Dear Editor
DEAR EDITOR 'LOVELY WAR' In emphasizing those episodes of Oh What a Lovely War that are, indeed, ponderous, didactic and repetitive, Albert Bermel, ("Meanwhile, Fifty Years Later," NL,...
...Let me note in conclusion my own observations which confirm those of Feuer, that the students on today's campuses are greatly attracted to the young idealistic Marx of the Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts...
...Too, when Bermel mentions the cast's Graustarkian speech, he does not add that this detail, like many others, is a comment on the vicarious experience of war by caricature...
...they will do so in the future...
...I will allow anyone to come to my desk to read them...
...Silver has, I think, been won over by what Joan Littlewood may have intended to do, not what she actually did...
...For the rest, I can only set my judgment of the stagecraft and performance against Bermel's: What he found almost entirely dull, I found mostly interesting...
...My own Federal government appears to be so concerned in getting to the moon that it leaves some of its citizens to die in despair...
...DEAR EDITOR 'LOVELY WAR' In emphasizing those episodes of Oh What a Lovely War that are, indeed, ponderous, didactic and repetitive, Albert Bermel, ("Meanwhile, Fifty Years Later," NL, November 9) gives a distorted picture of this production to its potential audience...
...New York City Allan Silver Albert Bermel replies: Mr...
...I have witnessed responsibility being thrown from one person, department, and agency to the other—just like a ball is passed fiendishly around in a water polo game when sometimes the spectators, as well as the players, do not know who has the ball...
...These other individuals' needs are of vital concern...
...And this idea will probably give me a deeper understanding in the life of my yet unborn baby...
...Some of the replies I received were written without thought or understanding...
...Just what about all these countless people...
...Then on page 201 of the same Report, Oswald reaffirms this incongruity when he answered another reporter who had apparently disregarded Chief Curry's insistence that newsmen not ask any questions at the "press conference.' Oswald said again that he did not kill the President, and that he had not even heard anything about it until just moments before when a newsman asked him the same question out in the corridor...
...And, far from merely sentimentalizing the working class (although she does this), Littlewood also shows them muttering mindless chauvinisms at an earnest pacifist and reveling in wages earned at factories that make munitions and shrouds...
...After pointing out that the Warren Report has finally answered every aspect, and every area of doubt concerning the assassination (which, incidentally, it does not—¦ "The Other Witnesses" in the same issue of NL, by George and Patricia Nash of the highly reputable Bureau of Applied Social Research of Columbia University, points out that misconception rather brilliantly), Meyer turns his attention once more to the motive of the assassination and parrots the speculation of the Warren Report and others: "So Oswald, who failed at everything, carried to the warehouse the greatest equalizer between nobodies and somebodies—a lethal rifle [Thus] Caliban was able to strike at a man who was so like a god...
...New York City Robert E. Cronin STUDENT PEACE UNION We would like to bring to the attention of the readers of The New Leader that the Student Peace Union, one of the country's largest progressive student organizations, has been reorganized with headquarters now in New York City, the center of SPU'S largest region...
...All of these charitable organizations have a detailed analysis of how many people they have helped...
...but there is no statistician present recording the failures...
...Where is Goodness...
...Shrub Oak, N.Y...
...The responsibility for the mistaken characterization in my article was altogether my own, and I hope will give rise to no misunderstanding...
...They cannot go on being misplaced and transferred from department to department like so many of my letters were...
...The "press conference" ended abruptly a few minutes after midnight...
...I have on my desk a. pile of correspondence, copies of letters I have written and replies...
...Newsmen from all over the world, lights, television cameras, and other paraphernalia of undreamed of mass communication were all tightly packed about and focused on the lone, demented individual who, so we had been previously assured, had killed the President of the United States...
...OSWALD "The Triumph of Caliban" by Karl E. Meyer (NL, October 12) has proved to be another of those seemingly erudite attempts to settle, once and for all time, the motive behind Lee Harvey Oswald's assassination of John F. Kennedy...
...The thesis, then, that Oswald was motivated to kill the President of the United States because he wanted a place in history, is not consistent with the facts as set forth in the Warren Report, where it states, rather plainly, that Oswald repeatedly denied ever having killed anybody...
...At 1.30 A.M...
...It is untenable to believe that anyone who had allegedly spent his entire life searching for a place in the sun should have scurried to the shadows when the light finally came his way...
...Closed down in Chicago by a June convention because of a temporary financial strain and lack of adequate personnel, the spu national office was re-established at a convention held in New York over the Columbus Day weekend...
...The well- and half-remembered songs invite a sentimentality that is then destroyed: The arch women, for example, often become proletarian Sirens luring men to slaughter...
...All of these letters deal with my seven-month-old blind condition...
...If our pleas for help are not heard, seen or spoken about, then our country will be reduced to mere survival of the fittest...
...The fight for survival of the fittest takes on a greater significance now than it did 24 years ago when I was thrust from my mother's womb...
...New York City Roget Lockard Robert Karen O'NEILL Readers interested in the American theater are used to being in Eric Bentley's debt, but never more so than on the occasion of his latest essay on Eugene O'Neill ("A Touch of the Adolescent," NL, October 12...
...The answer given for countless thousands of television viewers to hear was a bit inconsistent with the personality of a man whose ambition in life, so the Warren Report tells us, was to seek "for himself a place in history—a role as a Lgreat man' who would be recognized as having been in advance of his times...
