,\
I
LETTERS
A LEITER TO THE EDITOR
Sirs:
Nearly every statement William
Phillips makes (PR No.1, 1971, pp.
9-10) about my article in last No–
vember's
Commentary
is patently
false, as even a cursory reading of
the article would reveal. Phillips
certainly exemplifies his own com–
plaints about the low "level of dis–
cussion and debate." To itemize:
I
was not "ostensibly presenting
a capsule history of New York in–
tellectual life," although
I
referred
favorably to three such efforts–
by Podhoretz, Epstein and Howe
- but at most a "capsule history"
of
The New York Review of
Books.
The title of the article, af–
ter all, was "The Case of
The New
York Review."
I did not accuse PR of "deviat–
ing" from any "political norm,"
merely of printing Jack Newfield
and Nat Hentoff. The context
made clear that my objection was
to the intellectual caliber of these
worthies rather than to their poli–
tics.
When Phillips writes that my
"political norm ... turns out to
be right of center," one can only
wonder just where he locates the
center. Perhaps here too he exem–
plifies a tendency he himself de–
plores, that of mistaking the
"fringe" for the center. Presum–
ably, he considers
The New York
Review
writers I criticized, such
as Chomsky, Friedenberg, Kemp–
ton as centrists. A bit sectarian
that, surely. I guess PR hasn't yet
overcome the "arrogant intellec–
tual parochialism" I said it pos–
sessed back in the forties, for I
should have supposed that the cen-
ter in American politics was where
figures like Humphrey or Muskie
stood. Phillips also ignores my
cri ticism that some
New York Re–
view
writers, while marching under
the banners of the left, actually
draw heavily on conservative and
right-wing arguments in assailing
American life and democracy.
Since the bulk of my article was
devoted to detailed criticism of
particular
New York Review
ar–
ticles and writers, always listed
and named, I fail to see how I
can be said to have "ignor [ed]
the differences between diverse
peoples and positions."
I
neither
discussed nor made "a hasty dis–
posal" of
any
literary questions, but
merely reported that most
New
York R eview
critics, and specifical–
ly Phillips's old
confrere
Philip
Rahv, were unsympathetic to the
current "new sensibility" in the
arts. Nowhere did I suggest that
"all forms of radicalism amount to
intellectual betrayal." My objec–
tions were restricted to the most
publicized contemporary forms of
soi-disant
radicalism.
My major concern in the article
was with the state of the academic
and intellectual community rather
than "the state of the country." I
was, after all, writing in a journal
produced, like PR, largely by and
for that community and which, un–
happily, does not reach "backward
and provincial opinion throughout
the country." But does Phillips
perhaps think that complaints
about "the state of the country"
are confined to journals like PR?
Has he looked at
Life
lately or the
CBS News? "The state of the
country" may be "presumably what
the left is responding to" (why the
doubt?) but the New Left (and I
insist on the upper case and the
