PARTISAN REVIEW
LETTERS
P. R.:
CriItic Morris Dickstein leveled
some pretty serious charges against
me in
his
bombastic, characteristi–
cally flag-waving reply to my let–
ter, both printed in the
Partisan
Review
(Fall 1972). I feel that a
reply to his reply is in order.
According to ,the courtroom def–
inition, a rape occurs when !\:he
woman says "no" at the crucial
genital moment. ("The Politics of
Rape," Liberation News Service,
Los Angeles Free Press,
Sept. 1,
1972). The
Random House Dic–
tionary
defines rape as "-n.
1.
the
act of seizing and carrying off by
force. 2. the act of physically forc–
ing a woman to have sexual inter–
course. -V.t. 4. to seize, take, or
carry off by force. 5. to plunder (a
place). 6. to force (a woman) to
have sexual intercourse -v.i to com–
mit rape. (ME
rape(n )
L
rapere
to seize, snatch) In Richard
Wright's
Native Son Bessie
says
"no" at the crucial genital moment
and is forced; therefore she is
raped regardless of whether, as
Dickstein writes, "she is his own
girlfriend," an expression which
belongs to the same class as "his
own mule."
In a paragraph which must rank
as one of the sneakiest, creepiest,
molelike pieces of critical doctoring
even by Dickstein's standards and
in which he distorts both Baldwin's
viewpoint and mine, Dickstein
claims: "Bigger feels no hatred for
Bessie." He had a funny way of
showing it; he killed her, but of
course Dickstein has already given
his views about the quality of fe–
male life: something that belongs
to
a man to do with whaJt he
pleases: Dickstein, club in hand,
315
dragging a woman across the snows
of Europe is my suggestion for the
Partisan Review
"intellectual car–
toon."
I suspect that critics like Dick–
stein, who still view black writing
as an annex to the old John Reed
Club reading room, enjoy unsavory
characters like Bigger Thomas
be–
cause he is the kind of <thug who
terrorizes Afro-Americans but, like
the sorry chumps these Biggers are,
takes people like Dickstein meta–
phorically speaking, to where they
are too chicken or too lazy to take
themselves. Of course, when the
Biggers turn on them, mug them,
they hire some house right heavy
to write nasty things about all
"blacks" in their little "rational–
ist," "humanist" newspapers and
magazines.
In
his
original article Dickstein
wasn't <talking about "mutual in–
fluences" between "black" and
"white"
wr~ters
as he claims in his
letter. The influences were going
one way from Dickstein's mostly
Jewish (that's not racist, that's ob–
jective) writers, comedians, and
poets to black writers, the kind of
patronizing, paternalistic, jingoistic
boasting that comes out as Harry
Lesser in Bernard Malamud's sad,
old-folks, attempt to
be
with-it,
The Tenants.
In this book, the
noveliscic counterpart of Dickstein's
cri:ticism, Lesser, the virile, con–
scientious, Jewish writer teaches
poor Willie Spearmint (the kind
of pun that would
be
booed even
on the Johnny Carson Show) ,
a grunting groaning subhuman,
craftsmenships, cap'n. (Based upon
his charaoterization, Anatole Bro–
yard, in a review of the book :in
the
New York Times,
Sept. 20,
1971, referred to blacks as "lesser
human beings"; the kind of term
tho s e "awful," "pathological."
