Dear Editor
DEAR EDITOR diana trilling Exiled as I am (most happily) in London, I didn't until recently catch up with Diana Trilling's inaugural curtain lecture ("Dwight Macdonald's Reminiscences of Radical...
...Bewildered because memory, tradition and continuity with the pa* t have come to assume increasing importance for me, and also because it would seem obvious that one would not write a two-part article about one's past unless one thought it important...
...The country is almost bankrupt...
...If Mr...
...4. My article—Part 1, that is—emerges finally as "a betrayal of history and of its author's contemporaries and of Mr...
...As long as murder remains a grim reality, capital punishment is necessary to make our society reasonably safe...
...Tas urges that the Algerian leaders listen to the voice of reason in efforts toward a solution...
...Since publishing my column, I have read the second half of Mr...
...However, the author has omitted or been misinformed about certain facts...
...Macdonald, of having failed to give himself sufficient credit for virtue and probity and intelligence...
...3. I am bewildered by the accusation that I feel there is "nothing to be learned from the past," and that I share the common American (and Soviet Russian) delusion that "fresh starts" must constantly be made without reference to memory and tradition...
...It was exactly to this view of his past that I was addressing myself when I accused him of frivolity...
...Macdonald proves it...
...London Dwicht Macdonald Mrs...
...She is hard to please...
...The FLN succeeded in continuing the struggle, increasing its own strength, and also giving assistance to the Tunisian and Moroccan nationalists...
...It is terribly important to do everything we can to strengthen this spirit of freedom and independence in Poland...
...Macdonald to write vulgarly and I am sorry to have occasioned such a lapse of taste...
...The Algerian people ardently desire a negotiated solution of the conflict between them and France...
...Why must she reveal herself as a belated sister-under-the-9kin of my ex-comrades in the Thirties (speaking intellectually, not politically...
...New York City A. Chanderli Delegation, Algerian Front of National Liberation poland Your readers, I would think, have a pretty realistic idea of what can be hoped for from the Gomulka Government in Poland...
...1. Mrs...
...I am glad to report that it is indeed more serious than the first...
...Quite a betrayal...
...At the same time, it is the only country within the Russian orbit where a certain intellectual, religious and personal freedom does exist...
...When ever did the radical movement throw up an instance in which a man was accused, as I accused Mr...
...Moreover, on June 13 the Afro-Asian group at the UN, in support of the...
...I don't deny some of her strictures: The article was a bit sketchy...
...it should have had more on those determinants...
...Though, I must confess, it doesn't do much about "the social, economic and political determinants of the radicalism which dominated our intellectual culture in the '30s...
...Could it be that my stern critic is really objecting to the ironic and comic tone of Part 1 (a tone that seemed to me justified by the content of the experience— Part 2, for example, is more serious because the subject-matter seemed to me more serious) ? Could it be that the only lessons she thinks it legitimate to draw from the past are "positive'' ones, exhortations arising from an augur-like scrutiny of the entrails of those social, economic and political determinants...
...The latter, like the former, would guarantee them the respect of all their legitimate interests...
...Certainly I have never known Mr...
...That's how we Trotskyists, and they Communists, used to carry on...
...He would also have considerably validated the claim to moral superiority which is so implicit in much of his writing...
...Second-hand volumes from your library or even a few paperbacks will make a rich gift...
...And not healthy...
...With regard to this point, the Algerian Front of National Liberation has denied all responsibility for the incident...
...Macdonald that the '40s were a more serious time than the '30s...
...I condemned Mr...
...Macdonald very much with my criticism of his reminiscences...
...Although French sources at various times have given different estimates of the total number of Frenchmen residing in Algeria, the actual number of Frenchmen, according to the most reliable sources, is 850,000 and not 1.3 million as cited by Tas...
...But they were not as disproportionate to the social and economic circumstances of that time as Mr...
...The cruelty of execution should be measured against the possible increase in murder victims, as well as the untold misery and heartbreak of their friends and relatives...
