Dear Editor
DEAR EDITOR THE NEW LEADER welcomes comment and criticism on any of its features, but letters should not exceed 300 words, KENNEDY SUPPORT I was very much surprised to read William E. Bohn's...
...And I ask our readers to decide whether Friedman's explanation of "stern miraculous" love explains, or faces the defects of, the phrase at all...
...We need the resistance- which is not just hate, the love which is not just surrender, the courage which is not just desperation of Cummings' own, but forgotten, "conscientious object-or," Olaf "glad and big...
...These are not Cummings' perceptions, not his goals, not his values...
...But a simple-minded "Jeffersonianism" (which isn't Jeffer-sonian at all) faces neither the nasty problems of a plural, industrial society beset with the clamor of those peoples without food or shelter or education (let alone legacies), nor the terrors of a world perpetually tottering, because of our nationalistic "individualism," along the margins of war...
...Some words are hard to define so I don't know how to interpret William E. Bohn's description of Adlai Stevenson's campaigning for Senator Kennedy as "very moderate...
...By my own standard Stevenson campaigned very vigorously, as the following schedule of his speeches reveals: Chicago, September 7 Milwaukee, September 10 New York City, September 14 Brooklyn, N.Y., September 15 Minneapolis, September 18 Seattle, September 24 Sacramento, September 26 San Francisco, September 27 Los Angeles, September 28 Berkeley, September 28 San Diego, September 29 Denver, October 3 Madison, October 10 New York City, October 18 Philadelphia, October 19 Durham, North Carolina, October 21 Portland, Oregon, October 30 In addition to these he substituted for Senator Kennedy at Town Hall in New York City on October 19 when the Senator's schedule became too crowded...
...Our world is indeed in a fix, and when he sets over against Cummings all "those peoples without food or shelter or education," the case indeed appears overwhelming...
...Eliot, whatever one may think of his social ideas, is clearly trying to conserve or revive a value system which once (rather too long ago for resuscitation, I suspect) flourished...
...TAIWAN AND QUEMOY It is with acute distress that I read the article by Bruno Shaw on the Quemoy controversy (NL, October 31...
...This may not fill any dinner pails, but it certainly produces some livingly beautiful poems...
...Their individualism was not simply a goal in itself, not a recipe for economic self-seeking, not a pose from which to heap scorn on "most people," but a method by which they could move toward transcending their disunited condition as men and could thereby point a path toward self-transcendence for other men...
...But we permitted Chiang and his Kuo-mingtang to invade Taiwan, perpetrate vicious cruelties on the rightful owners, set up his futile and incompetent Government and then tie us up in an opera-bouffe "alliance" which would be comic if it were not that we have been jockeyed into the mortal danger of being pulled into a war with which we have no true concern, at the whim of this moribund remnant of a one-time Government...
...New Haven, Conn...
...But one wonders whether the individualism of Senator Goldwater is not a cherished myth and that of Cummings, alas, a dream...
...Brooklyn, N.Y...
...Geneva, N. Y. PAUL LAUTER Norman Friedman replies: I share Paul Lauter's concern over the values which "our anxious world" needs, and for a moment I was nearly carried away by the urgency of his rhetoric...
...And it represents a personal response to our world of the highest dignity and integrity...
...I had mentioned Russian help to Communist China for the development of atomic energy, but I would never imply, as the formulation which appeared in print does, that this is what makes the difference between a fourth-rate and a 10th-rate power in Communist China...
...But I did not find them...
...would carry their planes straight to Taiwan where they could avoid the inconvenience of having their bases attacked by the simple expedient of putting the meager forces of Chiang out of business...
...Their "Self-Reliance" consisted of the ability to penetrate with calmness and sympathy all dogmatisms, whether of individual enterprise or of social welfare, and yet to reconstruct a unified world on the margins of the new frontiers (the phrase is Emerson's) they discover...
...Rather, I think, the analogy is based upon the fact that, in my opinion at any rate, the political and social philosophies of both the Senator and the poet grow from inadequate conceptions of the modern world and inaccurate notions about the American past...
...First, Taiwan should belong to the people of Taiwan who differ somewhat from the Chinese...
...We do not look to poets, in other words, for programs of social action, for solutions to the world's problems...
...DAVID NELSON ROWE...
