Mark van doren falls village connecticut

To the Editors:

In an article about Ignazio Silone in the March 14 issue of The New York Review, William Weaver states that &#;like many Americans of his time,&#; our father, Mark Van Doren, &#;was an admirer of the Fascist regime,&#; citing a review he wrote of Silone&#;s novel Fontamara for The Nation in This review was quoted by Maria Paynter in her book about Silone as indicating a political bias against the novel&#;s depiction of peasant life in Italy.

Van Doren&#;s review, though disapproving, was not so from any partiality to Mussolini but from a conviction that Silone&#;s indictment of his Fascist regime was a blatant work of propaganda that, while it might well be true (and probably was), could not convince anyone not already persuaded of the fact.

Its own bias could not save the book from being in Van Doren&#;s view a bad novel. This was a literary judgment, not a political one, as any reasonably fair-minded reader should be able to see.

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