...the kind of invective he directs at me had survived, I thought, only in the Communist press...
...Any work, in any language, that expresses free intellectual or cultural activity, or gives a picture of what is going on in the outside world: fiction, poetry, theater, music (especially jazz), criticism, art and architecture, psychology, sociology, philosophy—the list is endless, particularly in the humanities and social sciences, where the censorship was strictest...
...2. It is unfortunate that Mrs...
...SellOuts, Desertions of the Banner of Revolution, Rotten Compromises, Petty-Bourgeois Renegades —all these abounded in that heyday of paranoia, and of comedy...
...Macdonald is embarrassed by his recollection of himself as a Marxist, and can treat his period of Marxism only with irony or humor...
...Of course, there was great silliness in the business of being radical intellectual in America in the '30s...
...Trilling begins by damning me, as of 1935-1945, for an excess of moral earnestness —if she, of all people, thinks this, I must indeed have been monster—and ends by damning me for frivolity...
...The position of the FLN on the status of these Frenchmen in an independent Algeria has been clearly stated many times...
...It contains some of the explication and evaluation, even some of the seriousness, that she didn't find in the first part...
...Trilling was unable to contain herself until Part 2 of "Politics Past" appeared in the April Encounter...
...Macdonald undertook survey, however brief and good-natured, of his political evolution, and in this evolution there were social forces at work upon him which I should have hoped he was capable of describing in such » way as to demonstrate that he participated in a serious phase of the American intellectual experience of his generation...
...But I cannot agree with Mr...
...A man evidently can be both frivolous and a prig...
...But this was not the ambition of Mr...
...There is much good entertainment in any honest recollection of what life was like in the radical movement in the '30s — I wish someone with comic gifts woidd set it down on paper before it is lost to posterity...
...We share the opinion expressed by your correspondent Sal Tas, in his article "A Way Out in Algeria" (June 24), that "the Algerian war is so costly that a major effort [for peace] is certainly justified...
...Deja vu, really...
...DEAR EDITOR diana trilling Exiled as I am (most happily) in London, I didn't until recently catch up with Diana Trilling's inaugural curtain lecture ("Dwight Macdonald's Reminiscences of Radical Politics Before the War," NL, April 15...
...The hunger is tremendous...
...On the other hand, he may shrink from the deed if he knows he will be subjected to the horrors described in Koestler's article...
...Paris Charles Merrill...
...Mac-donald had had the courage to bring to the examination of his political past any of the moral certainty — moral earnestness, if you will — with which he used to judge his political adversaries, he would not only have been spared the accusation of frivolousness...
...Tas raises the question: "How can the 1.5 million Frenchmen who live in Algeria be protected...
...The Algerian revolution began on November 1, 1954, at a time when Tunisia and Morocco were still engaged in an armed struggle to attain their own independence...
...Perhaps hundreds of people are now living who would otherwise be dead at the hands of some killer...
...A man who contemplates first-degree murder, even though insane, is usually quite capable of weighing the consequences...
...Capital punishment acts as a strong deterrent that keeps murders, and also kidnapings, at a minimum...
...There were also some good and even noble aspects of the heritage of that period—see Part 2—but this kind of moralistic melodrama was not one of them...
...In a telegram sent to the United Nations Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold on June 2, the FLN appealed for an impartial investigation by the UN and gave assurance of its complete cooperation in all initiatives which may be undertaken...
...Macdonald neglects when he indulges his self-consciousness...
...they were determined by actual objective conditions, they were not subjective responses in a social and political vacuum...
...As individuals, we can't supply them with the raw cotton or steel they need to put the country on its feet, a little further from absolute Russian control...
...I have just returned from a week's visit to Warsaw and was profoundly moved by this spirit of change...
...If they are no worse than « life in prison with good companions, sympathetic guards, and the chance of parole for good behavior, he may consider the risk worth taking...
...Monterrey, Mexico Frederick E. Lowell algeria The Algerian Front of National Liberation (FLN) has been pleased to note The New Leader's interest in the Algerian question...
