Sidney Keyes
To the Editors:
In his otherwise sympathetic and perceptive review of Sidney Keyes’s poems (“Ruined Squire,” March 1990), Robert Richman writes that Keyes “looked like a corpse” and “was unable to love anyone.” Both assertions are untrue. He was physically by no means unattractive, and during his brief life deeply loved both Milein Cosmann and, after her, Renee-Jane Scott. No cold fish he.
Michael Meyer
London, England
Walter Benjamin
To the Editors:
In the opening paragraph of “The Beatification of Walter Benjamin” (June 1990), Richard Vine characterizes Benjamin as follows:
Professionally, the would-be philosopher was a failure. Personally, his life was ruled, if not by duplicity, then by abulia . . . [and] unable to master the world outside himself, he ended as its self-selected victim, killing himself at the age of forty-eight out of accumulated self-pity.
Mr. Vine chooses to begin his reevaluation of Benjamin with a base personal attack and does not stray from this mode of discourse throughout. It appears that in taking this approach to an ostensibly intellectual inquiry, Mr. Vine experiences a perverse pleasure that would be denied him were he actually to deal with the work and ideas of Walter Benjamin. The ideas of Benjamin here are secondary.
It is not until the end of Vine’s condemnation of Benjamin to the purgatory reserved for all defunct “leftist ideologues” that the primary objective of his invective becomes evident. The key question for Vine is