CORRESPONDENCE
BERLIN POSTSCRIPT
Sirs:
There's been a tremendous in–
terest in PR here in Berlin since
the fracas at the German Writers'
Congress [when PR's Berlin corre–
spondent startled the Russian-spon–
sored congress by describing the
life of a writer under Stalin.-Edi–
torial note].
But absolutely no for–
eign books or magazines are avail–
able. People have heard of Koest–
ler, Burnham, Trotsky; no library,
however, has anything modern in
politics or literature. Whatever is
mailed to me here will be put in a
kind of private lending-library in
my office for the benefit of editors,
publishers, and writers. Reviews of
politics, economics, history, psy–
chology, literature are particularly
wanted. Literary people can help
with things like Melville and Henry
James, for whom there are several
publishers.
I
may say that the few
publishers' readers who have been
going through my copies of PR
have been quite floored; for them,
of course, it was an America be–
yond their knowledge, beyond
their expectations.
Melvin
J.
Lasky
Lasky's address is the U.S. Press
Center, US Army APO
742
A,
Postmaster, New York.
139
DIFFERENT EXPOSURE
Sirs:
This is an
"I
deplore" letter.
An intermittent reader of PARTISAN
REVIEW, strongly drawn from the
first to its pages by its generally
high level of partisanship,
I
never
expected to address such a letter
to its editors. But in my memory
no review of the pretended charac–
ter of your magazine has descended
quite to the level that some of your
pages represent in your September–
October number.
I
deplore the
temper of the cheap and vulgar
reviews of the literary studies of
William Tindall and Edwin Bur–
gum. When reviewers apply such
epithets as "fat overgrown bed
bug" and "vicious fool" to the au–
thors they are reviewing, they de–
grade themselves beneath their
victims and raise the serious ques–
tion whether a proper editorial
judgment would have assigned to
persons so intemperate books tore–
view, or would have printed the re–
sulting smears.
I
have no objection
to your reviewers exposing the
limitations of Messrs. Tindall and
Burgum if they can do so by ap–
pealing to my reason rather than
to my passions-! am not in the
camp of either man-but one does
not even have to revert to their
books to know that they are better
contained and more sensitive than
their reviewers. The latter have
served you very badly indeed
if
they leave a presumption of in–
equality and unfitness on your part
to weigh the volumes you elect to
