Correspondence
CORRESPONDENCE Hold the Irish-American Writers In my article "New York Jew: A Tale Distorted" (November 1978), I spoke of Kazin's Jewishness as "a very contemporary phenomenon, resembling the...
...As to your comments on Grant, as a man of discretion I can offer only a provisional felicitation...
...I had some correspondence with Bob Kirsch of the L.A...
...There is not another man writing English who could pull off the marvelous effrontery of naming his journal after Joseph Ad-dison's-although your own style may well owe rather more to Swift...
...Besides, you do put things so nicely...
...When a ruffian once asked Wilson Mizner who the greatest general was, Grant or Lee, Mizner, a careful man, said he did not know, but that they paid off on Grant...
...Gardner has made one of the more useful points to come out of contemporary litcrit, and he is in every way right in his assessment of the relentlessly trivial, often avowedly pro-evil, attitudes of the New York Review of Each Other's Books crowd...
...I am not a literary detective, but it is known that Twain did importune Grant to write his story, that Twain saw him constantly during the last two years of his life, and that Twain's company published and distributed the work...
...George Warren Pasadena^ California...
...Teddy and the Camelot Buncombe" (December 1978) is, simply, superb...
...CORRESPONDENCE Hold the Irish-American Writers In my article "New York Jew: A Tale Distorted" (November 1978), I spoke of Kazin's Jewishness as "a very contemporary phenomenon, resembling the mystique peddled by other contemporary writers who dwell on their blackness, womanness, Irishness, etc...
...I can only guess that Kunstler, Vince, and Kayo were either on vacation or were previously committed to an even more beastly cause...
...Stephen Miller Grant's Autobiographer Your editorial "The Hon...
...You refer to Teddy's rightful place in presidential annals as a genial and goatish Grant-I take it from this that you expect him to be our next President...
...Go into your sacristy and pull from the shelves Twain's The Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (originally published under another pseudonym) and therefrom read of the great campaigns of Joan-you will find the same understated style and expressions found in Grant's memoirs...
...Let Thomas, a "writer" of whom I had not previously heard, go to his church and I shall go to mine...
...Or have I misunderstood your magazine altogether...
...I should appreciate your publishing this qualification of my general point...
...On the other hand, please deliver two handfuls of choice river-bottom mud to Brian Thomas for his brutish, swinish, mindless ad hominem attack on John Gardner in the same issue...
...Times about this some time back, and Kirsch had one trenchant thing to say: "All great writing does after all share a moral address...
...Millbrae, California River-bottom Mud Please accept an admirer's respectful tip of the lid for your January '79 piece on Jonestown, etc...
...But if he is to continue this street-corner-preaching gambit of his, I wish he would find some more appropriate street-corner to do it in...
...In fact, I would have bet, and won, $50 on the notion that Charles Garry and Mark Lane would turn up as adoring and protective counsel for the man who murdered 900 underprivileged blacks in the name of Marxist progressivism...
...The American Spectator is hardly the proper place for a celebration of the moral vacuum...
...On second thought, I think the inclusion of Irish-American writers wrong...
...In a private correspondence, James T. Farrell has questioned my remarks with regard to Irish-American writers...
...Charles Wallen, Jr...
...In turn, I would have lost back the $50 on the notion that Bill Kunstler and the Hallinans would also be on the staff...
...but he was a great general...
...You write that Grant's is possibly the greatest American autobiography, and I am inclined to agree with you, but I have always contended that Mark Twain wrote those two memorable volumes...
...Other than that, I agree that Grant was a poor, if honest, President...
...Very well...
...I write novels for a living myself, and I have in fact come to the conclusion that the way for my novels to become better lies in my following not Coover and Mailer but Dickens and Dumas...
...Thomas' troglodyte defense of antimoral stances and deliberate inconsequence in modern "literary" fiction hardly belongs in a magazine otherwise devoted to quality and, yes, morality as I recognize it...
...Good writers tend to gravitate toward this because they want to be great writers...
Vol. 12 • February 1979 • No. 2
