To Seriously Maintain

(Ed. Note--The Crimson does not necessarily endorse opinions expressed in printed communications. No attention will be paid to anonymous letters and only under special conditions, at the request of the writer, will names be withheld.)

To the Editor of the CRIMSON:

The very interesting review of V. F. Calverton's "The Liberation of American Literature" in yesterday's CRIMSON raises some disturbing questions in my mind. I have often taken exception to the CRIMSON's editorial policy of never giving a definite opinion on a controversial subject. Like some others, I regarded this hesitancy as the result of sitting on the fence too long, which would seem likely to result in emasculation. The glaring grammatical errors in this review seemed to suggest that another factor was involved: the sheer inability to write English. Assuming that these are due to slipshod proof-reading, and passing over such phrases as "ratiocinative circumstances" etc. we come to the real meaning of the review.

"If Mr. Calverton's thesis is, as he claims. . . If on the other hand it is what it actually seems. . ." Does the reviewer really suspect Mr. Calverton, like the bolshevik he is, of concealing the thesis of the book from the eye of everyone but the vigilant CRIMSON man? "The author argues that literature should be judged sociologically rather than aesthetically." I thought he argued that there is no such thing as aesthetic apart from sociological judgment. "The sociological conditions which brought about a novel like 'Oil'. . . have passed." It would be interesting, and faintly reminiscent of Mr. Hoover's assurances that the depression will be over in a few months, to seriously maintain this thesis.

In concluding, I should like to question the reviewer's criticism of the author's style, which is perhaps one of the important functions of a critic. "Mr. Calverton writes with some case, but he uses certain words such as 'bourgeois' and 'middle-class' so often that the reader becomes weary and begins to suspect that his exaggerated 'class consciousness' is. . . the result of a personal frustration of some kind."

One may praise Calverton for his ideas, but the fact remains that his style is, to say the least, pedestrian. And I do not suspect that his class consciousness is the result of a personal frustration any more than that of a worker is such because he "personally" is being exploited, "personally" realizes his solidarity with other workers. But I do think that speculation on the cause of the reviewer's class consciousness, as shown in his opinion of Calverton, would be fruitful. Herbert E. Robbins '35.