Dear Editor
DEAR EDITOR NUCLEAR DISARMERS While I share William Henry Chamberlin's view ("The New Failures of U.S. Nerve,'* NL, August 1 and 8) that unilateral disarmament would be a far more dangerous policy...
...Associate Editor Edwards, of course, recognizes no distinction between fiction and other printed matter...
...One vase smashes to the floor spilling its contents, a bystander who seemed to have been clipped on the jaw by a wild haymaker denies that she was even touched, and, at a late party, cigarette butts are killed in a cheese...
...In summarizing Theodore Draper's reasons for the American Communists' enslavement to Russia in the '20s, Schapiro lists their "aims and ideals and ideological enthusiasms...
...she complains that "the implied promise is not fulfilled...
...We shall never know how to cope with a man or group so described until we realize that once the convert has stepped within what Arthur Koestler in his autobiography calls the "closed circle" or system, whether, as he suggests, it be the church, the psychoanalytic movement, or the disciplined Party, nothing can rescue him but some equally revelatory or traumatic experience, either personal or historic, or both...
...But a novel is an art form and But Not For Love is a novel about some aspects of modern men and women as reflected in an art colony during one period of thirty-four hours...
...The reviewer thinks that a bikini-clad blonde at the wheel of a Jaguar is "trite" and a "never-fail igniter...
...He was not...
...a statistic which this female author found as surprising as it is irrelevant and boring...
...Harry Goldberg ROCHE ON BEVAN I am touched by the emotional article by John P. Roche of Brandeis University on "British Labor's Last Mass-Leader" (NL, August 15-22), about the late Aneurin Bevan, a great statesman and orator...
...Be that as it may, the one in But Not For Love is not "the deus ex machina" nor does anyone in the book make a pass at her...
...New York City Aryeh Neier Executive Secretary, League for Industrial Democracy Steven Allen (NL, August 15-22), in attacking my article on the unilateral disarmers, beats loudly on some wide-open doors and does not seem to face up squarely to the point I was trying to make: that advocates of one-sided disThe New Leader welcomes comment and criticism on any of its features, but letters should not exceed 300 words...
...Rather than "nerve crack-ups," their advocacy of unilateral disarmament represents a reasoned position that must be examined against the background of records that evince quite as much devotion to liberty as Chamberlin can claim...
...The motives for becoming a ComDEAR EDITOR munist or fellow traveler are as varied as the involved characters themselves...
...The article was written, apparently, from a great distance, and actuated by Bevan's detractors, of whom there are many with vested interests to serve...
...W. E. Chilton III...
...Only Miss Edwards has treated the novel as a source book of "tribal rites, morals, and social techniques...
...surely, every bit as dangerous a policy to follow in the light of today's realities as that advocated by the latter day "Committees of Correspondence...
...Might I suggest that Allen and others of his point of view would benefit from reading Constantine FitzGibbon's When the Kissing Had to Stop, a vivid and all-too-probable picture of what would happen if a combination of fellow travelers and ultra-pacifists should persuade Great Britain to break away from the Atlantic alliance and force the United States to abandon its bases in Britain...
...This idea, through the writings of Arnold Toynbee and Reinhold Niebuhr, your own Max Eastman and many others since, I thought had now become a commonplace...
...She blandly lumps William H. Whyte, A. C. Spectorsky, John Keats, John Cheever and Vance Packard in a single bundle as men engaged in a common objective, all unsuccessfully emulating "such earlier masters as John Marquand...
...After that it is understandable why she rebukes me for "eschewing the clinical approach to the subject...
...It seems rather narrow to imply, as Geertz does, that many of these joined the Padang rebellion of '58 because of their disaffection as alienated intellectuals...
...Either let the reviewer know something about the subject or allow that the author may know what he's talking about...
...And why does Miss Edwards say that there is "considerable destruction of movable property...
...William Henry Chamberlin Pontresina, Switzerland THE CLOSED CIRCLE May an old Englishman, who hasn't long to live and who is traveling about in your wonderful country for the first time, leave your readers a sort of "last will and testament...
...As a socialist for approximately 60 years and one who has had personal experience in many parts of the world in dealing with Communists for 40 of those years, I think I was the first man —at least in the labor movement—to label Communism a secular religion...
