Dear Editor
DEAR EDITOR SINYAVSKY FOOTNOTE Shortly before the news of the arrests of Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel broke, a story appeared in the New York Times which was to cause not a little...
...Disregarding the Soviets' help to the North Vietnam war effort, we cannot belittle the constant stream of armaments and military instructors that goes forth from Russia, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany to many parts of the world, such as some Arab and African countries...
...Now I would be the last to deny that Dahlberg's pen is filled with the waters of Phlegethon...
...CORRECTION In Leo Sauvage's review of Edward Jay Epstein's book, Inquest, ("The Duality of the Warren Report," NL, June 20), the word "deceptively," on the first line of the second column, pace 26, should have been "decisively...
...There is something else which I object to in this quote, and that is the incredibly offhand manner in which this generalization is expressed, as though it is to be taken for granted, and as though the Spanish-American War is a minor aberration on the part of a juvenile delinquent, which we can afford to gloss over...
...Dahlberg has said, "What is important is to ascend the moral mountains, and though we roll down each time from the summit like the Sisyphean rock, it is our will to return that is Vision...
...The wars in Vietnam and Laos, as well as those fought before in Malaya, the Congo, and the Phillippines, were, in spite of the absence of modern and supermodern weapons, very dangerous...
...The point is that I am astounded at the number of Americans I have met (including the wife of a Professor of Government) who are totally unaware of the half of their country's history which deals with the rest of the world...
...This is a statement which sticks noticeably in one's throat for several important reasons...
...With two of Howard's words I am in complete agreement: Dahlberg's prose is both gorgeous and great...
...However, his assertions that "Moscow is not really interested in world revolution" and that "Russia has become one of the pillars of peace and a partner of Western civilization" can be accepted only with considerable qualifications...
...In the last paragraph of the same column, the sentence "Since he has also read in the Liebe1er memorandum how unconvincing some of the other charges against Oswald appear even to the eyes of Commission staff members, Epstein's unhesitating acceptance of the Commission's accusations," should have read "Since he has also read in the Liebeler memorandum how unconvincing some of the other charges against Oswald appear even to the eyes of Commission staff members, I cannot comprehend Epstein's unhesitating acceptance of the Commission's accusations...
...The Vision and the Rock may endure though man may not...
...Howard implies paranoia...
...Niebuhr's repute...
...This sentence seems to be unique in Niebuhr's article for its propagandistic quality, and to be honest, I find the rest of it very well written and informative, and I thank the writer for it...
...Watertown, Mass...
...Dahlberg's cleansing prose has nothing to do with the devil...
...If just the same it is fomenting revolutionary movements in many parts of the world it does so because it uses them as the most modern and most effective kind of warfare...
...Black Humor, Black Reason or Black Art...
...Andrew Field NIERUHR Reinhold Niebuhr's "Vietnam and the Imperial Conflict" (NL, lune 6), is certainly most helpful in showing up the pitfalls of "imperial" oversimplifications...
...First of all, it is typical of the totally erroneous (not to say inaccurate) and uninformed generalizations I am accustomed to hearing from American high school and college students, but the last thing I would expect from a man of Dr...
...Raymond Rosenthal replies: As everyone should know, Ford Madox Ford not only repeatedly asserted this view, but promoted it energetically as a critic and editor, as a kind of propagandist for the modern point of view-which Conrad never was...
...And in all his writing he makes it obvious that he casts stones because he has studied his own nature and reviles it...
...DEAR EDITOR SINYAVSKY FOOTNOTE Shortly before the news of the arrests of Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel broke, a story appeared in the New York Times which was to cause not a little confusion...
...No explanation was forthcoming as to just how the Times reporter had been misled...
...Montreal, Canada Nigel G. Spencer DAHLBERG You are to be commended for devoting two pages of your journal to a review of Edward Dahlberg's latest works ("Labor of the Negative," NL, June 6...
...That-and no more, and it is everything...
...This asperses Dahlberg's learning, which is only a vessel for his writing, not the content...
...And this little footnote to the Sinyavsky affair, in turn, lends weight to the theory that the Soviet secret police did not know that Sinyavsky was Tertz until a very short time before the arrest was made, for the original Pasternak volume appeared very close to the arrest, and it is inconceivable that it would have been allowed to proceed if Abram Tertz' identity had been known...
...Even if we write off the first as a precautionary measure during a War of Independence, and the last two as minor "incidents" (something in the manner of Niebuhr's dismissal of that little Spanish-American Somethingorother), we are still left with that considerable and unrationalizable blemish of 1812...
...The discoveries published by the new government of Ghana about the nature of the "revolutionary" training practiced by Russian and Chinese missions in that country prove military rather than ideological intent...
...It was a report of a new Soviet edition of Boris Pasternak's poetry, with an introduction by the famous children's poet and scholar Kornei Chukovsky...
...First, the reviewer says in reading Dahlberg "we may jettison any rational approach...
...There has now appeared a new Soviet edition of Pasternak's poetry, with an introduction by Kornei Chukovsky...
...In his book on Conrad, he says: "That message, that the province of written art is above all things to make you see was given before we met: it was because that same belief was previously and so profoundly held by the writer that we could work together for so long...
...Evidently then the reporter was presented with a piece of sly semi-misinformation by an official Soviet source before he himself had an opportunity to see the Pasternak-Sinyavsky volume...
...The point I wish to make is that, because of the existence of atomic weapons, the paramilitary war fought under "revolutionary" pretenses is the war of the future...
...Philadelphia, Pa...
...But his burning prose is as purificatory as a hot coal applied to our wounded moment...
...I thought everybody knew that it was Joseph Conrad-who wrote in the Preface (1897) to "The Nigger of the Narcissus": "My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feelit is, before all, to make you see...
...However, in a generalizing attempt to pigeonhole the neglected writing of Dahlberg, clever Richard Howard either misreads or misrepresents...
...We had the same aims and we had all the time the same aims...
...The Soviet government is perhaps no longer interested in world revolution from purely ideological, humanitarian motives, in order to "liberate the proletariat" everywhere...
...Austin, Tex...
...Niebuhr may perhaps prefer to call that training "paramilitary"-though the arms and training with jet planes etc., which Egypt and other Arab states receive show that this term cannot be applied everywhere...
...Upon visiting the memorial at Chrysler's Farm, Canadians still heave a sigh of relief, much as do Mexicans visiting the far more inflammatory monument at Tehuantepec Park...
...Anyone who has been educated on history books other than those written by Americans for the home market, knows that Canada alone has repelled American invaders on at least four occasions: 1776, 1812, 1838-39 and 1866...
...then he takes Dahlberg to task for having an asp crawl mellifluously among Cleopatra's "strawberries...
...George Stevens Vice President J. B. Lippincotl Co...
...New York City Frederick M. Stern Reinhold Niebuhr in "Vietnam and the Imperial Conflict" says of the U.S., ". . once we achieved a continental economy, overt expansionism became unnecessary (our only lapse being the Spanish-American War...
...His pessimism is as positive as Nietzche's...
...Harold Billings LITERARY TRADITION In Raymond Rosenthal's review of The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon published in your issue of May 23, the following sentence appears: "The main line of modern literary tradition was formulated by Ford Madox Ford when he said that the novelist's chief aim was 'above all, to make you see.'" If Ford Madox Ford did say this, it is an extraordinary coincidence...
...It soon became known, however, that the foreword was written not by Chukovsky but by Andrei Sinyavsky...
Vol. 49 • July 1966 • No. 14
