LETTERS
To the Editor:
Leon Wieseltier's attack on
Susan Sontag ("Ideas in Season,"
Partisan Review,
3, 1982), in spite of
its particular arguments, very much
resembles in tone such diverse crit–
ics of Sontag's speech as Andrew
Kopkind and the
New Republic's
Richard Grenier. The key phrase is
"she must have done something
right." All questions of filial piety
aside, one does feel that Sontag's
twenty years of work might have
moderated the patronizing tone
Wieseltier adopts so inappropri–
ately. "Sontag's conclusion," he
sniffs, "quickly became famous. (It
was delivered in the epigrammatic
manner that is the intellectual's best
hope for fame.)" This imputation
that Sontag made her remarks with
a press agent's calculation-the bad
Sontag hungering for space in the
tabloids contrasting with the meas–
ured voice of complexity and clar–
ity-borders on the slanderous.
Yet Wieseltier's diatribe is
almost totally unconcerned with
what really went on at Town Hall,
who the participants were, and, in
short, the context in which Sontag
delivered her remarks. He forgets
that there is such a thing as an
American Left, or seems barely
familiar with it. The meeting at
Town Hall was an event sponsored
by the Left with the express purpose
of mobilizing a Left opposition to
the martial-law regime in Warsaw.
Not being any part of this Left,
Wieseltier can caricature the rally at
Town Hall as a frivolous tiff over
"language," and be sarcastic about
the (un)importance of Sontag's
speech.
Writers and Artists in Support
of Solidarity can be fairly called a
Marxist, though anti-Soviet, group.
It basically reflects the Trotskyist
views of its founder, Ralph Schoen–
mann, who was formerly Bertrand
Russell's private secretary and the
organizer of the Russell War Crimes
Tribunal during the Vietnam War.
Another active member of the
group is Daniel Singer, who is also
loosely affiliated with the so-called
Fourth International. In other
words, the clearly enunciated view
of the organizers of the Town Hall
rally (one they share with much of
the American Left) is that the
crimes committed by communist
governments do not invalidate the
utopian claims of communism itself.
For them, Rosa Luxemburg is more
of a communist than Stalin, or
Ceausescu, or any other party hack
from Shanghai to Sofia.
This assumption has always
been fundamental to thinking on
the Left because communism, as
Wieseltier knows perfectly well
whatever his demurrers, is the great
modern faith. As such, it is no more
to be judged, in the eyes of its sym–
pathizers, on the way it has been
perverted in a particular country
than a Christian would accept that
his faith could be invalidated by the
abominations of the Inquisition.
It
is curiously enough this extrahis–
torical dimension to the communist
system that accounts for the fact
that as each generation of commu–
nist sympathizers in the West is, as
it were, disabused of its faith,
another seems to spring up to
replace it.
It
is no good moaning
about this and downright harmful to
pretend, as Wieseltier does, that it
doesn't continue to happen.
The rally at Town Hall in its
tone and emphasis was a reflection
of this political stance. One indeed
felt that many of the speakers were
more exercised over El Salvador
than over martial law in Warsaw. At
best, as Christopher Hitchens
pointed out
in
his commentary on