...It is precisely the humanistic tone of his early teaching, as for example the concept of alienation, which both provided the vital and valuable core of Marx's philosophy, and which, pace Sidney Hook, deserves just such a revival as it is now receiving...
...The SPU maintains its traditional broad-based peace position and continues to require of members only that they agree with the Statement of Purpose "that neither war nor the threat of war can any longer be successfully used to settle international disputes" and that while acting "independently of both East and West the SPU works toward a society which will ensure both peace and freedom and suffer no individual or group to be exploited by another...
...There are two reasons: 1. Oswald ran away...
...When Bermel criticizes Littlewood for making a belated and mediocre "contribution to the boom" in comment on the Great War, he misses a major point: The show at its strongest is precisely about the memory of catastrophe, as well as catastrophe itself— memory corrupted by personifications and cliché (Littlewood, alas, perpetuates some she likes while attacking others), sensed through propaganda and popular song, and untellable by those whose very flesh was seared and torn...
...While Meyer (and the many other commentators who have used this same wornout tack) finds this "terrifyingly plausible," I do not...
...The three monkeys see, hear and speak no evil because they place their responsibility on the other guy...
...I wish I could agree with him that the sentimentality she evokes 'is then destroyed...
...On this point, I think her work marred but brilliant and impressive, and I am concerned that your readers not neglect it on the basis of Bermel's review...
...New York City Jack Scaparro STANFORD CONFERENCE I wish to praise Lewis S. Feuer's report on the Stanford Conference ("Passage Beyond Marxism," NL, October 26...
...Chicago, Illinois Richard L. White...
...Far from being "brindled by nostalgia," Littlewood's work is largely an attack on nostalgia...
...Berkeley, California Lewis S. Feuer A PROTEST This ìs a letter of protest and freedom— a protest against all human selfishness, and for freedom to possess a healthy set of values...
...Great promises of help are made by public and private organizations, but upon making a specific request the promises turn out to be not worth the paper they are writen on...
...Some of my letters have gone unanswered...
...It was with Stephano and Trinculo that he plotted to assassinate the mighty Prospero...
...This is one of the most brilliant analyses of an American play that has appeared in years...
...But what about the homeless...
...Finally, the people who glory in their munitions wages are not represented as typical workers but, to borrow a Marxist label, as traitors to their class...
...I haven't shot anybody...
...But let us now conclude on a lighter, more inconsequential note...
...Where is Charity...
...The cast's final song ("And when they ask us/And they're certainly going to ask us") justifies Littlewood's stylistic indirections...
...Sentimentality doesn't shake off so easily...
...Loyola Seminary My attention has been drawn to a mistake in my article "Passage Beyond Marxism" (NL, October 26...
...It goes to the heart of O'Neill's weaknesses, but is not compromised by that air of intellectual superiority that is usually the worst feature of academic critical writing on O'Neill...
...Oswald replied, "No sir...
...This particular memory has none of the cruel implications of the catastrophe itself...
...The reporter asked, "Did you shoot the President...
...it's sticky and Miss Littlewood gets stuck with it...
...that is what's wrong with it, yet that is the show "at its strongest...
...Silver is right to say that "the show at its strongest is . about the memory of catastrophe...
...We urge all students who wish to join or remain affiliated with the Student Peace Union to contact the new national office at 5 Beekman Street, New York City...
...Since the production's ideology is, as he says, primitive, its worth depends upon Littlewood's ability to evoke feeling about a historical event and compel the audience to examine the quality of those feelings...
...Oswald was indeed arraigned for the murder of President Kennedy, but he was never seen nor heard from again by the general public until he was killed a day and a half later...
...My employer ruthlessly dismissed me from my job...
...I am fortunate enough to have the help of my devoted wife, family and a few real friends...
...They are the ones who have helped me maintain my sanity through the worst storms of public apathy...
...Where is Responsibility...
...Some, indeed, show a lack of organization and coherence, others glow with irresponsibility on the part of the people who are employed to give aid to persons who have a disability such as mine...
...Where are Values...
...Donald J. Sullivan, s.j...
...But it is my opinion that Meyer fails to convince...
...I will never for a moment overlook all the good people in the world who have assisted me, but why are all the good people so hard to find...
...It should be pointed out that Meyer chose a very unfortunate title for his article...
...Caliban, you will remember, was part of a conspiracy...
...What about the desolate individual in the Bowery who says everyday, "Help me," or the unskilled Negro in the complexity of Harlem who cries "Job," or the mentally retarded who cannot even think about his existence and is neatly packed away in an institution because there isn't a training center for him...
...The unskilled rehabilitation counselors fail miserably...
...Max Shachtman, I am informed, served as literary representative for Nataliya Ivanovna Sedova, the wife of Leon Trotsky, and not as literary executor for Leon Trotsky...
...However, to give credit where credit is due, it should be noted that Father Joseph M. Bochenski, director of Osteuropa Institute and a leading logician, is not a Jesuit as Professor Feuer reports, but a Dominican...
...2. At a few minutes to midnight on that memorable November 22, 1963, as he was being led down that jammed corridor to the now famous two-minute press conference (where, according to the account in the Warren Report, page 208, Chief Curry had instructed the reporters not to "ask any questions and try to interview . [Oswald] in any way"), Lee Harvey Oswald was asked a question by a reporter...
Vol. 47 • November 1964 • No. 24
