To the Editors:
Any author must be flattered by having twenty-four columns devoted to his work in a prestigious periodical [September 1984.], and even grumpy old Ivy Litvinov might have got some pleasure at the thought of Mr. Lipman going to so much trouble (perhaps even expense) to get copies of her early novels and make an extended critique of them which includes the opinion that they are “implicit with life.” I am glad to have drawn his attention to them.

So I do not complain that he clearly disliked both the book and its subject. They clearly fascinated him in some sort of way. I also leave aside the personal points he tries to score off me—the sneer that only my biographer will be able to explain why I wrote the book at all, the obtuseness of spekulating I might not be aware that my carefully chosen title had a psychological as well as a topographical connotation, or the twittering about one or two pedantic points which could be matched in his own piece.

I have, however, two substantial things to say. First, on page eighteen of his piece Mr. Lipman says I provide “not one fact based either on Ivy’s testimony or the recollection of intimates to support [my] claim” that Ivy regarded David Eder as her second father. My whole book makes it clear that I myself was Ivy’s intimate and had full access to the voluminous papers she left behind, which contain many references