...Actually, the reasons for the rebellion were much more simple, even prosaic, if you will, involving as they did differences on the questions of Communism, democracy, local autonomy (for Sumatra, etc...
...But, while I might find a review interesting which discussed the characters of But Not For Love as if they were potential patients or customers (especially if it were funny enough), I do protest that the review (NL, August 1-8) by L. B. Edwards, Associate Editor of East Europe, has no more right to assign my novel to the "genre of social anthropology" than the doctor would have to place it in the genre of medicine or the salesman in merchandising...
...I would describe the posture for unilateral disarmament adopted by Fromm, Riesman and Taylor as an essay in counter-cyclical thinking rebelling against the tragically foolish spectacle of two political parties vying to outdo each other in "talking tough" to the Russians and boosting defense spending...
...have dubbed the book "witty," "brilliant" and even "powerful...
...Washington, D.C...
...Since Draper and Schapiro are attempting to enlighten their readers about the "magic" that Moscow employed in transforming Western Communist parties into "its tools," we need first to substitute the word "religion" for "magic...
...But then, I also don't understand Miss Edwards' use of squire, hauteur, in fee, or that unspeakable artistics...
...To a varying degree, much the same can be said of Natsir, Sjafruddin and the others mentioned...
...Reviewers in Newsweek, the Herald-Tribune, the Saturday Review, the Library Journal, etc...
...It was my impression from having read The New Leader for many years that this disastrous kind of reasoning was no longer engaged in by your sophisticated writers—disastrous because if we do not correct it in time, the loss of the lives of millions of free men everywhere may be the result...
...That main theme is the alienation of what he calls the intellectuals from indigenous Indonesian developments (because of Western influences...
...Whatever degree of Western influence may have affected their thinking it merely enlarged their vision a bit, but hardly made them divided personalities at war with themselves...
...Evidently she won't accept any picture of artists which doesn't conform with the one she has fashioned from movies, Time-Life gossip and certain colorful paperbacks...
...What matters to us, aside from doing everything in the powers of our national policies and of our personal relations with Communists to prevent these victims from being further ensnared by tyranny, is to understand clearly what a Communist full-fledged ideology means in essence...
...It is most dramatically expressed, purportedly, in the quotation he gives from Sjahrir: "For my relative unpopularity in nationalistic and intellectual circles in Indonesia I can largely thank what they call my 'Western inclinations' and sometimes even my 'Hollandaphile' sentiments...
...Considerable destruction...
...Let there be ground rules of some sort...
...Artists and art critics have agreed that I know what I'm writing about...
...Chamberlin would have us hark back to the policies of the Committees of Correspondence formed on the eve of the American Revolution...
...East Hampton, N.Y...
...Charleston, W. Va...
...I have read with a perturbed spirit Leonard Schapiro's review of American Communism and Soviet Russia (NL, August 15-22...
...Otherwise nothing, not even a head or heart, is broken...
...The famous old nationalist, Hadji Agus Salim, for instance (an incomparable raconteur, with whom I spent many enjoyable hours discussing various questions during my stay there in the early '50s), was alert to Western developments...
...However, if Roche will come closer to actuality by attending the House of Commons, the Labor Party Annual Conference or the Trades Union Congress, he will realize that the British Labor Party is still so rich in impressive statesmen and persuasive orators that the middle word of his title is grossly misleading...
...May Natalie Tabak INDONESIA Clifford Geertz' article, "Indonesia—Sense and Sensibility" (NL, June 6), is so interesting, so well-written (brilliant in spots) and with such original insights, that it should be completely convincing, yet it just isn't...
...The knowledge of, loyalty to and susceptibility to indigenous influences of most of those who are at present on the rebel side is not qualitatively less than those in the ranks of Sukarno's henchmen and yes-men...
...and issues of that sort...
...Enough...
...On the other hand, those who advocate unilateral nuclear disarmament for the free nations, or who would settle for the utterly inadequate and deceptive schemes of "control" and "inspection" so far accepted by the Soviet Government are, however unwillingly and unconsciously, playing the role of Trojan, or Kremlin, horses in the citadel of freedom...
...But I am not ready to join Chamberlin in saying that anti-war declarations are the greatest contributors to the likelihood of war...
...in the 20th century...
...These people are profoundly of Indonesian soil and thought...
...And a scientific study, no matter how fascinating, is not a creative art form any more than a sugar-coated aspirin is candy...