...San Francisco JOSEPH S. THOMPSON CORRECTION Near the bottom of the second column in my article, "Fallacy of the Sino-Soviet Rift" (NL, November 14), there is a sentence which reads: "This is not to mention the current assistance he is giving the Chinese in the development of atomic energy, without which Communist China would quickly revert to the status of a 10th-rate power, instead of the mere fourth-rate power it truly is today...
...To conserve these values in our anxious world we need, I think, more than a doubtfully "conservative" conscience and more than the CONTINUED ON NEXT PACE DEAR EDITOR continued charms of a foggy solipsism...
...The nature of that reaction, whether it be positive or negative, morally admirable or morally disgraceful, matters very little, what is essential is that the reaction should genuinely exist...
...and he led a theater rally in New York City on October 17...
...I will therefore only say that I did as his letter suggested—I looked up the pages cited in his index under "Language, conceptual" for definitions of "Soul," "Heart" and "Mind...
...All we can ask of a poet is that he calls the shots as he sees them and that he writes good poems, All we can say about Cummings' politics, all we should say, is that he appears to be consistently for the underdog, that he distrusts bureaucracies of all kinds, that he counsels us to love one another, that he wants us not to run with the herd, and that it is our spiritual lives which are of supreme importance...
...Roosevelt, she publicly announced that she was much mistaken about Kennedy's qualifications for the Presidency and found him to be far superior to Nixon...
...And this is a value which W. H. Auden, one of Lauter's favored poets, has explained eloquently in his essay on Yeats: We judge a poet, he says, not by his politics (and he felt Yeats' politics were questionable) but rather in terms of whether he reacts in a vital way to the world he lives in...
...In my manuscript I said: "Without Russian assistance, Communist China would quickly revert to the status of a 10th-rate power, instead of the mere fourth-rate power it truly is today...
...Eleanor Roosevelt, as far as I know, gave him [Kennedy] no support...
...After Kennedy visited with Mrs...
...to Cummings', did not base their lives and works on childish delusions about a world clearly divided between goodies and baddies...
...But I would remind Lauter of another value which our world needs almost as much as the noble ones he champions, and that is the value of art...
...Would it were so...
...Moreover, the views of Senator Goldwater (as I think Dean Fitch pointed out) and Cummings are not even truly "conservative...
...DEAR EDITOR THE NEW LEADER welcomes comment and criticism on any of its features, but letters should not exceed 300 words, KENNEDY SUPPORT I was very much surprised to read William E. Bohn's statement (NL, November 21) that, "Mrs...
...Poetry, as Auden says in his poem in memory of Yeats, makes nothing happen...
...Emerson and Thoreau, however Friedman relates their non-conformity (and why not Kerouac's or Ginsburg's...
...I do want to take this opportunity to defend and perhaps expand slightly what Friedman seems to have taken as a gratuitous slur: my comparison of Cummings and Senator Gold-water...
...She also took an active part in the election, both in her daily newspaper columns and in propagandizing on behalf of the Democratic candidates...
...EDITH GIFFORD E. E. CUMMINGS I do not wish to prolong or deepen any differences I might have with Norman Friedman over his hook on Cummings, for, as I tried to say in my review (NL, October 3), I think it is a first-rate piece of critical scholarship within the limitations I also tried to indicate...
...Both oversimplify man's difficulties in the 20th century by suggesting that if we could only return to rugged individualism, repeal the New Deal, salvation and a full dinner pail lie just around the corner...
...Someone should lead Shaw and Admiral Arleigh Burke to some quiet spot and explain to them that if Communist China had any plan to fight the United States, three minutes' flight...
...Second, as the island of Taiwan was taken from the Chinese many years ago, and is therefore owned, according to the accepted thinking about conquered lands, by the Japanese, the fact that we conquered the Japanese and took Taiwan away from them means that Taiwan belongs, or would belong except for the incompetence of our Administration, to the United States, just as the Philippines did after the Spanish war...
...I did not mean that my readers should automatically hiss at the Senator's good name, but it is not possible to dismiss the analogy by cheering our two-party system Or deploring that Eliot and Yeats are more conservative still...
...New York City MAURICE S. CALMAN, M.D...
Vol. 43 • December 1960 • No. 47
