Dear Editor

...Boston, Massachusetts R. B. Bensen MORE ON PRIMITIVISM Coming from as sophisticated a student of politics as Reinhold Niebuhr, I was very much disappointed in the article "Triumph of Primitivism" (NL, August 17...

...I, too, was present at the world premiere of the Mahler-Cooke work at the Royal Albert Hall, a performance which moved Miss Newlin to praise its "many episodes of great beauty...

...Never before has the anguish suffered by the creative artist under totalitarianism been so graphically set forth, with every nuance of humiliation made so unmistakably clear...

...Robert S. Sharlet AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY It is a pity that Robert S. Elegant, in his article on "Vietnam: An American Tragedy" (NL, September 28), could not be more specific about what, exactly, the United States has to offer in Asia...

...New York City Ross Vickers LABOR HISTORY Michael Klein's diatribe ("Dear Editor," NL, September 28) against my review of Philip Taft's labor history might be dismissed as a piece of personal venom were it not for the medley of nonsense he spews forth...

...My by-line does not automatically represent magazine policy—and that is policy...

...Theodore Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Dwight Eisenhower) have never presented nearly the same threat that a Kennedy, a Johnson, or a Hubert Humphrey now does, for these men not only threaten to take away all of the irrational symbols, ideals, and hatreds with which conservatives have been allowed to live since 1789, but are deadly serious about carrying out their threats...

...De Sola Pool states, "Everyone in 1960 knew that Kennedy would gain Catholic votes and lose bigot votes...

...Their progressive liberalism, representing such a triumph for those on the moderate Left, is at the same time one of the greatest threats that those on the extreme Right have ever faced...

...Edmonton, Alberta, Canada Henry D. Rempel THE POLITICS OF MODERNITY John Roche is brilliant...

...didactic triumphs accorded to him," what Fowlie has suggested about Proust's role in liberating his readers from the hypocrisies of social convention remains nonetheless true...

...Washington, D.C...

...the flag symbolizes a higher cause with which the dissatisfied man can identify...

...To paraphrase an old politician, come down to Washington, boy, and we'll show you the record...

...Listening to it, one could only wonder to what lengths an ambitious composer may go when he is given a blank stave to fill in...

...Like a real leader, Rustin has taken his stand and is prepared to lose his influence over the activists until they are brought to their senses by the political realities which he is holding up to them...

...For since it treats all Communist governments alike, it forces them to act alike...

...It may be an enigma to the writer of that piece, but it is not to me, or to anyone experienced in the labor movement, that for the moment Rustin seems to have been passed by...

...New Hyde Park, New York Felix Morrow Myron Kolatch Replies: The "first name on the masthead" regrets to have to inform Mr...

...For instance, in your issue of September 14 ("The Squares vs...

...Unfortunately, except for her comment regarding the first movement, which required the least tampering, I cannot join in her enthusiasm...

...One shudders at the spectacle of the life of art—or of human life in any aspect— having to contend, day in and day out, without respite, with this massive state machinery whose every instrument grinds away at the finest human gifts...

...WAITING FOR '68 When an article in a political magazine like The New Leader is signed by the first name on the masthead, it cannot but represent a political line, even though it is ostensibly a piece of current reporting...

...Though I sympathize with his exasperation over the exaggerated attention paid to Soviet literature of "protest" in this country and England, I feel someone should point out that there is at least one widely-published "dissonant" voice among the American and English critics of Soviet letters...

...Rustin would attest, although this may confound those who would rush to his defense when he is not being attacked...

...Los Altos, California Park Chamberlain BIGOTRY One point in Ithiel de Sola Pool's review of Burdick's The 480 ("Fantasy and Reality," NL, August 31) intrigues me...

...Publication of articles of this kind continues to keep The New Leader in forefront of our serious journals...

...That's the devil of it: History limited to archives is a collection of raw bricks...

...What really stuns one about the Brodsky transcript is the relative obscurity of the young poet himself...

...As for his new "facts," the assertion, for example, that Taft-Hartley was not punitive may be the professor's fact, but it is no one else's...

