Henri Coulette
To the Editors:
We are writing to express our anger at Philip Levine’s recent memoir-review of the late Henri Coulette and his Collected Poems, which was published in the first issue of Common Knowledge (Spring 1992). We are writing to The New Criterion—a journal in which Coulette’s poems regularly appeared—because the editors of Common Knowledge have refused to open their pages to any response, even to a correction of the many misrepresentations of which Levine is guilty.
Levine and Coulette, once the closest of friends, were estranged for many years. Although Levine claims that he does not wish to say anything against his former friend or to damage his literary reputation, his essay is contrived to do precisely that. After some pages of seemingly affectionate reminiscence, sprinkled with errors, exaggerations and fantastic assertions, he introduces a dying young poet, whom he portrays in heroic and sentimental terms and from whose mouth is made to flow a series of malicious negative judgments of Coulette’s character and achievement. Levine presumes that if any of us are offended by this ventriloquism, we shall have only the Dying Young Poet, now dead, to blame.
Henri Coulette is also dead and cannot defend himself. At a loss to understand why Levine should need in this way to diminish the reputation of a former friend and with no desire to speculate in public as to the nature of his motives, we wish only to respond with a statement