a whole, is an obscene and filthy work”; literary critics and at least one federal judge decided otherwise. Snickering at this difference in judgment seems like misplaced energy. Rather than examine the critical faculties of Summerfield, it would make more sense to examine the censorship powers of the Post Office...

About 100 years ago, Lord Lyons, bewhiskered, youngish ambassador from Britain, sent home a description of the city of Washington. "A terrible place for young men," he said. "Nothing whatever in the shape of amusement for them." No one doubts the accuracy of Lord Lyons' picture. Washington was just an overgrown village then. But could the present ambassador cable the same description now? Is the nation's capital still a hub by day and a dud by night? Like most questions in this federal town, these provoke more than one answer. Arguments usually follow two contrasting lines: 1. Washington is one of the world's dreariest capitals after dark. A few hours after midnight the only one you are likely to meet on the silent, black streets is a milkman or a mugger. 2. Washington is one of the world's great cultural, cosmopolitan centers. Great music, theater, jazz, night clubs, foreign restaurants, parties. There's enough amusement here for anyone. Where does the truth lie? Well, it is true that city laws tend to drive everyone home late at night...

An innocent-looking envelope, addressed to the teen-ager in your family, slips into the morning mail. The envelope is opened. A letter and two photos fall out. Half-nude girls beckon from the photos. For a few dollars, the letter promises, you can get more and better photos perhaps showing less clothing and more action. Shock and anger grip you. "Can't something be done to keep such mail away from the American home?" you demand. "Must our teen-agers be exposed to this?" You investigate and find that the Post Office department, led personally and loudly by Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield, has embarked on a campaign to rid the mails of pornography. But there is a hitch. You also discover that in some quarters the post office attempt to clear up the mails has provoked bitterness and anger. Critics like the American Civil Liberties union and book publishers say the post office tramples on freedom of speech and of the press, and, in its zeal, too often mistakes a classic for a French post card. Through the years, they say, the post office, while attacking pornography, has tried to ban a host of literary classics...

IN THE Federalist days, the young, fretful American Republic tried to stop pamphlets about the French Revolution from reaching the mailboxes of its citizens. Since then, in sporadic moments of crisis, the federal government has continued to screen mail and weed out what it considers foreign or dangerous propaganda. Such moments have come in the pre-Civil War days, during the two World Wars, and, now, in the Cold War. But the present little-known program, a joint effort by the Post Office Department and the Customs Bureau, is facing the heaviest attack in its existence. For the first time, law suits have been filed against it. Under the program, the Customs Bureau checks foreign non-first class mail as it enters the United States. If translators and inspectors decide the mail contains foreign - usually Communist - political propaganda, the Post Office generally holds it up and sends a notice to the addressee...

MEXICO CITY’S Palace of Fine Arts assigns one of its salons to modern art and another to Mexican art, but both, like all the others, exhibit the same kind of paintings. In tiers of galleries, this huge museum offers little but work by twentieth-century Mexicans. A first look is far from a dull experience. Eager for more, I marched from room to room, excited by a mural still in progress, by the stark perspective of Siqueiros, by the cluttered symbols of Rivera, by the bright colors and stunted figures of young artists, by the mystery of a powerful art spawned in a political revolution. Only later did doubt creep in. Where do young Mexicans go, I wondered, to find out about Botticelli or El Greco or Rembrandt or Degas or Picasso or de Kooning? Later, at the small Antonio Souza Gallery, the American manager discussed her related problem. The gallery displayed numerous canvases by Leo Rosshandler, a Dutch painter living in Mexico, who paints huge, frightening birds in thick blacks, browns and whites. Although visitors gazed long and quietly at them, sales were meager. “The Mexican public has not been educated beyond Mexican nationalistic art,” the manager said. “They want the usual paintings of the Indian woman with her rebozo and little child.”During my stay, a brisk controversy in the newspapers, stirred by José Luis Cuevas, has emphasized the significance of the gallery’s problem...