To the Editors:
I just finished reading Hilton Kramer’s piece on Richard Gilman’s true confessions (February, 1987) and was especially interested in Mr. Kramer’s faulting most recent books of this genre for their superficial perceptions. What surprised me, however, was his neglecting to connect the trendy involvement with religion on the part of some of the intellectuals of that period with the demise of the Trotskyist movement and their final and total abandonment of the Marxist construct.
Among the believers who couldn’t function without a tidy ideology, some tucked themselves into the confession box and others into the Orgone box (I’m thinking especially of Isaac Rosenfeld who became a militant Reichian). Also, it wasn’t T. S. Eliot who brought Simone Weil to the attention of Our Crowd; it was Dwight MacDonald in Politics. In February 1945, he published her “Reflections on War” and in December 1946, her essay called “Factory Work.”
Other times, other perspectives: a young woman who read some Weil last year referred to her as a self-hating Jew who was a clinical case of anorexia nervosa.
As a devoted reader of The New Criterion since its inception, I have occasional quarrels with it, but my differences don’t interfere with my thinking that you’re doing a terrific job.
Helene MacLean
Brooklyn, NY
Hilton Kramer replies:
Mrs. MacLean is certainly correct in citing Politics as the publication that introduced Simone Weil’s politicalwritings to American intellectuals. But I was also correct in pointing