...So the Retail Clerks' was a weak union before the '40s: Is it not appropriate to know, even in a labor history, just a bit of the underlying forces that make it an important one today...

...YAHOOS I subscribe to both The New Leader and to National Review, and can always tell them apart except when I am reading something by Irving Kristol...

...Incidentally, by participating in the CORE and SNCC demonstrations at Atlantic City, Rustin was not only wisely refusing to "isolate" himself but was violating the decision of other leaders to avoid such demonstrations during the campaign...

...The Negro, for example is an irrational symbol, the hatred of whom enhances one's own self-esteem...

...Introduction," Pages From Tarusa, edited by Andrew Field...

...Moreover, Klein reveals an incredible ignorance, which he ought not display so foolishly, when he implies that the Retail Clerks have had "no discernible effect on legislation, judicial precedent, national wage levels, political thought or industrial relations practices...

...No one has yet come along to weld all of the many irrational symbols of the American Right into a comprehensive ideology...

...Perhaps the dominant tone of Field's approach to Russian literature is nowhere more aptly expressed than in the title of his article, "The Not So Dissonant Voices in Soviet Literature" (NL, December 24, 1962...

...That Miss Newlin should countenance the creation of such an acoustical manifesto is regrettable...

...The gradual erosion of the Democratic party in the south, from the election to the Senate of conservative Texas Republican John Tower to the failure of Southern state Democratic party delegations to support their party's national Presidential candidate, is another profound indication that the American Right is willing to take down the barriers separating its relatively isolated little compartments in the interests of overcoming liberalism...

...Pardon me, Gompers and Strasser and Fitzpatrick hadn't said anything about the matter in their minutes and correspondence: Hence, the historian has no license to comment on it...

...Nor, to my knowledge, would anyone in the civil rights movement try "to make him out to be a hasbeen...

...As a political scientist and American Exchange Scholar in the Soviet Union this past year, I am the first to acknowledge that there is much of interest in Soviet literature to the student of politics...

...Acting on the principle of the lesser evil, as they see it, the governments of Southeast Asia prefer the risk of Chinese domination—which they have not yet experienced— to the known ravages of civil war under Western auspices...

...However, I agree with Field's observation that there is too much "concern with incident, inside and outside of literature, rather than with writing as such" in Western criticism of Soviet letters...

...Thus it is our own policy that transforms China from a threat to the national independence of the nations of Southeast Asia into the protector of those nations from white imperialism...

...Nor is Elegant's frightening image of Mao and his designs for world domination quite convincing, in relation to the specific impasse in Vietnam, to anyone who has pondered Hans J. Morgenthau's memorable discussion of this subject in your pages only a few months ago ("Realities of Containment," NL, June 8...

...American conservatives are fighting desperately—not for their lives—but for the only things which give meaning to them, and to this end are mobilizing all resources at their disposal...

...I tried to make it clear that history is not chronicle, but evidently he, like others, is unable to grasp the distinction...

...Klein might study the legislative history of the statute to note the vindictive spirit which motivated Congress at the time...

...That, however, does not make Rustin an enigma, nor does it mean that he has no base anywhere...

...He has called the Negro activists to subordinate themselves to the major imperative need of the election year, which is to defeat Goldwater overwhelmingly, and they have not responded...

...Finally, there are often great virtues to being an enigma, as Mr...

...It leaves one filled with admiration for those poets who have triumphed over this governmental machinery in at least a part of their work, but woefully depressed about the nature of a regime which could permit such practices to take place under the banner of "justice...

...It is this basic and quite elementary political arithmetic which The New Leader should be teaching its present-day readers rather than this pseudo-reportage in which a magnificent figure like Rustin is reduced to an "enigma...

...I am referring to the young Harvard critic Andrew Field whose work frequently appears in the pages of The New Leader as well as in other places including the London Slavonic Review...

...To give meaning to their lives such men must identify themselves with some irrational symbol or ideology...

...Teaneck, New Jersey Robert D. Hershey, Jr...

...The second movement, in particular, seemed to be less a Scherzo than a debate between Mahler and Cooke, won (due to Mahler's untimely death) by Cooke...