...Nerve,'* NL, August 1 and 8) that unilateral disarmament would be a far more dangerous policy for the United States than our present reliance on military deterrence, I am disturbed at the vituperative quality of Chamberlin's attacks on such distinguished advocates of unilateral disarmament as Erich Fromm, David Riesman and Harold Taylor, et al...
...But that's the way artists are...
...London Davis Ian Bullen BUT NOT FOR LOVE I admit that if fiction is presented as intended for the general public, then the opinion of any reader, a doctor or a salesman, although different, should be as acceptable to the author as that of a literary critic...
...I should think this sentiment would he quite unanimous...
...Whether the book is actually as hilarious and as terrifying as I intended it to be, only the individual reader can say...
...This is the psychological commitment from which all the other evils flow...
...Quite the contrary...
...But this does not get us very far toward solving the problem of what to do when a power committed to world conquest through a mixture of subersive propaganda, intrigue and military power possesses nuclear weapons, constantly brandishes them, and threatens to use them if it does not get its way...
...But I was mistaken, if I am to judge from your review...
...It will not do for Chamberlin to label the efforts of the "Committees of Correspondence" "super appeasement movements," thus seeking to evoke images of another Munich...
...Today...
...The lessons of the past are not wholly applicable to our present age despite Chamberlin's rather flippant dismissal of Linus Pauling trying "to make the flesh creep with pictures of the horrors of nuclear warfare...
...And it isn't because its main theme represents an oversimplification, at best a half-truth which leaves out of consideration other factors, thus giving a flawed, though appealing, picture...
...But the decisive formative influences in his life and thought, besides the indigenous happenings in his own country, were the Koran, Mohammedan philosophy and ethics, and developments in Asian countries...
...Allen speaks of "millions of people all over the world who regard the prospect of nuclear war with deep loathing...
...on Long Island...
...Now, there is a measure of truth in Sjahrir's case, though the whole story is much less simple than implied...
...Hadji Agus Salim, Natsir, Sjafruddin, or Hatta for that matter, simply cannot be fitted in under the rubric, "alienated intellectual...
...And if those on the rebel side have been attacked in the past, chiefly by the PKI or the violently neutralist members of the PNI, they have been so attacked not because of their having been estranged and schizophrenic intellectuals, but because of long-standing political antagonisms between the PNI on the one hand and the Masjumi and the PSI, to which parties so many of these purportedly alienated intellectuals adhere...
...armament by the free nations, however pure their motives, are objectively aiding the Communist design of extinguishing liberty throughout the world...
...I'm truly sorry that L. B. Edwards does not like my characters...
...An American abandonment of nuclear defenses would have even more disastrous results...
...It seems to me that those who best aid the cause of peace with freedom and national honor are those who are doing their best to make America's nuclear defenses so strong that the Soviet rulers will never venture to translate their homicidal boasts into action...
...He was a New Deal Democrat who shortly before his death became chairman of the important Senate Judiciary Committee...
...Much of the failure of our American foreign policy can be ascribed to the inability or refusal to comprehend the changes that have been wrought and the nature of the age in which we are living...
...Their position must be considered seriously at a time when we run the risk of enslavement by the shibboleths of past epochs...
...As the old man said when I came to him for advice about my cat's bird-catching habit: "Ma'am, that's the nature of the beast...
...But it certainly even hardly applies to many of those whom Geertz names as representative Indonesian intellectuals...
...Why do the characters seem "predominantly female" to her, when by actual count there turn out to be exactly as many males as females in the book...
...London Hector Hughes MP KILGORE: DEMOCRAT Stanley M. Arndt, in his letter concerning Reinhold Niebuhr and Richard Nixon (NL, July 18-25), gives the impression that the late Harley M. Kilgore, twice elected Senator from West Virginia, was a Republican...
...I, for one, do not believe that it would be in the interests of the United States, of survival, or of liberty, to adopt a policy of unilateral disarmament...
...She alone promised herself that the novel would be "an examination of a new species of group living" and then, when But Not For Love failed to describe a homogenized gang of nouveaux-riches artists who had "encroached on the preserve of the conservative rich who formerly held it in fee" (in fee, forsooth...
...And let it never be forgotten that a novel is not a sociological investigation even should it reveal the most startling authenticated sociologically useful material...
Vol. 43 • September 1960 • No. 34
