To the Editors:
In the February issue of The New Criterion, David Pryce-Jones so entirely and deliberately misrepresents my book Atrocity and Amnesia that I can only wonder what made him suppose he would get away with it. He even goes so far as to tar with the Marxist brush a book several of whose chapters celebrate writers like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, V. S. Naipaul, and Saul Bellow. But then a reyiewer who is inclined to smell a Marxist under every bed that has not been tucked and fitted in the best neoconservative way can hardly be expected to see what is in front of his ever so sensitive nose. In any case, Mr. Pryce-Jones ought at least to have a few simple questions and provocations put to him:
1. How is it possible for a given book—in this case, mine—“to treat political novels as academic documents,” that is, “to carry the aesthetic point of view to an extreme,” while at the same time falling prey to a “vulgar Marxism” which is said “to make a common political cause out of assorted writers”? The utter confusion and senselessness revealed in this example is characteristic of the entire piece by Mr. Pryce-Jones.
2. How can a person who has read a book detailing the political activities of a wide range of characters living in places like South Africa, the Belgian Congo, Haiti, Paraguay, and so on, speak about the book’s failure to specify “what activism might really be like”?