...These are facts, as are the facts in "Waiting for '68," and I think an unemotional reading of the article would find the implications drawn by Mr...

...Certainly I would not, as he does, mark Rustin as one who has been "passed by," even "for the moment...

...That selfadulatory, puerile piece should have instead appeared in Silver Screen with a gushing preface by Hedda Hopper...

...but to apply this attitude in adapting another's work not only distorts the original but transforms it into symphonic forgery and dilettante musique à clef...

...He also thinks the young members of the two groups are "the greatest thing that has happened to the civil rights movement...

...Will liberals, reading this now in a liberal magazine, admit it to be true...

...Those who call themselves conservatives are still split into groups emphasizing primarily one factor to the relative neglect of others: America firsters, Protestant Fundamentalists, laissez-faire economists, racists, etc...

...How many others—one wonders as one reads on and on, increasingly horrified at every turn—how many other poets and painters and composers have been put through similar harassments, in backwater towns and under the jurisdiction of even more benighted judges and accusers than the lugubrious types who figure in this published trial...

...Ben B. Seligman BUCHANAN Leo Sauvage's marvelously sardonic and analytically devastating commentary on the so-called Buchanan "report" ("Thomas Buchanan, Detective," NL, September 28) is definitive...

...The "lacunae" which, Miss Newlin avers, Cooke fills "with imagination and taste," would have been better left empty...

...Washington, D.C...

...Few labor historians possess that rare skill and Taft is no exception...

...And this, of course, is only one of the many interesting asides in Fowlie's useful and wideranging critical study...

...Morrow that what he read was intended to be nothing more than "a piece of current reporting" after all...

...Morgenthau wrote at that time: "It is obvious that in such a. situation an ideologically oriented military policy is not only ineffective but also counter-productive...

...In my opinion, we have permitted these well-meaning scholarcomposers to extend their artistic license beyond the limits of good taste and musical justice...

...Chicago, Illinois Janis Ames Farrell...

...the violation of traditional boundaries of artistic "interpretation" and revision cannot be allowed to go unchecked...

...Previous moderates in American government (e.g...

...the Yahoos"), he states as a simple fact a charge which conservatives have incessantly made and liberals as often hotly denied, namely, that "as between individual freedom and his plans for the common good, the liberal will automatically opt for the latter...

...In one of his longer writings, Niebuhr chastises the naive, optimistic "Children of Light" of political history for their eternal failure to recognize the existence of the primitive, pessimistic "Children of Darkness" and to cope with their machinations...

...Some of the difficulty, undoubtedly, may result from Cooke's tendency to confuse music with philosophy, as may be seen in such statements of his as: " by accepting the second work of the trilogy, the agonized Ninth Symphony, as Mahler's final symphonic comment on existence, we have entertained a false impression of his ultimate attitude toward life and death which can be set right only by hearing and understanding what can be salvaged from the manuscript of the transcendent Tenth Such an approach to the works of Mahler, or to any other composer, may be suited to program notes, and may even be justified if the philosopher-arranger presumes to construct his own theory of human existence out of his own musical sense...

...it takes imagination and insight to bring a design into the story...

...New York City Harold Z. Simmel Yevtushenko's screed on American treatment of Soviet literature ("Brodsky: Reactions in Moscow...

...If H. L. Hunt has doubts about Senator Goldwater's judgment, as reported in the New York Times, August 17, 90 per cent of the country must have more...

...Kennedy and the Politics of Modernity" is one of the most perceptive pieces I've read...

...the void would have been Mahler, while the filling is pure Cookery, a candied confection of little nourishment...

...Passing humanistic rationalism off as the prevailing philosophy which will bring to America ever greater peace and prosperity, and enacting legislation in accordance with such assumption will not make people believe it or even want to believe it...

...Indeed, his is one of the very few voices that all of the various civil rights factions will at least listen to, if not follow...

...Field's concern for what is "literary" in Soviet letters places him in striking contrast to those tiresome nabobs of English and American criticism, Max Haywood and Patricia Blake...

...Bayard Rustin, of course, needs no defense from anyone...

