CORRESPONDENCE
Sin,
Thank you for your good note. . .
uking me to comment on "The Cold
War and the Future of the West." I
agree too deeply with what Robert
Lowell and Mary McCarthy have writ–
ten
and you have published to wish
to
fog their words with my assent.
Robert Oppenheimer
Sin,
What in Heaven's name does John
Henry Raleigh mean by saying in the
Spring issue of
PR,
that "Rousseau. ..
could not bring himself to mention the
four, or possibly five, children that he
had by Therese Ie Vasseur"? He men–
tions them at length in Book VIn of
his
Confessions,
confesses that he turn–
ed
them over to a foundling hospital
and explains (however unconvincingly)
why he did so. Mr. Raleigh quotes
Goethe also as saying that he could
not bear to write his own autobiogra–
phy: I know not where Goethe said
this, but it is a grade-school fact that
Goethe did, in
Dichtung und Wahrheit,
in fact write his autobiography. These
errors seem to me sufficient comment
on Mr. Raleigh's wild generalization
that "No one has ever been able to
tell the truth about himself"-a per–
fectly valueless dictum.
Newton Arvin
Sirs,
Mr. Arvin is of course absolutely and
incontestably correct. In fact,
it
is even
worse, in the case of Goethe. I had
been relying on a college memory–
without checking-that in the con–
versations with Eckermann Goethe had
said that, in spite of
Dichtung und
Wahrheit,
it was impossible to tell
it all honestly. But the opposite is quite
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