...But couldn't she have been a little more discriminating, a little more judicious, even a little more, dare 1 say it, sensible...
...That is, Mr...
...I like to boast that this is my style, and rather remote from the style of any political group with which I have ever had acquaintance...
...There is a significant difference between humor and frivolity...
...Not so long ago, a certain state abolished capital punishment for wives who did away with their husbands...
...capital punishment In his article, "Alternative to Capital Punishment" (NL, June 17), Arthur Koestler overlooks the fact that this law is meant to make an example of the murderer...
...Tas speaks favorably of a projected North African Federation, which he states has long been a pet idea of the Premier of Tunisia and the Sultan of Morocco...
...Macdonald's memoir...
...Macdonald's charge that when...
...What sort of books...
...The article also refers to the massacre at Melouza as the work of the, "rebel National Liberation Front...
...Macdonald bases this judgment on the fact that his intellectual life, as it developed, freed itself from the dominion of Marxism and therefore became, in his opinion, more worthy of serious consideration...
...I hope it's not too late for a. few counter-points...
...No one knows how many tragedies have been averted because homicidally inclined individuals, thinking about the supreme penalty, changed their minds at the critical moment...
...We affirm our willingness to accept the European minority into the Algerian national community on the basis of complete individual equality, leaving the members of this minority the choice between integration into the Algerian nation and preservation of French citizenship with the status of aliens...
...it is surrounded by hostile neighbors...
...I said he had betrayed himself and his past I put myself in the familiar line of the political paranoids who were always looking to accuse someone of selling out, I am afraid that here he is badly rattled...
...I gather that Mr...
...As for Mr...
...The fact that such a solution has not yet been reached is not their doing...
...FLN proposal, called upon the Secretary-General to seek such an international investigation to determine who is actually responsible...
...course) ? Betrayal...
...The Algerian Front of National Liberation is ready at any time to enter into direct negotiations with France on the basis of the Algerian people's right to independence...
...But hooks sent by private individuals to private individuals- plus the old Polish habit of passing rending matter from hand to hand—can bring in new ideas and new facts and also give a certain welcome reassurance that we take their struggle seriously...
...Macdonald and his associates were engaged, and the assertions they made, were wildly disproportionate to their historical consequences...
...realize was a form of self-defensiveness...
...We would like to add that this is also ardently desired by Algerian nationalists and has been referred to in many official documents published by the Front of National Liberation...
...This is the historical truth which Mr...
...At the risk of making Madame Defarge-Rhadamanthus-Trilling even more indignant, if that were possible, I must confess this strikes me as awfully old-fashioned...
...Macdonald, too...
...as we look back at them now, the occupations in which Mr...
...Macdonald's reminiscence not for its humor — actually, it was not at all funny — but for its frivolity, which I now, in the light of his second installment and of his letter...
...His figure may have been arrived at by including the 53,000 foreign residents and the 135,000 Algerian nationals of Jewish faith in Algeria...
...Macdonald would now have us think...
...Macdonald's memoir...
...its administration is torn by Communis: pressures...
...They should he sent to one of the following addresses: "Wspolczesnosc" Jerzy Prokopiuk Nowolipie 20a, m.23, Warsaw 31 (A literary magazine of the students of Warsaw University, a courageous group that was operating a sound truck advertising an edition on American literature right on Stalin Square...
...The frequency of murder rose so alarmingly that the law had to be reinstated...
...But we can aid the intellectuals who have fought with courage and tenacity by sending books they can't find at home...
...Trilling replies: I must have hurt Mr...
...Tygodnik Powszechny" Jacek Wozniakowski Wislna 12, Krakow (A new Catholic magazine with a wide reputation for courage and honesty...
...The Ford and Rockefeller aid to university libraries cannot meet the need...
...A brief review of the history of the Algerian revolution would suffice to refute the statement that "without such assistance [Tunisian and Moroccan] the FLN would have had to capitulate long ago...
Vol. 40 • July 1957 • No. 28
