Dear Editor
DEAR EDITOR VIETNAM In a letter to your August 1 issue, John Roche again portrays himself as a good old fashioned, civil-libertarian idealist doing battle with a group of cynical....
...Machiavellian Leftists who prefer Tito's brand of totalitarianism to a blooming democracy in Vietnam...
...helpless, enmeshed in a war which cannot be won and from whose morass it does not want to retreat...
...Thus, the separation of the two Vietnams is disappearing in the war itself...
...I suspect that Kauffmann was so happy and grateful that an adult subject was finally tackled by Hollywood thai his tears of joy prevented him from seeing what a botch it was...
...Well, if one of the few interesting American plays of recent years is filmed, it is shocking to let Liz at it, and shocking of her not to desist...
...Jerold S. Auerbach Assistant Professor of History Brandeis University Lawrence Grauman replies: Jerold Auerbach's letter is of course largely unanswerable...
...Instead of replying to my argument as it appears, he has constructedin the contemporary spirit of psych-crit-his own rationale for my opposition to current draft practices...
...He also seems to be saying that he is one of "those professors who act responsibly" according to a different understanding of responsibility than my own, but I do not find any statement of his "understanding...
...If he is truly convinced that the relationship between universities and agencies of war is a "remote" one, then he does not know much about our country during World War I and consequently fails to recognize the steadily developing analogues of social coercion and cultural hysteria in our own time...
...Like Grauman, I also consider myself a "friend of freedom" whose job is to teach students to think critically...
...regressive...
...involvement in Vietnam, I am obviously not going to be able to persuade him otherwise...
...Since he has cleverly determined that my rhetoric is about a "camouflaged device" for opposing U.S...
...We were delighted to see your review of Mr...
...One test of this proposition might be for Grauman to cite his "professorial complicity" articles written prior to our massive intervention...
...Clurman wants to discuss a serious question with me, he can begin by examining the issue I raised...
...Therefore, expose hitherto protected college students (and their comfortable middle-class parents) to the war and trust that opposition will mount accordingly...
...Or is it that, by ignoring the NLF politically, the U. S. hopes to deny it any political role in South Vietnam...
...Ho Chi Minh is now speaking of Vietnam as a single country which is his way of saying that if the North is to be blasted on the grounds that it is responsible for the Vietcong, then the Communists will fight for North and South...
...Saigon had a civilian regime until June 1955, some of whose leaders were ready to negotiate...
...Or is General Westmoreland's napalm the moral equivalant of Mihajlov's opposition newspaper...
...And how does this prognosis jibe with Ho Chi Minh's claim voiced often since 1954, that the two Vietnams must become a single political unit...
...Calling me a napalm-monger may provide him with therapy, but it is hardly relevant to the merits...
...Minneapolis, Minn...
...2. If it is true that the National Liberation Front is a legitimate and reasonably independent political entity in South Vietnam, why has the American Government been so loath to accept it as such...
...the least he could do is give me his...
...policy, and perhaps not even if the policy were reversed...
...If he does exist (and I suspect that he does not: no one could really be that worked up about someone as inconsequential as Elizabeth Taylor) he might be urged to de-escalate his literary firepower...
...1966) deserves a "quand meme" even from his most devoted fans...
...fat...
...I gave him mine, however neatly or self-righteously...
...Washington, D. C. Michael D. Padnos The review of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf by John Simon was trashy...
...And if Padnos thinks my style too blaring, I can say only that o be heard among all the noisily unserious and unrespectable critics, one may sometimes be forced to shout louder than a delicate sensibility can bear...
...On the second point: The whole Vietnam adventure has been a probe of the Sino-Soviet schism, and the calculation in Washington has been that the local Communists could be weakened, while the helplessness of both Russia and China was exposed...
...It was an example of a certain genre in which the reviewer becomes more entranced with his wit and sharpness than with a criticism of the work...
...But other political forces are available...
...must necessarily emerge victorious...
...Does Starobin see, in our refusal to believe that the NLF is anything but a tool of Hanoi, an ulterior motive aimed at involving both North Vietnam and China in a military confrontation in which the U.S...
...SIMON John Simon's review of Le Bonheur (NL, June 20, 1966) is easily the best piece of writing on film I've ever seen, one of the best pieces of writing on anything...
