Correspondence
CORRESPONDENCE Teachers Always Right John Dunlap's review of Paradigms Lost (April 1981) was devoted mainly to seconding John Simon's attacks on the National Council of Teachers of English-a...
...Johnston's censures, since I agree with the view that literature is something entirely different from ideology or the mere essaying of ideas...
...NCTE has never opted, gaseously or otherwise, for anarchy in the teaching of writing...
...The SRTOL stand on instruction in Edited American English-affirmed as an official Council position statement in 1974- is only one of NCTE's numerous actions in support of well-balanced writing programs...
...But to say that James's writing is lacking in "mind," that it had no traffic with the social issues, the "ideas," of his time is to miss completely the whole tenor of his work...
...Let Mr...
...My flaws are legion, but my "real flaws" are neither "cognitive" nor "strategic...
...Sadlowski was on the union payroll when he ran for the top office and he is still on the payroll...
...Brittling Sees It Through lately...
...The problem is that Mr...
...Those writers to whom Professor Nolte admiringly refers to as novelists of ideas-Tolstoy, Mann, and Huxley-are not read today because of their "ideas...
...In his fine piece, Paul Seabury quotes Victor Navasky as saying that most Americans "in the abstract" would agree with Forster...
...Therefore, Forster is addressinghimself to precisely these people and is offering his opinion on what he would do if he were in their shoes...
...Forster's sarcastic use of the word bourgeois suggests strongly that the "movement or cause" to which he is so disparagingly referring is Communism itself...
...Dunlap is entitled to his opinions of the Conference on College Composition and Communication's Student's Right to Their Own Language (NCTE, 1974...
...Ideas and the Novel Reviewer William H. Nolte's aggressively middlebrow discussion of "iddas and the novel" (February 1981), apropos of Mary McCarthy's book of that title, turns on a set of aesthetic assumptions which would warm the cockles of the ideological watchdogs of the Soviet Union of Writers but unfortunately have little to do with the nature of art...
...Forster's dictum that betraying one's country is preferable to betraying one's friend...
...For a different view of Simon, I'd suggest that readers see Jim Quinn's American Tongue and Cheek (Pantheon, 1981...
...among contemporaries, his influence on Updike, Salinger, and V.S...
...Dunlap replies: The SRTOL, as I tried to show in my review, confuses the issue of the spoken word (about which the document has much to say of interest and value) with the issue of the written word (about which the document bloviates...
...Further on in this remarkable essay, Forster heartily gives "two cheers" to British life- "two cheers for democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism...
...And perhaps the single most real of my real flaws is what Daniel P. Moynihan has called a "low crap tolerance"-a flaw which Moynihan acquired in the practice of politics and which I acquired in the teaching of English...
...they are read because they are great artists...
...For example, he claims that two statements from SRTOL ("Dialects are all equally serviceable in logic and metaphor" and "Edited American English allows much less variety than the spoken forms") are contradictory, which they clearly are not...
...Many things does the fox know, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.'' I can understand Mr...
...Naipaul is obvious...
...They are regarded as bourgeois luxuries, as products of a time of fair weather which has now passed, and we are now urged to get rid of them, and to dedicate ourselves to some movement or cause instead...
...Nor am I totally anti-James...
...It is sadly indicative of Dunlap's powers of observation that his example of "total freedom of written expression" is drawn from a section of SRTOL that deals not with writing but with general linguistic competence...
...The notion that "ideological content" is crucial to a novel's artistic success and that a great work of literature must swarm with "ideas" is one from which most critics were weaned after the literary " pogroms of the thirties...
...This is an interesting parallel...
...As Forster undoubtedly knew, many British Communists, among them the infamous trio of Philby, Burgess, and Maclean, truly believed that Russia, not Britain, was their "real" country...
...A nice job...
...John A.Barnes Brooklyn, New York...
...Sadlowski was indeed unsuccessful in his run for the presidency of the union, but there is no evidence that the leadership of the Steel Workers is corrupt...
...One does not quarrel with Professor Nolte's distaste for Henry James...
...The phrase comes from a one-line fragment of a poem by Archilochus, perhaps the first Greek lyric poet (7th century B.C...
...Of course, that is exactly what they did...
...The description somehow doesn't fit...
...Johnston has completely misread my review which was not intended to promote the novel of ideas but was rather intended to say that ideas might well be found in much great fiction...
...George Simm Johnston, III New York, New York Mr...
...The most tedious stretches of War and Peace are Tolstoy's digressions on his pet theory of historical process...
...CORRESPONDENCE Teachers Always Right John Dunlap's review of Paradigms Lost (April 1981) was devoted mainly to seconding John Simon's attacks on the National Council of Teachers of English-a favorite pastime of linguistic purists these days...
...To claim that he believed treason to be an acceptable means of preserving a personal relationship is to take the man fatally out of context...
...Stark replies: Sir Isaiah does attribute his metaphor to Archilochus, and so I was indeed aware that Archilochus was the originator of the "hedgehog and the fox.'' However, my point was that Berlin divides Western thinkers into hedgehogs and foxes, something Archilochus, standing at the dawn of Western thought, was unable to do...
...but Mr...
