To the Editors:
There is a lack of generosity in Maurice Cowling’s “Raymond Williams in Retrospect” (January 1990). It cannot be that everything that Williams wrote is bad and dangerous. Mr. Cowling seems still to be fighting battles now twenty years old. Of the spirit behind the dis turbances of the 1960s, many things may be said. But that they were “odious” may, I believe, be said only of those who—themselves well beyond the draft age—committed the bodies of younger men to a war which they had not the courage to go to Congress to get approved, as is required by law. I have heard too often at dinner parties old men discussing, with a certain pleasure, the merits of carpet bombing. War Games, indeed! The odor arising from those conversations far out-stinks the (by comparison) harmless activities of the “revolutionaries” of the 1960s. I am bemused that a conservative journal, such as yours, thus indirectly defends illegal acts by so-called conservatives who managed to avoid the traditional legal restraints by bullying a supine Congress. Even the dullest of imaginations can picture what Burke would have said in such circumstances.
There are enough poorly written journals which, preaching to the converted, prefer revisionism to analysis. It is something to be dili gently guarded against.
Gabriel Austin
New York, NY
Maurice Cowling replies:
I have two rather unyielding comments:
1. My polemic was deliberate since Williams is on the way to becoming a secular saint and needs to