...The heart of the issue, it seems to me, is that Grauman's opposition to the use of grades for Selective Service purposes serves as a convenient (because it is camouflaged) device for opposing American involvement in Vietnam...
...His implicit assumption is: The more the war impinges on one's self-interest, the more likely one is to oppose it...
...And it is disturbing to see a "serious, respected critic," as David Grossberg rightly calls Stanley Kauffmann, become her uneasy champion...
...Thus the English readers, having learned to read, would understand likewise that in castigating a Liz Taylor one is, by metonymy, attacking a whole society or culture that permits such wholesale desecration of its rare works of art, and that can accept as a valid specimen of femininity a piece of squeaky, squawking arrested development...
...Is there need for the reviewer to spend 13 lines to note that the room looked like that of an English professor rather than an historian and that he enjoyed a visual pun...
...New York City Joan Wexler Publicity Department Simon and Schuster...
...The new government stemming from the September elections could parley if Washington gave the signal of its readiness to have a non-military solution...
...I wonder whether Roche feels that it is in keeping with his posture of "infantile libertarianism" to help the military regime of Marshall Ky frame a new constitution for Vietnam...
...Madison, Wis...
...New York City Nancy Weber Film Critic, "Manhattan East" Keeping John Simon's reviews within the bounds of reason is like trying to give a centipede a pedicure, but surely his latest ("Woolf Dog...
...In fact, I fail to see how Grauman ever accomplishes anything in his crowded classes: in addition to his students and General Hershey sit graduate school admissions officers, prospective employers, fellowship donors, members of honorary and professional associations, and countless others who, like General Hershey, may from an equally remote perch consider grades as partial criteria for helping to determine a student's future...
...I do not think, as Grossberg apparently does, that wit and sharpness are tantamount to trash, but I thank him for likening my work to that of the English critics, whose standards are generally higher than ours...
...Is Roche implying that Marshall Ky is his prototype of an Asian Djilas...
...Just thought that you would be interested to know that Justin Kaplan's book that Raymond Rosenthal praised so highly is published by Simon and Schuster (not Atheneum...
...Would the military in Saigon negotiate with the NLF...
...New York City David Grossberg John Simon replies: My old correspondent, Michael D. Padnos, gets so excited that he cannot even wait to see the film in question before rushing into the polemical fray, this time to damn my prose style and my taking Liz Taylor seriously...
...a spoiled, and untutored child...
...NLF Joseph Starobin's interesting and reasonable assessment of the various political currents running in Vietnam ("Thinking Aloud," NL, July 18) left me struggling uneasily with two questions...
...Waltham, Mass...
...As anyone with even a superficial knowledge of my views on constitutionalism should realize, I would never associate myself with such an absurd project: A meaningful constitution must emerge from the experience of a people, not as an exercise in political mechanics...
...He says she exhibits a "tinny nastiness" and that her performance is like National Velvet Rides Again, and concludes that although she "has been coached down to every intake of breath and flutter of eyelashes, behind those robot-like mechanics there is no discernible human being...
...Of those parts of Auerbach's letter that are seriously arguable I can only wonder what period of history it is that he teaches...
...and The New Leader, October 25, 1965...
...If criticism can do this, cut away into what a film (or anything) is saying about how people ought to live, it can be a time/place of discovery and re-evaluation of ultimate things for whoever encounters it...
...NL, July 18...
...Not having seen Virginia Woolf, I direct my criticism not to Simon's analysis but to his prose, in which his love for the "richly, rottenly ripe" has found such unfortunate expression...
...My old admirer I. F. Stone, misled by the capitalistic press, spread among his parishioners the story that I had gone to Vietnam to frame a constitution...
...in the throes of a difficult puberty...
...If Mr...
...Just to give an example, in one single paragraph Simon describes Elizabeth Taylor as a "total flop...
...How can the North Vietnamese justify their sacrifices if the prognosis for Vietnam is continued division...
...But before we find ourselves being swept away by the power of Roche's starry-eyed, liberal rhetoric perhaps we should ask exactly who are the Mihajlovs and Djilases in Vietnam...
