LETTERS

...I read your article with pleasure approaching glee...

...I had spent about an hour with it and, candidly, I had the feeling that it might be hard for me to match my admiration of his work with my enthusiasm for David’s person...

...Why not pick another name, first, like Land Use...

...I would not want to take away from your pleasure in a job well done by pointing out that a lot of us have been raising hell over a long period with varying success, about the same conditions you deplore...

...It would not have been fair to Kostelanetz if I had not disclosed that fact...

...You were labeling the subject by its commercial appendage...

...Jason Epstein’s hlghly personalized rejoinders consistently avoid the central issue, which is the integrity not of The New York Review’s writers but of the medium itself...

...If Irving Howe intends to refute Lessard and myself, he would seem less pathetic if he provided better evidence than a hypothetical survey of a New York “cocktail party...

...they have their own authority...

...However, since my book has not yet appeared, thanks to unfortunate production delays, one wonders how he can say that it is “mediocre...

...e., my) judgmental words on architecture, planning, land use sitting beside the lavish space on behalf of condominiums, developments, etc...

...Podhoretz, no...

...In my own experience, a scandalously large number of publishers refused a book on literary politics in America, an interesting subject one would think, even though the manuscript was complete, its author scarcely a novice, portions had appeared prominently in literary journals, people were discussing it in conversation and even in print, and junior editors at several firms had supported its publication...

...thus their letters are filled with inexcusable presumptions, such as David Halberstam’s assertion that “Kostelanetz,” who has spent his entire professional life away from literary institutions, “wants to be Jason or Podhoretz...

...If the same logic were applied to the Post’s news sections, coverage of President Nixon would depend on a steady flow of advertising from the Republican National Committee...

...I might say that the Globe’s real estate page is far superior to the ones you mentioned...

...After all, there is theater, art, film and music criticism even on the arts page...

...Had Charles U. Daly, a vice-president of Harvard University, actually read The End of Intelligent Writing, he would have seen a critique of “intellectuals” who make seemingly authoritative comments on cultural works that they simply have not examined at first hand...

...At the same time, I disagreed with much of the rest of his book, in c 1 u ding his Epstein-Podhoretz-DecterSilvers-Howe grand conspiracy thesis...

...His honor is almost obscenely rigid...

...What I do notice, however, is that Suzannah Lessard has considerable scorn for him...

...I wanted to make that clear, too, and I regret that it was not clear to every reader...

...In an interview with Publishers’ Weekly, Mrs...

...not necessarily, their content, but their approach and the title ‘real estate.’ I argued (in vain) that calling real estate pages, real estate...

...Lessard gives him: he gets a resounding yes from Silvers and Epstein, as thundering a no from Howe, Decter, and Podhoretz...

...Although the Star-News duly reported HcTD’s action in their regular news columns, on a rainy day this may be scant consolation for Ocean Pines residents who believed what they read in the real state section...

...By comparison, political reporting is duck soup-you hit a few of the right sources, qualify their most damnable gaffes, and the story is done...

...It could have been made even more sharply: real estate pages are not only fellow sufferers in the back-of-the-book syndrome, they are behind the back of the book in terms of coddling their advertisers...

...I therefore begged off, which gave The New York Review a chance to get Mary McCarthy...

...you have certified him as a witness, and he does in truth, if the judgment pronounced upon him by the prosecution itself is to be accepted, sound very much like the sort of witness who is served up in the average conspiracy trial...

...Then I read the Halberstam book, found it absolutely marvelous, and, in my fiied opinion, the best contemporary work I read this year...

...MURRAY KEMPTON New York, N.Y...

...the most venal thing most of them do is to pass over what seem to them the sins of their friends unremarked...

...2) I have no comment on Kostelanetz, since I do not know his wrongs while being all too aware of the incapacity of his disposition to bear them with philosophy...

...If Ms...

...His quotes remain...

...I doubt if Ms...

...It would not have been fair to our readers if I had not also attempted to disclose the extent of my disagreement with him ~ Kay, Otis and Newby Congratulations on Walter Shapiro’s fine article, “Kay, Otis, and Newby: They Sell Out, Too” [December, 19731, directed at a large sitting target...

...I understand Murray Kempton’s concern about my quoting a source I disagreed with, but the simple fact is that I would not have written the article if I had not read the Kostelanetz book...

...My feeling was that real estate pages should be totally abolished...

...however, it still suffers from the same biases...

...Letters More Moral MvoDia: “The New York Review” and the New York lntellectuals I have been so often refreshed by the workings of Suzannah Lessard’s intelligence that it is embarrassing to comment on her now only when I am distressed by one weed in what is otherwise the garden of her works...

...Design-I had a dozen of them-and, then, change the calibre of the reporting on them...

...4) Four of the five cited conspirators are, persons towards whom I have the friendliest feelings and wellearned respect, and I am no neutral witness in their defense...

...Graham complained that “publishers said they had to give their advertising to The New York Times and we’d be lucky to feed off the crumbs from the table...

...then passes at length to a summary of his thesis...

...Yet Ms...

...I could not imagine Howe as capable of belonging to any collective of names on earth except a real one made up of his children and some beautiful myth of a collective-some Debs Branch of the Brooklyn Socialist Party, 1936-whose members quite anonymously go about together in the streets and give out the literature...

...There is no single source, no Mayor of the Environment...

...Halberstam also confuses the publishing power of James Silbennan (as the chief of Random House) with literary power over public reception and critical opinion (e.g., Epstein, Podhoretz, and Howe...

...I.e., Ehrlichman, Haldeman, Dean, Colson, same fellow at bottom, imputations of conspiracy, plausible if best left to grand juries...

...I pulled a trick once as a Book Award judge and must have read seriously into a hundred books all of which had been quite favorably received and a great many of which seemed to me appallingly shabby...

