Lowly Chronology
To the Editor:
May I add a footnote to David Daiches’s excellent article (“The Dangers of Literacy,” October)?
The passage he quotes indignantly from Sir Harold Nicolson after Barzun’s House of Intellect is even more “monstrous as history” than he supposes: “The Emperor Frederick II was wont to sneer at King René of Sicily for his addiction to the arts, obliging that monarch to indulge his gift for painting in the privacy of his own closet.” It also sins against that low, elementary, and exact part of the discipline of history called chronology. Frederick II lived from 1194 to 1250 and Rene over two hundred years later, from 1409 to 1480. It is as if one said that Louis XV despised President Eisenhower for using the brush, forcing the shamed President to paint in private.
Meyer Schapiro
New York City
_____________
Correction
To the Editor:
Although the article “Greenwich Village Challenges Tammany” by Dan Wakefield (October) correctly states that women “are relegated to a kind of ladies auxiliary” in De Sapio’s Tamawa Club, it mistakenly makes me a former participant in these “beam-supper-serving” activities. The fact is that I never belonged to Tamawa in any capacity, nor did I even contemplate the possibility of membership. What’s more, I have never even set foot in their clubhouse. Quite the contrary. I joined the Village Stevenson Committee at its formation meeting early in 1956 and was a captain during that campaign. I then became a charter member of the successor group, the Village Independent Democrats, and have served on its executive committee continuously from the first election.
Carol Greitzer
New York City
_____________