...Barry N. Siegel Professor of Economics University of Oregon In the introduction to his article, "The Virtues of Complexity" (June 1981), the widely-read Andy Stark mentions Isaiah Berlin's treatise The Hedgehog and the Fox and writes: Eastern culture, almost always on a completely different schedule than Western culture, in this rare instance offers us a pertinent exchange between Confucius and one of his many disciples: Confucius, a man vastly underrated in his own time, and greatly overrated in our time, once remarked to a student . . . "You probably think I know many, many things...
...Stark seems unaware that Berlin did not invent the metaphor of the hedgehog and the fox, but drew it from the heritage of Western literature...
...But I do stand by my remark that James's fiction is so far removed from the world in which we live that one reads it only when the desire to escape has one by the scruff of the neck...
...Needless to say, I knew my review would cause James...
...that is partly a matter of temperament...
...Before we allow the Spectator's readers to pigeonhole Forster as a fellow-traveling commie turncoat we ought to examine his writing a bit more closely...
...Nolte replies: Suffice it to say that I am by no means entirely in disagreement with Mr...
...Charles Suhor, Deputy Executive Director, National Council of Teachers of English, Urbana, Illinois Mr...
...For a more recent NCTE document on writing, see "Standards for Basic Skills Writing Programs" (NCTE Committee on Writing Standards, 1979...
...Who's the Renegade...
...He is hoping that, in the final analysis, they will not betray their many friends in Britain for the sake of "the move-mentor cause" espoused by their "real" country...
...Eliot's remark that Henry James "had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it," which Professor Nolte blithely dismisses, is a locus classicus of modern criticism for a good reason...
...And the assertion that James's influence on later writers has been slight is palpable nonsense: Eliot, Conrad, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway avowed their debt to James...
...Stark Raving I recently ran across Andy Stark's review of Thomas Sowell's book, Knowledge and Decisions (January 1981...
...It appears in an essay in which Eliot makes a useful distinction between writers who bristle with ideas, like Geofge Meredith, but whose mind gives no evidence "that it actually thinks," and those writers who "think with their feelings," whose intellects are not primarily engaged by the plethora of "isms" in the intellectual marketplace but rather grapple with the rich, ambiguous fabric of life as a whole...
...the most dated and unreadable works of Huxley and Wells are precisely those which are primarily hobbyhorses for their author's ideas (has Professor Nolte sampled Mr...
...Why doesn't Professor Nolte occasionally allow some ambiguity, some appreciation of the richness and complexity of great literature, violate his mind...
...Johnston read my review again and he will see that he has interpolated entirely too much in his letter...
...In fact, Stark's analysis of the various ideological positions in today's political spectrum is so useful that I decided to circulate the piece in a class I teach pn the economics of social issues...
...But you are wrong...
...But as suggested by the timbre and the jargon of Mr...
...Suhor's energetic response, the motivation for SRTOL was fundamentally political, and in politics issues are more typically used than they are explored...
...I enjoyed Mark Lilla's review of Studs Terkel's American Dreams: Lost and Found (May 1981), but my faith in him as a reviewer was undercut by his reference to Ed Sadlowski as, "the renegade Chicago union leader who unsuccessfully tried to unseat the corrupt leadership of the United Steel Workers...
...ians to lose sleep and sweat ink...
...but the particular arguments advanced in the review raise doubts about his literal comprehension skills...
...It is tempting to use the sentence that achieved notoriety to support a variety of viewpoints, but it does Forster's memory a great disservice...
...Indeed, the twentieth-century British novelist most likely to endure, Evelyn Waugh, is anything but a "novelist of ideas," although a powerful intellect is at work in every sentence he wrote...
...Stark's reluctance to peruse the New York Review of Books' Letters column, where this matter was discussed with pedantic passion, but not his seeming preference for Confucius over the Greeks...
...I know one big thing...
...30-38) and my article on John Simon's Doublespeak in the forthcoming (July) issue of Quarterly Review of Doublespeak...
...Has Professor Nolte read The Boston-tans...
...He provides a genuine self-contradiction, though, when acknowledging the SRTOL calls for teaching Edited American English while claiming that NCTE "opts gaseously for something like total freedom of written expression in the classroom...
...I hate the idea of dying for a cause, and if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country...
...Thomas R. Brooks Brooklyn, New York Friendly Betrayals I noted in the April 1981 issue of The American Spectator that two of the contributors, in two separate articles, invoked E.M...
...Susan Scheinberg (Kristol) Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Mr...
...He was deploring the fact that trendy British Communists insisted that one abandon all inconvenient personal relationships for the sake of " the cause.'' In fact, it is possible to infer that the "country" to which Forster was referring was none other than the Soviet Union itself...
...The quotation is taken from a piece Forster wrote in 1939- It bears quoting more extensively: Personal relations are despised today...
...Perhaps Dunlap's real flaws aren't cognitive, but strategic...
...And what about that "renegade...
...Arnold Beichman in "Gentlemanly Spooks" uses the quotation to signal his astonishment at Cord Meyer's apparently deliberate omission of what Beichman sees as a crucial episode in the history of the Agency...
...Suhor's response leaves me sanguine about the possibility that some flaws merit cultivation...
...Both writers pass by or use the quotation without real reference to what it was Forster was saying...
...Most of his errors are thin, sassy extrapolations of the thin, sassy errors found in Paradigms...
Vol. 14 • July 1981 • No. 7
