Dear Editor
Dear Editor A Fine Distinction Roger Fontaine is too eager to catch Secretary of State Cyrus Vance in a lie ("The Standoff in Cuba," NL, September 24). At one point Fontaine quotes Vance's late...
...Boston Emory Spajght...
...But 1 don't think this should require rejection of the PLO by the blacks...
...September 10...
...Guy receives word that his wife Virginia (whom he has remarried and who has just borne a child, not Guy's) and his eccentric uncle Peregrine have been instantly killed by one of 'the new doodle bombs.' We are told that 'the news did not affect Guy greatly...
...That is the only hope of moderating its stand...
...it must be talked to...
...He provides as an example a synopsis of an episode in the last volume of The Sword of Honour trilogy...
...Unlike Fontaine, I fail to see how the second statement is a "180 degree reversal" from the first...
...This is hardly boredom and depression...
...Then he notes the Secretary's more recent remark: "Elements . . . may have been there since the early 1970s, and possibly before that...
...New York City Alfred de la Roche Rustin In the light of the rather hysterical rhetoric that followed Andrew Young's resignation, it was a pleasure to read Bayard Rustin's calm and reasoned discussion of "Black-Jewish Relations" (NL...
...Anne Clement Waugh William H. Pritchard chastises Evelyn Waugh for having become too serious in his later books ("Waugh Revisited," NL...
...In the first case, Vance was talking about Soviet buildup...
...Anxious to create characters that were sympathetic, or at least recognizably human, Waugh wound up with a "spir-itlessness falling like a blight on whatever it touches," Pritchard says...
...Chicago Terry Jaffe Bayard Rustin speaks eloquently of the need for blacks and Jews to reunite...
...Which is to say that, having become closer to God through Catholicism, Guy has acquired a nearly Buddha-like indifference to the things of this world, which include suffering, lust and friendship...
...Within the context of the novel, Guy's "lack of responsiveness" is not "spiritlessness" at all but, indeed, an excess of spirit...
...Washington, D.C...
...Vance's answers were narrow, to be sure, but consistent...
...I think Pritchard read the incident, or perhaps the whole trilogy, rather carelessly...
...It is hesitant, pared-down piety...
...The PLO is, after all, a central fact of political life in the Middle East...
...Israelis and American Jews should be pleased, not bitter, that blacks have taken steps toward opening a dialogue...
...Well, not this reader...
...less, indeed than the arrival of Frank de Souza and the jeep and the Praesidium.' The reader shakes his head once more in disbelief at Guy's lack of responsiveness, is bored with his boredom, depressed by what seems to be his creator's depression...
...At one point Fontaine quotes Vance's late August statement that "there is no evidence of any substantial increase of the Soviet military presence over the past several years...
...And his "indifference" to the death of his wife (whom, incidentally, he remarried because he thought it was his duty, as a Catholic, to sacrifice his desires) shows him, at least in Waugh's opinion, to have reached that exalted state...
...Seen from this angle, the second quote merely echoed the first...
...Congratulations...
...He has throughout been striving for the kind of spiritual balance that his father had...
...he did not say the Russians weren't in Cuba to begin with...
Vol. 62 • October 1979 • No. 19
