Dear Editor

Dear Editor The New Leader welcomes comment and criticism on any of its features, but letters should not exceed 300 words. In Defense of Mamet I, like John Simon, was ultimately disappointed...

...He brilliantly magnifies the inherent absurdities, redundancies, contradictions, poetry, and significance of both language itself and its peculiar incarnation in the American idiom...
...Far from simply a "caricature of capitalism...
...It doesn't transform bad men into good ones, prevent revolutions or start them...
...What bothers me is the confluence of esthetic sensibility and political righteousness in your contributor's mind: A man who can appreciate the genius of a Handel and a Beethoven—synonymous with a soft heart in Herrick's vocabulary?would never shoot bullets in people's backs or bury the objective enemies of the Revolution in Siberian graveyards...
...What with his being lifted from his "filthy human skin," his "aching bones left dangling" and his "old heart abruptly on fire" ("A Letter to Uncle Lenin," NL, March 28), the author might well rapture himself into insensibility, not to mention muddled imagery...
...In Defense of Mamet I, like John Simon, was ultimately disappointed with David Mamet's American Buffalo ("IS Youth But Knew, If Age But Could," NL, March 28...
...The unfortunate thing is that it comes back empty-handed...
...Poetry," W. H. Auden once wrote, "makes nothing happen...
...And while Simon discovered he wasn't all that concerned about the unresolved mystery at play's end, I could not have cared more...
...as Simon would have it, American Buffalo goes to the heart of the American experience...
...Philadelphia Henry Leonard Handel and Lenin Maybe it's too late, but somebody should get William Herrick to calm down...
...Allen is correct in affirming the material success of this century, but I must go along with Tannenbaum on our era's social failures...
...In short, while I grant that the theme of Tannenbaum's book seems to be a truism, I have yet to be convinced that it isn't true...
...For every 20th-century artist Allen names who was reasonably content, I can name four who were miserable, and two more who got by only because they were capable of deluding themselves...
...For example, although Simon recognized Mamet's "good ear," the playwright's gift for the spoken word goes deeper than that...
...I realize that a man undergoing hyperesthesia doesn't want to be disturbed, so I'll forego discussion of Lenin—whether he actually was as bloody-minded and cold-hearted as the essay claims...
...The same goes for music...
...Consider one of his lines: "God forbid the inevitable should happen...
...But I found more of value in the play than your critic did...
...New York City Clark Tomford Modern Problems I found it rather puzzling that James Sloan Allen's central objection to Edward R. Tan-nenbaum's 1900: The Generation Before the Great War ("Cliches of Modern Culture," NL, April 25) is that Tannenbaum wrongly associates the modern artist with despair and rebellion...
...Falmouth, Mass...
...Such judgments are anyway—though we deny it—ultimately related to our political persuasions, and Herrick is certainly entitled to his...
...I'd doubt that, even if I didn't have those cliches about Nazis waxing ecstatic over Goethe or being lifted from their filthy human skins while listening to Wagner bouncing around in the back of my head...
...Richard Parmenter...
...For I felt Mamet had barely missed his goal: a dramatic correlation, as in the best detective stories, between a baffling plot and the final elusiveness of truth itself...
...perhaps that's the real genius of art...
...Perhaps Allen is right in stating that "modernism as unrelenting enemy of tradition" is a cliche, but if so it is only because the identification is so demonstrably true...
...Real art does not merely reproduce the world, and Mamet is no tape recorder...

Vol. 60 • May 1977 • No. 10


 
Developed by
Kanda Sofware
  Kanda Software, Inc.