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.”
Another wounded author took a deep breath and set things
straight. “Shlomo Sand’s response to my review of the parody of
historical scholarship he presents in his book illustrates
perfectly the accuracy of my critique. In his letter, he
substitutes belligerence for argument, and misrepresents the
research by others which he quarries. His letter is replete with
irrelevance, innuendo and inaccuracy.”
Another letter notes that an author was unhappy being
caught out in an argument over the meaning of “prime mover” as
used by Latin Aristoteleans. “I called the confusion ‘a howler’.
Professor Hart now pleads guilty to the lesser charge of laziness
in failing to make the distinction clear. But it is good to learn
that he is very much better informed on these matters than is
evident from a reading of his book.”
The surprise ending category includes this letter, worth
quoting in its entirety:
I have just read Jon Garvie’s review of Jan Morris’s book
‘Contact!’ and I found the review to be so rude, disdainful and
ill-considered that it was with great pleasure that I ordered
the book immediately.”