...The real test of a political leader is that he is prepared to be isolated rather than to go along with the crowd when the mass takes up the wrong positions...

...The net effect of the article entitled "Waiting for '68" (NL, September 14) is sentimental adulation of the young activists in the Negro revolution...

...has offered so far—in Vietnam, anyway—is only military stalemate together with social and political stagnation...

...SQUARES VS...

...I do not know Rustin personally, I have never had the opportunity to work with him, but I burn with indignation when the top name on the masthead of The New Leader speaks of him as "in many ways the enigma of the civil rights movement," and says of him that "he has no base in any particular group...

...The paragraphs about "trust" are particularly well taken...

...The success of the Goldwater campaign, a result of the willingness of all of these diverse groups to give him some measure of support, is an indication that the first steps toward a more unified and activist Right-wing ideology are being taken...

...Morrow to be without any basis in fact...

...Morrow's...

...Is it in some way less bigoted for Catholics to vote for Catholics than for Protestants to vote for Protestants...

...London C. Parke Douglas FOWLIE ON PROUST George Woodcock's review of Wallace Fowlie's A Reading of Proust ("Rites of Admiration," NL, September 14) has a number of cogent insights into Proust to its credit, but is shockingly unfair to Fowlie's book...

...Perhaps he prefers the antiquarianism exhibited in such labor histories as Taft's, but that is about as helpful in understanding whence we came and whither we go as a dissertation on the convolutions in Chaucer's armor would be in understanding English poetry...

...But there has always been a large segment of any society for whom the well-being of humanity or even enlightened self-interest has never been a high enough goal...

...the conservatives who denounced Eisenhower in the '50s also flourished during his comfortably laissez-faire administration...

...But Kennedy and Johnson in the '60s are dangerous in the eyes of conservatives...

...Or is bigotry by definition restricted to Protestants...

...As for Yevtushenko's complaint that his autobiography was inappropriately published in the Saturday Evening Post with an introduction by that "esteemed literary critic" Allen Dulles, I heartily concur...

...But paradoxically conservative irrationalism will flourish only as humanistic rationalism becomes ever more prevalent in American ruling circles...

...By his own account, what the U.S...

...The story of recent minimum wage legislation and the mountains of NLRB and Federal court cases testify otherwise...

...This is really almost what one would expect in the '60s...

...Niebuhr himself now says (in reference to the triumph of Right-wing extremism in the Republican Party): "No one could have believed that this radical revolution could be possible after all the decades in which we Americans have accustomed ourselves to the tense responsibilities, perils and possibilities of imperial power...

...As long as the "po' white" southerner believes that he is somehow innately "superior" to the Negro, and as long as the nouveau riche Californian believes that God would exercise his wrath upon anyone who would attempt to touch a penny of his inheritance, the irrationalism of the American Right will remain a potent obstacle to the realization of the good life for all Americans...

...There is no sign of any understanding in this article that men like Bayard Rustin are incomparably braver, wiser, more heroic than those activist leaders and activists who are trying to make him out to be a has-been...

...Ironically, Yevtushenko was inveighing against this very trend, so responsible for his own rather inflated Western literary reputation...

...Lewiston, Maine G. W. Thumm Professor of Government Bates College MAHLER'S TENTH Dika Newlin's defense of the latest "realization" of Mahler's Tenth Symphony ("A Final Musical Testament," NL, September 14) raises once again the question of whether latter-day musicologists should be granted the privilege of tampering with the unfinished works of the revered dead...

...But since I do know him personally and since I have watched him work, perhaps my appreciation and respect for him are more solidly grounded than Mr...

...The country needed Roosevelt so badly in the '30s and '40s that opposition to his policies was relatively futile...

...Even if, as Woodcock claims, "Proust would have been amused to hear...

...It is the perfect prologue to the publication of this rubbish in the U.S...

...NL, September 14) requires a partial rejoinder...

...It is, of course, precisely such "an ideologically oriented military policy" that Elegant is advocating in his article...

...And even beyond those who have been similarly harassed, what of those who, in the most crucial, formative years of their creative lives, have held back their innermost aspirations in order to avoid suffering the fate of Brodsky...