to dead human ears, eaten wheat
ears. the Roman
baths crumble waterless heat–
less. tram humble lath-
shanties
emerge
tub-women
hanging panties
sheets bibs sun-sweet on sal–
vaged string and pour
Brigham Young and Diocletian
out the door.
. . .
CORRESPONDENCE
SIRS:
Dwight Macdonald's review of
C. Wright Mills's
White Collar
was extremely amusing. But ap–
parently he was more interested in
being amusing than in informing
the readers of
PARTISAN REVIEW
of what Mills actually set out to
do.
r
for one am left with the im–
pression that Macdonald's reac–
tion is one of petulant disappoint–
ment at not having been given a
set of answers to political ques–
tions which he suspects are un–
answerable anyway
(Granville
Hicks
put it more baldly, and
more honestly, it should be noted,
in his
New Leader
review). This
is a strange attitude to adopt to–
ward a book which is not a tract
but a descriptive analysis, suf–
fused though it is with moral judg–
ments.
Macdonald's tone would be
more understandable if he were
discussing a book that, whatever
its merits, had already found
its
way into many thousands of
households (e.g.
The Kinsey Re–
port)
and was therefore already
familiar to his readers. But such
a cavalier attitude toward a seri–
ous work which has not yet won
a wide audience, not even among
the readers of
PARTISAN REVIEW,
and which
I
know
I
am not alone
in believing to be one of the most
strikingly original descriptions of
the
quality
of American life to ap–
pear in the last decade, is simply
irresponsible.
If
Macdonald was bored by
White Collar,
he would have done
better not to review it, or to sug–
gest that it be reviewed by some–
one else, rather than to indulge
himself at the expense not merely
of Mills, but more importantly of
Here is an art that
IS
on the move -
The Paintings of WILL BARNETT
with an introduction
by
James T. Farrell
Fonnat: SY2 x 10)4 • 96 pages· 36 reproductions· price 3.50
PRESS EIGHT
182 Third
Avenue
New York
City
3, N. Y.
