NEW YORK LETTER
What's New?
By M. L. ROSENTHAL
1TERATURE, said Pound, is `news that stays
news,' But most news about literature is of the more transient kind, gossipy or political or both. Vietnam is the great American literary news, as the letter that Robert Lowell sent to President Johnson on the occasion of the White House Festival to 'honor and encourage the arts in the United States' showed. Readers of the Spectator are acquainted with that letter, which may go down in the etiquette books as the best- written, most heart-wrung refusal of an invita- tion ever received by a Presidential host. Poetry magazine now reports some of the other incidents of that occasion. Saul Bellow and John Hersey, both of whom did attend, 'made clear in public statements that their participation did not mean in any way an endorsement of all the policies of the administration, including foreign policy. Mr. Bellow described the American military intervention in Santo Domingo as "wicked"; Mr. Hersey announced that he would read from Hiroshima, and . . . made a prefatory state- ment underscoring the immediate political rele- vance.' Mark Van Doren, in introducing the Programme, defended Lowell's scruples in stay- ing away. On the same subject, an amusing piece by Dwight Macdonald in a recent issue of The New York Review of Books seeks to justify that author's conscience-riddled attendance, and describes his rather comic attempts to get other People there to sign a statement condemning the government's policies—an attempt that seems to have irritated a number among them as in bad taste and somehow self-serving.
When The New York Review elf Books was founded two years ago, we all thought it would shake the good old New York Times Book Review to its barnacled depths. Corning out at frequent intervals (every two weeks), in the form of a tabloid newspaper or Le Canard Enchaine and wittily illustrated by David Levine, it would be a true literary review for the American intelligentsia and at the same time have a sufficiently wide coverage to rival that of the Times. And it is true that some of the country's liveliest minds contribute to it, and some of England's, too—at least half the contributors to some issues have been British. But the coverage of 'pure' literature, poetry and fiction mainly, has been pitifully sparse. If The New York Review, in fact, is any sort of a gauge (some- times it seems more of a weight than a measure). American literary critics have become far more interested in politics, sociology, education, anthropology—anything, indeed, but especially Politics—than in literature. Occasionally a poet 0_1: a novelist gets a look-in. The latest issue (S;eptember 16), for instance, has a review of GuY Daniels's A Lerinontov Reader and a piece On F. Scott Fitzgerald and some of his recent critics. Though one would hardly call either Lermontov or Fitzgerald a current writer, they are certainly both welcome subjects. But the main emphasis of the issue is political, so much s,.,0 that it is subtitled `A Special Supplement: `letting Out of Vietnam.' The leading article, by Hans J. Morgenthau, the University of Chicago professor who has den SO active in the movement against the government's Asian policies, is a ,somewhat lengthy but nevertheless cogent argument against the thesis that military withdrawal, or even a noticeable slowing-down of the present pace, would be disastrous to America's prestige. The second article, by the military journalist Joseph Kraft, defines the policy of bombing North Vietnam as an 'American Dienbienphu,' both in its self-defeating character and in its motives of giving the war a more comfortable Western form, encouraging the South Vietnamese govern- ment,. and forcing negotiations under more favourable conditions. Finally, a long article by Bernard Fall, a professor of history and expert on Vietnam, and Marcus G. Raskin, co-director of the Institute .for Policy Studies in Washington, presents a detailed programme to support its opening generalisations about what has to be done: It is not enough to deplore that the war in Vietnam has cost the lives of at least a quarter- million Vietnamese of all ages and political persuasions. . . . What can and, in our view, must be done in Vietnam as a first step is to limit the damage our present military opera- tions are inflicting on innocent people; second, to 'de-escalate' the war itself so that effective contacts, discussions, and negotiations with the other side may go on; and third, to join with others in planning ahead for the restoration of a Vietnam that will not be a menace to itself, to its region, or to world peace.
Vietnam is the gravest issue facing the United States now, and the pressure of responsibility on the literati is great. Sensitised by the great recent civil rights struggles and the taunts against liberal complacency that have accompanied them, and stung by the surge of youthful derring-do in many aspects of American life, they have come back out of the great sunk silences of the post-'thirties to deal with the state of the civili- sation as participants rather than as refugees. Irving Howe's magazine Dissent and the Partisan Review have discussions going on the `new ,leftism,' seeking to define a viable radical pro- gramme in the framework of the new movements and attitudes that have sprung up in a suddenly unfamiliar United States. Political theories have grown up in the heart of literature itself in recent years--witness the 'uncomproniising' criticism of . the white civilisation and power structure in the writings of Baldwin and Leroi Jones, against whom Howe has felt , constrained to protest in the latest Dissent.
Still, it seems a bit much that the rest of the issue of The New York Review I have been describing is devoted to historical works, works on modern Marxist theory, anthropological works, and two studies of Giacometti---as though new poems and stories and plays and all that were hardly for grown-ups. (The preceding issue had about the same proportions, and the only strictly literary.figure treated-- again, hardly someone on the contemporary scene--was James Stephens.) Lucky for the imaginative writer that the Times keeps going on, after all-- to say nothing of the exclusively literary magazines like Poetry, Quar- terly Review of Literature, Kenyon Review, and the multitude of smaller ones just noted, where ones sees what is actually being written these days.
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