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Among the Intellectualoids
Taken to Task at the TLS
When the stakes are this small, duck for cover.
I get a real jolt, usually on Saturday mornings if the French post office obliges, when I open my Times Literary Supplement (TLS) to the letters page and watch the long knives slide in and twist, often with considerable finesse.
The London-based magazine specializes in mind-stretching book reviews and esoteric essays but it is the letters page that I go to first — and I suspect I’m not alone. In fact I know I’m not. “The letters are addictive, even when I don’t know what they’re talking about,” says Canadian author Ann Tudor, a friend and a longtime TLS reader.
Here on public view every week are the world’s most cultivated men and women, most of them established academics, venting their spleens over a critical barb or a well-turned sneer in a previous issue. The indignation in these little gems — sometimes just a paragraph or two — is sometimes almost comic.
As Henry Kissinger once said, paraphrasing Woodrow Wilson, “Academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so small.”
The TLS letters are no mere blogosphere rants by nameless individuals. They are weighty cudgels from the academic crème de la crème. And their passions exist in some kind of parallel universe — detached from the real world of politics and oil spills.
I have been collecting my favorite TLS letters for the past six months or so, looking for patterns. Alas, I’m like that Canadian writer. I often barely understand what they’re talking about, much less what’s at stake.
The letters are in two categories: yelps about a reviewer’s comments, and yelps about a letter knocking a review. Sometimes the thrusts and parries go on for months, with several professors dragging out factoids they are eager to display.
Having a letter published there is almost as good for an academic career as getting a bona fide article accepted. One’s colleagues notice.
A long-running debate over Dostoevsky’s state of mind while writing The Brothers Karamazov is one of the more exhaustive cases of viciousness over small stakes. Dostoevsky dominated the letters page off and on from January to April over the relationship between psychological disorders explored in his classic novel and Dostoevsky’s own ailments, including epilepsy and paranoia. Prof. Emeritus James L. Rice of the University of Oregon probably had no idea what a firestorm he was igniting with his erudite 4,000-word essay.
Rice, a Harvard Magna cum laude graduate and respected voice in Slavic literature, found himself attacked for “fanciful speculations” and “applying (medical and psychiatric) ideas to Dostoevsky’s texts and thereby distorting them to make them fit.” Cambridge University Prof. Diane Thompson, the letter writer, accused him of “a sustained exercise in reductionism.”
Another letter in the same issue informed us that the innocent reader “has not, unlike myself, published five volumes on Dostoevsky’s life and works,” and went on to pick at Rice’s essay.
A few weeks later Rice shot back that some of the comment on his work was “pure sophistry and pointless bravado.” The fight was not yet over. Prof. Thompson seemed determined to wipe the floor with him. His defense, she wrote in a subsequent edition, was laden with “serious errors and misreadings,” and proceeded to instruct him in a secondary meaning of the Russian word “zhizn” (life). Prof. Rice concluded the debate with a couple of withering barbs, accusing Prof. Thompson of, among other things, being “deaf to Dostoevsky’s irony.”
Separate from the Dostoevsky debates, I saved another letter that required two or three readings to grasp. The writer took an author to task for hopeless confusion. “It is true,” he wrote, “that post-Impressionist painting, Darwinian theory and Heidegger’s question of Being all participate in modernity’s radically altered understanding of human existence and our place in the world…. Notwithstanding their shared reliance on the word ‘origin,’ Darwin’s and Heidegger’s ideas move in utterly different conceptual spaces.” I guess he had a point. At least a small one.
In the obscurity category came a letter from an author about a very small world indeed. Responding to a previous letter criticizing him, he explained, “Readers of the TLS unfamiliar with the field of historical scholarship on Madagascar may find themselves perplexed by the emotional tone of a recent letter.” The letter-writer under attack had claimed to be a leading historian of Madagascar, to which the aggrieved author retorted, “I would like to point out that in the English-speaking world, there are only three of us.”
Sometimes the letter-writer admits to confusion. “In his review of Amartya Sen’s ‘The Idea of Justice’, John Tasiolas mentions that a footnote in the book reveals that the famous anecdote about Piero Sraffa brushing his chin with his fingertips, in a familiar Neopolitan gesture of skepticism, and demanding of Wittgenstein ‘What is the logical form of this?’ may be apocryphal.” The writer claimed to have asked Sraffa once to confirm the anecdote, which he did, and to demonstrate the gesture. “Unfortunately, the writer adds, “I can no longer remember how you do it.”
