Letters to the Editor
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‘Alleged Intimidator’
As soon as I hear that commonsensical considerations are laid aside to justify decisions that do not make sense because the situation is just too complicated for the ordinary man on the street to understand, I say, “Uh, uh! Hang on to your wallet or pocketbook, whatever the case may be” [“Alleged Intimidator of Jewish Students Likely To Achieve Tenure at Columbia,” Jacob Gershman, New York, September 26, 2005].
I am speaking here of a case in point that I picked up in The New York Sun of the likelihood that an assistant professor of Arab studies at Columbia University, Joseph Massad, will be given tenure, in spite of the fact that in the spring term of 2002, he dispensed with his scholarly impartiality and threatened to throw a Jewish student out of his classroom for daring to defend Israeli military tactics used against Palestinian terrorists.
The article goes on to give a description of how complicated granting tenure is. It wearied me just to read it, for what it was meant to be, as it seemed to me, was hardly more than a smokescreen or pretense for scholarly objectivity and rectitude, as a cover for obscuring how thoroughly permeated the process is with politics.
For starters, the professor in question has written “academic essays” on “Zionism and Jewish Supremacy” and “The Ends of Zionism, Racism and the Palestinian Struggle,” and has put forth the idea that Israel is inherently a racist state and that the Palestinian resistance is a worthy cause.
It is the same genre of those that claim that America is a colonial and terrorist state as, for instance, George Galloway of Britain has done.
As another example of his scholarly credentials, he has also argued that Zionists are most guilty of anti-Semitism.
JULIUS GORDON
Douglaston, N.Y.
‘Dramatist of Black Experience’
Certainly, I regret the death of any man. But your critical effort to judge and compare August Wilson is flawed beyond repair [“August Wilson, 60, Dramatist of Black Experience,” Michael Kuchwara, National, October 3, 2005].
Thus you write: “Wilson’s astonishing creation, which took more than 20 years to complete, was remarkable … Not even Eugene O’Neill, who authored the masterpiece ‘Long Day’s Journey Into Night,’ accomplished such a monumental effort.”
What, the creator of the modern American drama, O’Neill, less accomplished? Is this a joke? Or rather, a flip comment? And how is it, in approaching any criticism of art, that effort or intention tops the thing itself. Never, it is the result that counts, the completed work of art itself, and not the narrative of its planning or its execution. Must we care deeply about what Charles Baudelaire dreamed, or ate, or planned? Or Jimmy Baldwin? That is footnote. Not the play.
Has anyone who judges drama not seen Jason Robards in O’Neill’s “A Touch of the Poet,” or heard O’Neill’s “Hughie” on the radio, or read “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” or “Ah, Wilderness!” and not come away awestruck at the staggering and prodigious artistic genius and its successes, the thrill of the audience, the delight of students and critics from around the world, that first put American drama on the world stage?
O’Neill emerged as the son of America’s most successful theatrical performer, but one successively broken by his own success. The young rebel dramatist endured a childhood of opulence and social climbing and addiction. His home base was his actor-father’s elaborate Monte Cristo “castle,” named for that great performer’s leading role, in melodrama.
But, the Count of Monte Cristo is a role that took him far down, in his own opinion, from his nobler heights and better roles of Shakespeare’s comedies, and tragedies.
“In the particularity of a thing, its universality resides.” The portrait of Tyrone in “A Touch of the Poet,” is the portrait in parallel of the elder O’Neill as the grandiloquent Irish immigrant. And now, probably, the greatest role on the American stage, for a leading man, about an American. Moreover, the composition and structure, and poetry of this part excels beyond all but a very few by any dramatist for the American stage. His only and belated competition in this realm: Tennessee Williams and Sam Shepard.
Can Wilson be in this class? How so? And is he honest, in artist terms, about his past, about the personal and historic narrative, which provides the superstructure for his creative energies, and enriches the dramatist’s vision, and idiom and poetry? And, to put is more crassly, where is the German father expressed in Wilson’s very idiosyncratic and massive Afro-focused body of only moderately successful works? Might the exclusion of the father and his influence, and that of the rest of American reality, have determined the weakness of the creative successes of Wilson’s grand plan?
Yes, I do think so. Wilson was in his career, more alike to the figure of Tyrone, in O’Neill’s superb and iconoclastic work of poetry and genius, than like the towering figure of the playwright, Eugene O’Neill himself. But in the crazed, magnificent end of “A Touch of the Poet,” Tyrone, through his son, does something so shockingly unexpected and great that he transforms the stage, making a great play magisterial.
In my mind, there are only two contestants for greatest American dramatist of the 20th century, and each is a poet, each with a lifetime body of work, and work that grew in power. These are O’Neill and Williams.
ALLEN TOBIAS
Brooklyn
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