...Aaron Miller World Affairs Assistant University of Minnesota Joseph R. Starobin replies: Both the NLF in the South and the northern Communists (until recently) have accepted the actual division of Vietnam, and both had a real interest in leaving reunification to some distant future...
...And, while I am less than ecstatic at the prospect of General Hershey applying my standards to meet his needs, I hardly consider that the remote relationship between us enables the Selective Service Director to occupy a seat in my classroom, as he seems to in Grauman's...
...His categories are so deceptively neat: either professors refuse to furnish student grades (for possible draft board use) or confess that they are enemies of freedom who are failing to otter a liberal education...
...It is also hard to imagine a discernible human being behind the napalm of John Simon's reviews...
...The sketch by Allais, which, from faulty memory, I referred to as "Des Gens simples," is actually called "Sancta Simplicitas...
...Not as long as escalation remains U.S...
...I wonder if he would be good enough to answer them for me...
...1. If the National Liberation Front is rather more independent of the Hanoi Government than Americans have been led to believe, and if, therefore, Hanoi envisions an autonomous-even if friendly-South Vietnam, why should Hanoi be willing to pay such a tremendous price in men and resources...
...Of course, they are also writing for a more sophisticated audience, one that, for example, understands irony, and that would grasp that spending 13 lines on a detailed description of a film's sets is meant to suggest how boring what went on in front of those sets really was...
...But the point has been pressed too far and turns into its opposite...
...If he really believes that I used the expressions "friend of freedom" and "professorial complicity," when my freshmen could have read it accurately, then what can I say...
...But I must disagree with Grossberg's plural: there was no other serious, respected critic who liked either Liz or Virginia Woolf...
...But T am not convinced that my success is proportional to my refusal to indicate (with grades) how well my students are succeeding at their job...
...Perhaps Starobin would also be willing to say something about the feasibility of coalition government in the South, given the military's demonstrated inclination to rule alone...
...but I really think his time would be better spent reading history-and the daily newspapers...
...Whatever the problems of a roundtable or an ultimate coalition with the NLF, I do not believe them to be as intractable as the problems our present immobility is piling up...
...To Miss Weber I can only say, touched, that I am probably as unworthy of her encomia as of the Padnos-Grossberg wrath...
...DRAFT Lawrence Grauman Jr.'s "The University and the Draft" (NL, August 1), seems constructed around the premise that when sound arguments fail, self-righteousness will carry the day...
...Somehow, reading the letters of Padnos and Grossberg reminded me of the correct title...
...When serious, respected critics appraise the film as an advance, a contribution to the American cinema, shouldn't a serious journal be concerned over such a cruel, insulting review, so out of style...
...may consider grades as partial criteria for helping to determine a student's future, when I have taken several pages to show that they do (not may, do) use grades, and use them partially (in an entirely different sense of the word) in a manner hardly calculated to "help" many students-well, there we are again...
...Let me make it clear that while I think that this is a perfectly valid tactical argument, perhaps we should call a spade a spade and refrain from tarring with accusations of moral turpitude those professors who act responsibly according to their understanding of the term...
...If he really believes that General Hershey, et al...
...But since she brings up my review of Le Bonheur, this gives me a chance to correct an error in it...
...It is a review that would be commonplace in England, but fortunately in this country still stands out as exceptional...
...There is, however, one matter I should like to clarify...
...Roche courageously proclaims that he "should infinitely prefer being 'wrong' with Djilas and Mihajlov to being 'right' with Lippman, Steel and the master strategists of the New York Review of Viet-Nam...
...Clemens and Mark Twain ("Bohemian from the Sage-Brush," NL, July 18) in the Writers and Writing section...
...If Auerbach seriously wants to consult my previous contributions to the literature of complicity he can see the "Filson History Quarterly," October, 1962...
...Both Russia and China-while avoiding a direct confrontation with the U.S.-are now plainly going to give whatever aid can render the U.S...
...Michael Clubman John Roche replies: Sarcasm-like bonded bourbon and firearms-should be kept out of the reach of children...
...a pretty, soulless child . . . made up to look middleaged and frumpish...
...OOPS...
...This was completely untrue...
...The New Republic," May 15, 1965...
...All the Vietnamese Communists are digging in for a prolonged struggle...
Vol. 49 • August 1966 • No. 17
