Dear Editor
Dear Editor The New Leader welcomes comment and criticism on any of its features, but letters should not exceed 300 words. Truth Ernest van den Haag does quite a demolition job on Arthur Janov's...
...This may be quite true, but Morgenthau leaves out another important motive...
...Bakersfield, Calif...
...My only regret is that the decline of her reputation will take the sting out of a favorite literary fantasy of mine: an encounter between the English academic princess and the Beast of Brooklyn, Henry Miller, concluding of course with violent rape...
...Why is it that so many Seekers After Truth end up worrying about their pocketbooks...
...Nor was the conviction that the United States should never have gotten involved militarily in Indochina the equivalent of demanding a unilateral American withdrawal...
...escalation of hostilities...
...In short, the novels best suit the temperament of fragile ladies who value memorabilia, press roses between the pages of books and preserve their virginitiesin mind if not in bodyAs their most prized possessions...
...He concludes that many of them were afraid of official reprisals, while others wanted to conform to a widespread consensus...
...For those opponents of the war who were not absolute pacificists or who were unwilling to march under the banner of the Vietcong, this created a most painful dilemma: If they opposed the official policy publicly, they would be giving the Communist side hope that internal pressures would eventually force the Administration to recall the troops unconditionally, thereby encouraging Hanoi to maintain its belligerent stance...
...But to view the Saigon regime as an authoritarian government with no moral claim to representing a "free Vietnam" did not necessarily mean that one regarded the North Vietnamese as great humanitarians...
...Only when it turned out that this expedient had no effect did most of us who acted in this fashion decide, however reluctantly, that public protests were indispensable...
...This position naturally won little approval from persons who saw the war as a struggle between good and evilwith either nasty imperialist oppressors fighting true-blue liberators in shining armor or else fiendish Communist foes of human freedom battling brave crusaders for liberty...
...compared to the hard working psychoanalysts like himself...
...if they kept silent, they would be doing nothing to prevent the U.S...
...Yet only a negotiated settlement would have permitted the Americans to withdraw without precipitately abandoning the South Vietnamese to the tender mercies of their enemies...
...Truth Ernest van den Haag does quite a demolition job on Arthur Janov's The Primal Revolution ("Vulgarized Freud," NL, December 25), and one is certainly inclined to go along with him...
...New York City Eric Bentley...
...Samuel Soriano Vietnam In his review of David Halberstam's book The Best and the Brightest ("The Web of Falsehood," NL, December 11...
...I am confident that history will vindicate those who rejected the mythology of the extremists on both sides...
...Berkeley, Calif, Carl Landauer Pressed Roses I would like to congratulate Pearl K. Bell for her fine review of Quentin Bell's biography, Virginia Woolf ('The Fin on the Sea," NL, January 8), and in particular for her conclusion about the Woolf novels: "On recent reading I found these books mannered, self-conscious and stiffing...
...Hans Mor-genthau raises the question of why people who in their minds were opposed to the Vietnam war did not speak out in public...
...Hoboken, N-J...
...And although the idea of containing Communism was grossly misused in Vietnam, that is not to say that the idea has no merit at all...
...The course that some individuals adopted myself includedwas to write to the President, to the Secretary of State and to legislators, urging them to take steps to terminate the American involvement through negotiations...
...Elton Oliver HUAC In his review of the stage production of my Are You Now Or Have You Ever Been, ("Fair Game," NL, December 25), Walter Goodman asks why I "chose just those passages" from HUAC records...
...We counted on the help of dissenters who existed both in Congress andAs the Pentagon papers confirmedin the Administration as well...
...As for the men who join in the appreciative babel over the doyenne of Bloomsbury, the less said about them the better...
...Instead of burdening your correspondence columns with my answer now, may I say that I did attempt an answer in the preface to Are You Now, which was published as a Harper Colophon paperback a month or two before the show opened at Yale...
...Hopefully, the Bell review is indicative of the Zeitgeist, and Virginia Woolfs day is drawing to a close...
...During the first phase of the war (and it is difficult to say exactly when this phase ended), neither Washington nor Hanoi was prepared for serious talks...
...You can always tell a Virginia Woolf admirer by the way she sits down...
...But he concludes his piece whining about how much money Janov is raking in...
...For too long now, those precious and enervated fictions have been taken seriously by people who should know betterprimarily because of the din from precious, delicate young things eager to enclose themselves in the same kind of secluded and protected world Virginia Woolf liked to believe in...
Vol. 56 • January 1973 • No. 2
