Dear Editor
Dear Editor Jarrell I would like to correct several false statements in John Simon's otherwise enjoyable review of Kipling, Auden & Co. by Randall Jarrell ("Writers and Writing," NL, September 8)....
...Furthermore, King thinks that O'Connor's wisecracking haw-haw tone in her letters is "irritating" and "transparent to the point of being embarrassing," as if letters to friends never intended for publication, were to be judged with the same stern eye used on books and articles...
...What Mollison seems to overlook is that Ronald Reagan also has a "record," which Americans will become increasingly familiar with...
...I cannot believe the American people will allow themselves to be flim-flammed into ignoring the appalling Reagan record...
...Greensboro, N. C. Mary Jarrell Reagan's Record Your reporter in Washington, Andrew Mollison, believes that this election is a cinch for the Republicans because they have a "man and a plan," while "the Democrats have Jimmy Carter and [his] record" ("How Reagan Plans to Win," NL, September 8...
...1. Jarrell was not in the least "run over...
...Andrea Spivack Andrew Mollison is indulging in wishful thinking if he is actually serious about a Reagan victory...
...If the grace she offers her characters seems to divide and destroy rather than unite and heal, that's too bad for her characters...
...Menlo Park, Calif...
...In his last paragraph Simon claims that Jarrell "was finally deflated into suicide," and that "Members of his family and friends who have tried to make his death appear an accident do him a disservice...
...Richmond, Va...
...Critics aren't vampires who can thrive only on the juiciest specimens?unless they are poor artists themselves...
...Robert Grenter Critical Failure The current malaise of film criticism, says Robert Asahina ("On Screen," NL, September 8) is due to the critics' failure to recognize the primacy of films...
...It will take only a few slips of the tongue, a gaffe here and there, or a Gerry Ford-style boo-boo to undo the Republicans' superior organization...
...Oscar Wilde knew that critics practice an art no less important than artists, that the distinction between the two is blurry at best...
...Nobody would write to anybody if that were true...
...As for John Simon and Stanley Kauffman, though they may be the "critics of integrity" that Asahina says they are, they don't generate much critical wattage between them either...
...Again, the facts are: 1. The doctors performing the autopsy found no other injury but a fracture at the base of the skull, which in their opinion killed Jarrell on impact...
...The facts are: 1. It was not a truck, it was a passenger car...
...I think the problem is that most film critics have tepid imaginations...
...James Wilhelm O'Connor I protest Richard King's slurs and insinuations against Flannery O'Connor's literary art in his review of Robert Coles' Flannery O'Connor's South ("Grace and Race in Dixie," NL, September 8...
...In Simon's first paragraph he asserts that Jarrell "died of letting a truck run over him...
...He was sideswiped as he walked along the edge of the road, and flung upward across the hood...
...His reactionary appointments to the State Supreme Court, his evisceration of one of the most progressive mental health programs in the country, his classic statements on conservation?if you've seen one tree, you have seen them all"-Suggest that a Reagan Presidency would be a disaster for the entire Western world...
...The trouble now is that we are sunk in a slough of dull films criticised by dull people...
...To twist Hilton Kramer's words, criticism derives its authority, not from the vitality of living art, but from its own vitality...
...Pauline Kael, Andrew Sams and Renata Adler have paltry imaginations...
...King has gotten me so riled that it pains me to say that, on the question of Flannery O'Conner's attitude toward Civil Rights, he is absolutely correct...
...Barrington, Mass...
...As the old spiritual says, "You will shout when it hits you, yes you will...
...Out here in California the Ronnie we remember still gives us the shivers...
...Dayton, Ohio Ronald Lambreth...
...2. The medical evidence, along with statements from persons in the car, formed the basis for the coroner's report listing my husband's death as "Accidental" and making this a matter of public record on his death certificate...
...Away from his speechwriters and aides Reagan is a zero...
...God is not noted for dispensing grace in nice, bite-sized packets, especially when the recipients do all they can to avoid the gift...
Vol. 63 • October 1980 • No. 18
