To the Editor:
Diana Trilling’s review of Laura Hobson’s Gentleman’s Agreement and, in an even higher degree, her answer to her counter-critics in the April number of COMMENTARY, are the most valuable and illuminating contributions that any American periodical has recently printed. .The overwhelmingly necessary intellectual act of this hour is the self-criticism of the liberals. .They waited long. .Years ago T. .S. .Eliot in his essay on “Religion and Literature” cruelly and correctly analysed the herd-mindedness of the contemporary “liberal.” That “liberal” continued to think in terms of withered clichés. .And any liberal who tried to break that bondage (as I did in The Permanent Horizon as long ago as 1934) was treated to another rubber-stamp: reactionary. .My own review of Gentleman’s Agreement in The New Palestine (April 1947) is, of course, more drastic and specific than Mrs. .Trilling’s. .But her aim and mine are the same: to point out the danger of the revolting attempt of the “liberals” to destroy all concreteness, color, particularity in human life, to neutralize and eviscerate it and, in the process, to reduce the living, suffering Jewish people to the faint shadow thrown by our few escapists from their great and tragic destiny.
Ludwig Lewisohn
New York City
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