...NAREE stopped the practice, and so far as I know still maintains the resistance...

...My own experience is that books are generally reviewed with a kind of indifferent benevolence and, if anything, undeservedly praised...

...Grady Clay is editor of Landscape Architecture...

...You should of course be aware of the fact that the kind of reporting you advocate (and which some of us have sought to practice) is among the most expensive of all journalistic undertakings...

...One recurring problem is that your letterwriters are talking about a book they have not read...

...It understands that, on most occasions, when anyone lists five persons as complicit, he gives the game away at once to pretty much anyone who knows the parties...

...The Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham made this abundantly clear when she tried to justify the Post’s decision to kill their weekly supplement, Book WorM...

...On the other hand, Podhoretz, Decter, Epstein, Silver, Howe, a wildly disparate crew, with just one marriage and no less than seven feuds among them, imputations of conspiracy so implausible as to be unworthy of critical attention...

...3) 1 could hardly be unconscious of the institution of literary backscratching, having myself been quite often its beneficiary...

...No, no, it doesn’t, many times over, for many reasons (only some of which I discuss...

...Perhaps my greatest frustration in drafting the book has been hearing descriptions of it (and its author) which were not only partial and/or inaccurate, but which could have been publicly refuted, if only the book as a whole were available...

...My relations with Irving Howe are somewhat more ambiguous and I feel rather more freedom in protesting on his behalf...

...The Washington Monthly, having been for so long so rich a source for my own Knucklehead Theory of History, is the one medium where I had last expected to find the poor old conspiracy theory flogged once again...

...As onetime president of the ‘National Association of Rial Estate Editors, I intervened in the group’s longtime acceptance of favors from large building organizations...

...JANE HOLTZ KAY Broo kline, Massachusetts The editors reply: Although the real estate sections are one of the most extreme examples of the b a c k - e of-the-book syndrome, they share the common characteristic of depending on advertising for their very existence...

...I wish I hadn’t been so callous as not to be outraged for it when I read Ms...

...Alas, my points were applauded and tucked in the back drawer...

...Land Shape...

...no Ombudsman for the Housing Market...

...It is also interesting that just six weeks after the Washington Star-News real estate section ran their article touting Ocean Pines, the Department of Housing and Urban Development suspended land sales at the BoiseCascade vacation community because of such shady practices as neglecting to inform buyers that lots were subject to flooding during rainstorms...

...Lessard can name me one writer since Faulkner these .five join in admiring, let alone consort to cry up, she will surprise me inordinately...

...But very few critics especially enjoy writing severe reviews...

...RICHARD KOSTELANETZ New York, N. Y. The author replies: Kostelanetz pointed out something I thought was true-that the New York literary world is full of apparent conflicts-ofinterest, of which the Random House-New York Review relationship is one of the more conspicuous-and I wanted to give him credit for doing so...

...But then one trouble with conspiracy theories is that even the evidence that is brought in to refute them had its orig- in in accident more often than design...

...I only wish that it served my purse as well as it has my feelings...

...The New York Review had asked me to do it...

...You are quite correct: the typical real estate editor is overworked, has far too much space to fill, and perforce falls back on handouts, puffery and other results of abnegated judgment...

...Your point was well taken...

...To round up the investigative story required takes at least five, and sometimes ten, times the reportorial time needed for the standard political story...

...was like calling theater pages “Tickets...

...Most cities are understudied, underanalyzed...

...Otherwise, Halberstam’s criticisms of the literary-industrial complex concur with my own...

...Lessard’s piece, and I am grateful to him for reminding me to be...

...The best reporters are crippled, by the managerial circumstances you describe...

...Though not familiar with “standards” at Harvard, I recently taught police at an urban university where, if a student judged a book he clearly had not read, he was usually flunked...

...Though Howe claims to differ with Epstein, their adjacent letters reveal how much they have in common, not only in literary political defensiveness but in virulent style...

...Now I find Mary McCarthy’s strictures on the subject cited in fairness by Ms...

...I am now writing the architecture column for The Nation, Building Design (London) and other publications which are-as your article so ably pointed out-not the places where the average home-buyer, city-builder goes shopping...

...Obviously, my idea was somewhat self-serving: I had visions of some (i...

...Housing Information” is often a jungle brokered among competing tigers, some jealous some conspiratorial...

...Pound, yes...

...If it comes in, is well-typed, has 301 pages, it gets printed...

...The fault dear Brutus lies not in ourselves but, as you indicate, in management...

...For four years, as architecture critic for the Boston Globe, I argued the same subject...

...Lessard really believes that a kindly mention from The New York Review and an even kindlier silence from Cbmmentaly has established many literary fortunes...

...Intrinsic in the book-publishing process is a censoring power that, whether by intention or default, can wield an insidious impact...

...GRADY CLAY Louisville, Ky...

...Had he actually read my book (as Suzannah Lessard did, in unedited manuscript), he might have said something else...

...Moral Myopia: ‘The New York Review’ and the New York Intellectuals” [November ¶ 19731 starts in my mind these objections: 1) The Washington Monthly has attained a great part of its distinction by an admirable abstention from giving circulation to theories of conspiracy...

...Lessard as evidence that Random House’s rule over The New York Review doesn’t invariably run...

...Take Chomsky, who I think deserves rather better than Ms...

...It seems to me a good rule not to quote a source unless you have genuine respect for it...

...Lessard, having expressed the utmost contempt for Kostelanetz (“paranoid abandon ,” “personal rancor ,” “fallacies and distortions,” etc...

...Speaking of Halberstam, I know of no literary agent, no publishing editor, no experienced writer who would agree with his contention that, “There is almost no critical rejection process in books...

...One exception was David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest...