Dear Editor
DEAR EDITOR ALABAMA I would like to take issue with Frank Fletcher's estimation of the effectiveness of an all-Negro political party ("Red Faces in Alabama," NL, May 23). Unfortunately,...
...Can't we make our policy reflect and amplify the voices of these disillusioned revolutionaries (including the young and well-educated revolutionaries Theodore Draper described in his Cuban articles), or must we always trot along with the Balaguers and the Wessin y Wessins, with an occasional foul ball over to left field...
...J. O. Smith Department of English University of Detroit DYNAMIC CENTER Bravo to George Field for his excellent appeal "For a dynamic Center" (NL, May 23...
...he, and those like him on the moderate left have in fact misunderstood the whole concept of "black power" elucidated most forcefully by Stokely Carmichael...
...Nabokov himself states that the novel contains almost no ideas and that Freudians are warned not to grub around in it, but that hardly stops Hyman (who, incidentally, makes readers who admire Freud ashamed of themselves...
...Emerson Jacob State University College...
...Being composed predominantly of intellectuals who should know better, it has in the past (and continues to do so in the present) demonstrated a stupendous myopia toward the realities of Communist goals and methodology...
...Clarence Williams BOLIVIA Your magazine is, I suppose, the only magazine in the world that is seriously interested in what is happening in Latin America before it explodes...
...Hermann's decision not to kill his double is surely related to an adolescent's decision not to masturbate-even though his decision is here just part of the plot...
...and that it is a series of allegories of a most exquisite sort...
...Los Angeles Perry Weber HYMAN Very amusing, and accidentally so, are many of Stanley Edgar Hyman's reviews...
...But it was this semimystic belief that perhaps more than any other factor enabled them to survive the nightmare of the Luftwaffe...
...Detroit, Mich...
...What if he had shot the man in the front...
...In contrast to all this, in the U.S., our glorious student activists of the Left, while wallowing in the luxuriance of democratic freedoms, contort themselves in righteous indignation at the imperfections of American society and at the alleged "aggressiveness"1 of U.S...
...An all-Negro "third force" is not intended to be "feasible" in the usual political sense...
...Unfortunately, Fletcher, like even the most liberal white writers, has utterly mistaken the purpose of such an organization...
...The Negro, surely, can do no more...
...One wonders why someone in that fabulously hard- and long-working State Department (or, better yet, the reputedly nonstop White House) doesn't bother to pick up Norman Gall's piece on Bolivia ("Slow Death in Bolivia," NL, June 6) and actually do something about the situation there-instead of frustrating the Boschs of the world...
...Fascism has always been excoriated, but Soviet and Chinese totalitarianism has either been explained away by semantic prestidigitation or else praised by faint damns...
...It is a trifle ironic that the Liberal Establishment together with the American Left seems incapable of a rational sense of proportion about the facts of life in the world today...
...Birmingham, Ala...
...in North Vietnam (according to Bernard Fall) between 50,000 and 100,000 peasant "landlords" have in the past decade been liquidated...
...In the chest, stomach, throat, or-horrorsthe mouth...
...The Radical Left has no such extenuation...
...Aren't those revolutionary miners-the ones who Gall describes as being fed up with the officia], fat-cat revolutionists-the ideal material for a new, non-totalitarian and noncorrupt 1952...
...Of the Radical Right it can at least be said that it is mostly composed of ignorant (although occasionally powerful) persons...
...Of course, this involves the development of theories which, looked at scientifically, are pure nonsense-"soul" being the most obvious example...
...foreign policy...
...But is the literal truth always the greatest good...
...Fredonia, N.Y...
...The black man must feel the taste of power which he has earned entirely on his own...
...But Hyman is beginning to romp around sweatily and hysterically in a game few other serious readers are interested in...
...When one plays such a game, one cannot lose...
...We learn that the flatulent Nabokov novel, Despair ("Nabokov's Distorting Mirrors," NL, May 9), is the most interesting novel of the season (just what has Hyman read, anyway...
...Were the English, in 1940, biologically adapted for democracy...
...It would be better for Negro self-respect for the Negro to take power by himself in only one county, than to assume control of the whole state of Alabama in alliance with white allies...
...In the USSR writers are convicted and anti-Semitism is still operative...
...And his shooting the poor man in the back is a clear instance of displaced sodomy...
...in the Chinese People's Republic purges are carried out and the human rights of 700 million people are rigidly violated...
Vol. 49 • June 1966 • No. 13
