To the Editors:

It was called to my attention recently that Hilton Kramer in “The MLA Centennial Follies,” had attributed a remark to me that I found, when I looked it up on page four of the February issue of The New Criterion, did not represent at all accurately what I had said in my talk at the Modern Language Association. As one can see from the typescript of the talk I gave, I made a generalization about every person who was once a young Turk becoming, by the simple process of time, an old fogey. The sentence in question reads, after the sentiment from Yeats that things thought too long can no longer be thought, “No generation can do what its teachers did; and young Turks, without changing by an inch or an ounce, become old fogeys by the simple fact of staying alive.” You will I hope agree that a generalization is a generalization. No one at the meeting “sat and listened to Professor Vendler describe Professor Wellek as ‘an old fogey.’” (I adapt Mr. Kramer’s sentence without distorting it.) It is true that earlier in the talk I remarked that “both Walter Jackson Bate and René Wellek have attacked deconstructionists, just as . . . [Douglas] Bush and . . . [Frederick] Crews” attacked other schools (in the case of Bush, the archetypalists, in the case of Crews, all schools). Nowhere did I suggest that Bate, Wellek, Bush, and Crews were “silly, if not indeed