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Scott Lahti | 5.17.10 @ 7:29AM
Mr. Johnson does well to sketch the enduring fascinations of the TLS letters page. My own contribution to that page from 1998, on the sources for Stanley Kubrick's film Full Metal Jacket is here (I knew nothing whatever of the subject, and retrieved all the necessary information from Leonard Maltin's TV movie guide and five minutes' web-browsing),
http://docs.google.com/View?id.....63hkqxbbhr
as is a 1986 essay from National Review in which I discussed the periodical at length - the TLS is a sort of weekly mailbox update to the great Eleventh Edition from 1910 of the Encyclopædia Britannica (see also my two-part review at Amazon.com of Critical Times, the official centenary history of the paper, from 2001, by Derwent May; and Dwight Macdonald's famous essay on London weeklies, "Amateur Journalism", reprinted in his collection Against the American Grain). I was pleased last month to score, via a Craigslist "free stuff" posting sent me by Google Alerts, a 200+ issue stack of recent back numbers of the paper.
Mr. Johnson might have noted that the author of "another letter" in the recent Dostoevsky dust-up in the TLS was none other than the nonagenarian Joseph Frank of Stanford University, one of our most distinguished literary humanists, whose five-volume life of the great Russian, condensed last year as Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time, and published over the years 1976-2002, is one of the truly great literary biographies of the last fifty years.
Finally, the last letter quoted, from a reader so turned off by the carping TLS reviewer of the latest book by Jan Morris he was moved to buy a copy of it, reminded me of Eric Idle's "Professor" from the panel judging the contestants in the Most Awful Family in Britain Awards (sponsored by Heart-Attack-O margarine), in the sketch of that name on Monty Python's Flying Circus; of the father from one such family, his opinion was that "he was rude, smelly and distasteful - and I liked him very much."
Bob K.| 5.17.10 @ 8:18AM
It serves a purpose. At least it confirms that some people, although likely very few, are reading what they have written!
I'm sending this to my nephew who just received his PhD in English Literature from an Ivy League University! But I suspect by now that he is well acquainted with these literary hissy fits!
Petronius| 5.17.10 @ 8:18PM
Oh joy! Much ado over who has the upper of the upper. It seems the only thing better than the autographed photo is personal involvement in the minutia of a famous authors life. It's the box seats for game 7 of the World Series for bookworms. But the overhead smash for me was the invitation to subscribe to the New York Times Review of Books with the insulting remark in the refusal box, (no thank you. I refuse to think.) of such effrontery towards me as a prospective customer. How dare I refuse, as the NYT Review of Books is the only literary publication worth looking at. I checked the refusal and told them that I was taking The Spectator of London, (which I dropped when Lord Black lost it and Mark Steyne was sacked and Boris Johnson forced from the editors chair.) Those were the heady days when Jonathan Franzen p-o'd his publisher for refusing to appear on Oprah's Book Club as he didn't want the vacuum heads who watch her reading his stuff; he being a serious author. It must be true as the Speccie critic who reviewed Changes said Mr. Franzen had written "literature". Which takes me to TLS . It is one of the few constants in this world of crumbling values whence I hied to my local library for a copy of Wm. Makepeace Thackery's Book of English Snobs. Who isn't? So let's have some fun and compare the review of the next Koogler winner with that in the TLS.
wouldee5150| 5.18.10 @ 12:23AM
"A long-running debate over Dostoevsky's state of mind while writing The Brothers Karamazov is one of the more exhaustive cases of viciousness over small stakes."
But that is Alinsky as he imparts spurious motive to a man of character nothing like Alinsky's vacuity. Saul Alinksky fancied himself having the definitve premise for veiling Dostoevski's messages. The "alleged" state of mind is misplaced. lol.
David Jack Smith | 5.18.10 @ 11:14AM
Even though they no longer have an Empire, it is encouraging to read that they remain heart-warmingly vicious.
If only the pen was indeed mightier than the sword
Scott Lahti | 5.20.10 @ 9:01PM
"the famous anecdote about Piero Sraffa brushing his chin with his fingertips, in a familiar Neopolitan gesture of skepticism...I can no longer remember how you do it."
As luck would have it three weeks on, a correspondent to this week's Letters page fills the gap in the literature:
"Should there still be sufficient interest, I would offer the following description of that gesture: Cup the fingers of your right hand together and raise it under your chin so that the fingernails touch its roof; then with a rapid motion, as with a snap, brush your chin with your fingertips as at the same time you stretch your hand and move it decidedly towards your interlocutor."
Bookmark the TLS letters page, fresh each Friday, here,
http://entertainment.timesonli.....s_letters/
and prospective subscribers check the display ads each fall in the NYTBR and the NYRoB - as well as your own direct mail if you subscribe to cognate periodicals - the better at $49.95 to save over 70% off the annual $169 rate.