To the Editor:
Your reviewer Diana Trilling dismisses Laura Hobson’s novel, Gentleman’s Agreement, with very faint praise and much sharp condemnation, in about a one to ten proportion. Of course, if one applies the standards of high art the book is obviously not a great novel, and I daresay Mrs. Hobson and her publishers would be the first to admit it. But doesn’t it deserve commendation as a sincere, readable effort to stimulate the thoughtful reader’s mind and conscience concerning his own share in keeping alive anti-Semitic prejudice, one of the great menaces to our way of life?
If it helps in this good cause with the tens of thousands of people it seems likely to reach, doesn’t it deserve some praise and the author some credit?
Sylvia Lapides
Kansas City, Missouri
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To the Editor:
Am I alone in finding Diana Trilling’s review of Laura Hobson’s Gentleman’s Agreement a puzzle?
Interesting—as are all of Mrs. Trilling’s able analyses of current literature—this review seems to have an animus not clearly expressed.
- Apparently Miss Hobson shares with her publishers some guilt in not wanting to portray “swinish Jews.” Are we to understand that, for novelists at least, there is a moral obligation to be unpleasant? If Mrs. Trilling espouses the right of some Jews to be unattractive, can’t Miss Hobson let others be pleasant?
- Mrs. Trilling indicates that “liberalism” (only defamed, not defined) is sterile, deadening, devoid of “grandeur or quality.” Gentleman’s Agreement, I gather before reading the book, approves of marriage, sex, reasonable child-rearing, and the acceptance of death as inevitable. In the first three of this odd list I find nothing to object to; there’s good fun in each. About the last (accepting death), one thinks of Margaret Fuller’s accepting the universe: “Gad, she’d better!”
Mrs. Trilling implies that she is bored by “liberalism” and welcomes “cultural pluralism” for the complications in society and the individual that it brings about. “It creates social problems perhaps faster than it creates social values.” Just as one individual talking to another, I’d advise any reader of the review not to worry about running out of complications and problems. I’ve never met an uncomplicated person yet. And not even a pleasant, liberal Jew or Gentile is free from his grandeur or quality.
Finally, when one comes upon the flat statement: “Surely no totalitarian ideal has ever projected a more complete regimentation of the psychic life of a nation than our present day liberal ideal”—it is time to go back and reread the piece that winds up in so odd a spot! I hope that “cultural pluralism” is not like culture as defined by Somerset Maugham—something that permits one to talk nonsense with distinction.
Samuel Middlebrook
New York City
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