Dear Editor
Dear Editor Simon John Simon's review of The Trial of the Catonsville Nine ("On Screen," NL, June 12) is the product of his illusions, not reality. The Berrigans are not saints. They are not even...
...Were that to happen, it is safe to predict the moneyed interests of this country would rise in opposition, giving us another period of "Polarization in America...
...They wear the clothes of Christian clergy while they support atheistic Communist governments that would destroy Christianity or reduce it to state-controlled vestiges...
...David Bolender Robbe-Grillet Jenny Weil's interview with Alain Robbe-Grillet (NL...
...Steven Kelman observes that "social trends in this country have a habit of closely mirroring those in the U.S...
...she was martyred for being a nationalist...
...They are Third World Communists who support North Vietnam totally...
...a few years earlier...
...New Haven, Conn...
...In view of the increasing popularity of income-redistribution schemes in America, we might find ourselves "mirroring" the Swedish experience a few years hence...
...If one may leave the world of Gallic paradoxes and return to earth for a moment, certain practical problems about the New Novel, not to mention ihe New New Novel, obtrude themselves...
...They are dissenters who would destroy the right of dissent of all those who disagree with them...
...July 24) is valuable for the light it sheds on the thought processes of modern French intellectuals...
...but as for myself, I prefer to see in him only support for Professor Henry Higgins' observation: "The French don't care what they do, actually, as long as they pronounce it properly...
...Brooklyn...
...Having denied themselves the possibility of any and all meaning, they are left elegantly mouthing banalities in order to prove the point that they have no point...
...Writing about the current "Polarization in Sweden" (NL, July 10...
...What Joan of Arc has to do with the Berrigans is impossible to see...
...Susan Brody Who's Copying Whom...
...Of course, Robbe-Grillet has answered his critics in For a New Novel, but if one wished to engage the French at their own game, one might point out that this novelist with nothing to say was far more entertaining in those essays, where he was saying something, than he has ever been in his fiction...
...Then he goes on to describe the reaction there against Prime Minister Olof Palme's most recent plan for equalizing income...
...Sainthood demands more than a few years of easy incarceration for erroneous beliefs...
...They protest and demonstrate against the American draft but they are silent about the North Vietnamese draft which has sent thousands of young ill-trained men to death in battle...
...What enticements, after all, are to be found in such comments as: "A novelist is someone who feels the need to talk, but does not know what to say...
...Long Beach, Calif...
...After all...
...The most fundamental of these is why, given what Robbe-Grillet says about his work, should anyone bother reading him...
...They are enemies of freedom and democracy...
...if the George McGovem forces should prove capable of overcoming the odds and replacing Richard Nixon's crowd at the White House, who is to say that they would not be able to achieve yet another miracle by pushing their tax-reform package through Congress...
...Philip Paradez...
...They are not even Christians...
...Certainly Robbe-GrilJet has the "right" to produce books in any manner he wishes, but readers have an equal "right" to proclaim his works devastatingly dull...
...The Berrigans aren't (unless they are North Vietnamese nationalists...
...I have been told, by the way, that Robbe-Grillet himself once announced in a lecture at the Sorbonne that he too found his novels boring-an anecdote which, if not true, obviously should be true...
...Charming and urbane Robbe-Grillet unquestionably is...
...They are international revolutionaries who regard North Vietnam's tyrannical regime as the ideal government for all Third World countries...
Vol. 55 • August 1972 • No. 16
