August 6, 1962
La plage des intellectuels. To Wellfleet Beach they came, they came; upon Wellfleet beach they sat - the academic intellectuals, the literary intellectuals. And among the rare Wilsons, there were Stuart Hughes and Harold W. Solomon, Lewis Coser and Arthur Berger, Henry Graff and Alex Inkeles and Bernard Malamud and Hassan Asbekan and Mischa Stille and Jason Epstein and John P. Marquand,Jr., and Daniël Aaron and Mary Grand and Dwight W. Webb and Lee Halprin. There were Joan Sinkler and Arthur Trottenberg and William Ward and Jacqueline Miller and James LeShay and Philip and Maggie Roth - not to forget Bill Goodman and Bede Hofstadter and James Newman ... and Arthur Schlesinger,Jr., and Richard Goodwin.
Upon the beach they sat, discoursing, and loud was the sound of battle, louder than the waves ...
August 7, 1962
What happened to the good old term, "man-of-letters"? It meant that letters stood for more than a craft — it meant the dominion for which letters had the key, over which it had authority. Now they are trying to make the critic a specialist in criticism, and even in certain kinds of criticism. The absolute division between critic as judge and the novelist as producer of literature means that the first has no real cultural authority and the second no real culture. [...]
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