Dear Editor
DEAR EDITOR BERMAN I assume that like many a subscriber to The New Leader I read Harold Berman's detailed analysis of the legal aspects of the Sinyavsky-Daniel trial ("The Writer and Soviet...
...There seems to be a tendency, and it is by no means confined to Right-wing rhetoric, to assume that Communism is totalitarian in nature and that Capitalism is democratic, also by nature...
...Perhaps one cause of Rosenthal's uneasiness about this book is that Greene has left aside his usual theme (and therefore has escaped the pigeonhole) and, treasonously, explores an Existentialist rather than a Catholic dilemma...
...The original American source is said to be white country music and Mississippi Delta Blues...
...As a matter of fact, I am willing to indulge the Mersey beat on occasion...
...It seems to me one of the Beatles best characteristics is their sense of play...
...reputation is the man...
...if there were no threat of death awaiting him, he would be as impotent with his women as is Brown in The Comedians before the seagull-threatening him with eternity-flies into the room...
...But it is just as possible to have totalitarian Capitalism or democratic Communism, or any of a number of combinations of economicpolitical systems...
...He's invading the territory set aside for Frenchmen...
...Berkeley, Calif...
...If there were not alternatives to Liverpool as an immediate source of the American musical heritage, one might cherish the Beatle mob as the black bleating sheep of the family-the bastard product of a line otherwise now extinct...
...This might be so seen if one were to recall how many people were sent to their death or to labor camps under Stalin without any trial at all or after secret, unreported trials...
...Professor Berman, who accused Western public of "short memories," seems to have a short memory himself...
...The evil of indifference is no literary game...
...In fact, I went out of my way to emphasize the relationship between contemporary R&R and the old R&B, citing the Stones, objects of Watson's special wrath, as "a straight Rhythm and Blues outfit...
...and its " "lonely,' plaintive and unharmonic vocal style" for a gregarious, plangent and unharmonic caterwaul...
...May I please request that the readers and writers of The New Leader please refrain from confusing political systems with economic ones...
...That Communism, as it appears today, is totalitarian I will not dispute...
...Richard G. Watson R. S. Draper replies: Some of Richard G. Watson's points are matters of taste, but for the most part he simply distorts my article...
...I remember a letter of Greene's to one of the English Sunday newspapers in which he deplored the custom of our soldiers in Vietnam of posing, smilingly, for atrocity photographs...
...Los Angeles, Calif...
...and that "totalitarian" and "democratic" are political terms...
...They are homines ludentes...
...But please, everyone, let's keep them separate...
...As for traditional American music, it is available not on Madison Avenue but on tapes at the Library of Congress, and in derivative forms -some perhaps little more "authentic" but much of it musically far better, than the Rolling Stones-at any good record store in the folk music bins...
...Turning to more recent examples, we know that Iosif Brodsky, whose trial in a district court in Leningrad was not, and could not be, publicized, found courageous defenders among senior fellow writers...
...nor that Capitalism and democracy can exist together...
...Bond is certainly strong on love-death...
...I did not even imply that "the present exhibit does not resemble its alleged forebears in a single distinctive respect...
...Greene, the Catholic Englishman, has no right (it would seem) to venture upon such subjects as disengagement (instead of despair), the banality of evil (instead of its power), mediocrity (instead of the struggle for glory) or indifference rather than sin...
...The Comedians, distasteful though it is to critics who would have Greene remain where they put him, is, among other things, a powerful book on the theme hastily thrown out at the end of Marat/Sade: "When will you learn to take sides...
...Peter W. Williamson SEX-BIRTH-DEATH Raymond Rosenthal's review of Graham Green's The Comedians ("Over the Border to Haiti," NL, February 14), is written out of deprivation: a small child looking in at a shop window full of splendid toys he can never have and therefore deciding the toys are sleazy anyway...
...But even the trials of the Party opposition leaders during the Great Purge were, in a sense, more genuine trials...
...New York City Kathrin Perutz MAYFLOWER ROCK R. S. Draper's attempt ("Rolling With Rock," NL, February 28) to prove that the music of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones came over on the Mayflower is worthy of the most desperately status-seeking aspirant to the Daughters of the American Revolution...
...That was true only of the period 1957-1963...
...The interrelationship between these three has been the theme of all meaningful and all popular art...
...Ipswich, Mass...
...Glee Struve Department of Slavic Languages University of California CONFUSION...
...The pedigree is flawed at its every link...
...What is granted Susan Sontag is denied Graham Greene...
...I think it (regrettably) bears repeating that these are economic, not political systems...
...It has given up "its heavy grinding unvarying beat" for a "lighter and faster one...
...The inherent contradiction between the two gave me a shock, as it must also have shocked a number of other people...
...Some of the Beatle songs at least are quite pleasing...
...its obsession "with misfortune" for "adolescent sentimentality...
...or a person in front of a cathedral who, for reasons of his ownsqueamishness, fear, the love of disengagement-will not enter and yet decides that what goes on inside is not valid...
...What is left...
...They were certainly much more adequately reported than the trial of the two writers last month, although the Tass reports, printed in the Soviet press, laid great emphasis on the "open" character of the trial...
...Yet according to Draper's own quite literate and interesting account, the present exhibit does not resemble Its alleged forebears in a single distinctive respect...
...So far we have not heard of either Tvardovsky, who was Sinyavsky's editor and alleged "protector," or any other writer allowed to attend his trial, coming forward in defense of the accused...
...To write, as Rosenthal does, " the linking of sex, birth and death is as pretentious and outworn, even when presented in a half-comic light, as those odious beasts that pullulate in Green's other novels" is worse than irresponsible...
...Except, perhaps, for all his technical skill-which even Rosenthal grants-Greene might, just possibly, be attempting something as "outworn" as tragedy: to explore man in the general and the particular, to expose his modern and universal dilemmas...
...DEAR EDITOR BERMAN I assume that like many a subscriber to The New Leader I read Harold Berman's detailed analysis of the legal aspects of the Sinyavsky-Daniel trial ("The Writer and Soviet Law," NL, February 14) after reading his telephone interview in the New York Times (February 16), given when the trial was over...
...The two must never be confused if we are to have an intelligent discussion of these matters...
...it is nonsense...
...The only aspect of the sex-birth-death theme that Rosenthal could object to is the problemsolving attitude of critics who come to works they cannot understand imaginatively and so must puzzle out the theme through a tendentious secular litany...
...Professor Berman saw the trial as a gain for broader civil liberties, according to the Times report, and described it as "at least genuine...
...But why all the seriousness...
...once critics have cast an author into a role, he has no right to change it...
...If anyone would seriously accept the linking of those three as pretentious and outworn, then nothing more could be written, not even folk songs...
...I would have understood if Berman had said that there was at least a semblance of a trial and saw in that something of a gain for civil liberties...
...Just as we are willing to indulge the latest generation of Churchills and Roosevelts (who do, of course, have impeccable genealogical credentials), we might be willing to indulge the Chuck Berrys and Rolling Stones (despite their flawed legitimacy...
Vol. 49 • March 1966 • No. 6
