To the Editor:
I was struck (I should say stricken) by Milton Hindus’ article, “F. Scott Fitzgerald and Literary Anti-Semitism,” and surprised at its appearance in the June Commentary. One of Commentary’s virtues for me is that, as a Jewish magazine devoted to general cultural issues, it has been able to keep Jewishness (and anti-Semitism) in its place. To encourage the kind of literary discussion whose main question seems to be, “What’s in it for Jews?” neither expresses the magazine’s customary liberalism nor promotes good criticism. To. each his hobbyhorse, certainly; but let it not be Trojan.
Mr. Hindus is so sensitive about his Jewishness that I think he unknowingly read the pages of The Great Gatsby from right to left. He finds the characterization of a Jew in the book highly obnoxious, and his article makes more of “the dim Wolfsheim” (Lionel Trilling’s phrase) than the book itself does. Mr. Hindus does not take at face value that Wolfsheim’s being a Jew is mentioned only in passing: he pounces on that very point as sinister. Mr. Hindus claims that the labeling is insidious: it never seems to have occurred to him that the labeling, beyond its momentary identification, may be thereafter simply irrelevant. Instead, he finds the book, Fitzgerald, and the avant-garde of the 1920’s in general, ill-willed towards Jews, and out of his sensitivity he constructs an involved, artificial and petulant thesis about “fashionable anti-Semitism.”
The thesis is flimsy at several points. Mr. Hindus says in one place, for example, tracing the sources of “fashionable anti-Semitism,” that “the satirist by temperament, because he has little affection for the living human beings around him, is disposed to look with favor upon those who are dead. . . . [That] is why almost every satirist you can think of has been reactionary.” Are Erasmus, Cervantes, Moliére, Voltaire, Fielding, Shaw (to think of a few) without affection and reactionary? It would be hard to find a clearer example of self-hatred than Mr. Hindus’ contention that mostly all the avant-garde writers of the 20’s summed up all bad things, all human objects of hatred and fear—”foreigners, intellectuals, scientists”—as Jews.
Mr. Hindus could bring less literal a mind and more sense of humor to his appreciation of The Great Gatsby. He seems to feel cheated, for instance, by “the richness . . . of [the] picture of American decay” compared with “the poverty of [the] interpretation of that picture” provided by the book’s narrator, Nick. He misses there one of the nicest devices of Fitzgerald’s art (even if it were true that Nick’s comments are thin). His solemnity and simplicity are evident elsewhere in his description of the essentially “literary quality” of “fashionable anti-Semitism,” and in his statistical appreciation of Paul Morand’s “joke” (quotation marks are Mr. Hindus’) quoted about New York. As for intimations of the symbolic or even allegorical meanings of the story of Gatsby, Mr. Hindus might turn with profit to Lionel Trilling’s short introduction to the New Classics edition of the book.
Anti-Semitism is serious enough without sparring with windmills about it. I’m afraid the worst thing about “fashionable anti-Semitism” is Mr. Hindus’ pains about it. If it does sometimes lead to more virulent forms, those were probably present in the first place, which Mr. Hindus himself allows.
My principal reason, otherwise, for taking issue with Mr. Hindus is because of what he makes of criticism. The Great Gatsby we both agree is an excellent novel. Now what is wrong, indeed, for a Jew to ignore anti-Semitism (assuming its presence) “as unimportant in the sum of the entire work”? Who says his “aesthetic enjoyment . . . is soured by [a] drop of vitriol”? It is bad enough for Mr. Hindus to think of me as a Jew “complacent and perhaps stupid” for reacting in the first way, and “unfortunate” for not being “soured” in the second way. (Please, do I have to dislike Wagner, and like Chagall?) Only let him speak for himself, not for me.
Diana Trilling’s review for COMMENTARY of Gentleman’s Agreement and especially her “Liberalism vs. Liberalism” reply to some of the detractors of that review (March and April issues) are instances of criticism on subjects of Jewish interest which Mr. Hindus might examine to his advantage. Frankly, I’m a little worried for the state of the humanities, which we are informed Mr. Hindus teaches, at the College of the University of Chicago.
Aaron M. Frankel
New York City
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To the Editor:
The title “F. Scott Fitzgerald and Literary Anti-Semitism” is a misnomer, proved thus by both the conclusions and physical proportions of Mr. Hindus’ article. . . . Fitzgerald is discussed with such comparative brevity it is plain he and a highly selective two of his books are used only as a springboard for more important considerations. The quick shift in emphasis to other writers (Eliot, Pound) indicates the weakness of Mr. Hindus’ case.
More serious where criticism is concerned is both Mr. Hindus’ misunderstanding of The Last Tycoon and his gratuitous labeling of Fitzgerald as a “satirist,” although I can hardly discuss the latter here.
It is strange that while Mr. Hindus is too quick to condemn Fitzgerald’s treatment of the Jew in The Great Gatsby, he is blind to the great respect and compassion which Fitzgerald so obviously feels for Monroe Stahr, the Jewish producer, in his last and what promised to be his finest novel. As a temporary student of Fitzgerald, Mr. Hindus should know that the writer strongly identified himself with each of his major characters—Amory Blaine, Jay Gatsby, Dick Diver, Monroe Stahr. “[Gatsby] started out as a man I knew and then changed into myself,” he writes in the notebooks. It is safe to claim that the tragic Stahr was the last romantic self-projection of a man and writer aware of his own approaching death.
Monroe Stahr “came here from choice to be with us till the end.” And, from choice, till the end Fitzgerald maintained his integrity as artist, his insight as perhaps the most attractive moralist in American letters since The Great Gatsby was first published. It is unfair to suggest that Fitzgerald could write of a man like Stahr with anything less than tenderness and humility. The Last Tycoon is Fitzgerald’s own puzzled but brave tenderness and humility at the bitter end.
Arthur Ormont
New York City
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To the Editor:
I found it a most illuminating experience to read Mr. Milton Hindus’ article on F. Scott Fitzgerald in the June COMMENTARY. It seems to me that his study of literary anti-Semitism is exemplary in its thorough probing and honest presentation, besides furnishing a rich canvas of comparing critical observations.
Mr. Hindus fits the literary anti-Semitism of the 20’s into a pattern of romantic reaction, this time against urbanization, with the Jew as the protagonist of that social group that is the most completely urbanized.
Taking Mr. Hindus’ article as a starting point, I think it would be interesting to probe into the past, in order to discover whether literary anti-Semitism was always associated with movements of romantic reaction.
I should like to see Mr. Hindus give us some more of what he has to say on the subject.
Marianne Coleman
New York City
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