To the Editor:

Jon Blair addressed several of the main issues in the matter of Anne Frank and Meyer Levin and reached reasonable conclusions (Book Review, Sept. 28). One issue he may not have seen in its entirety is the issue of Communist opposition to Levin. Paranoid Levin was (as perhaps are you, dear reader, and myself, the present writer), but he was not imagining things when he sensed that the Communists and their fellow travellers were quite active in show business and did seek to “universalize” tragedies that to others seemed not universal in the first instance, but Jewish. Lillian Hellman, we now know, had been a party member around 1940 (when Stalin was allied with anti-Semite number one, Adolf Hitler) and, standing close to her Communist lover Dashiell Hammett, she constantly tried to push this show or that (“The Lark” or “Candide”) in the direction of the Soviet world view. That this world view would come through disguised as a wishy-washy humanitarianism was no surprise to those who carried a banner stating “COMMUNISM IS 20TH CENTURY AMERICANISM.”

And there is an issue Blair ignored entirely: the aesthetic issue. Was Meyer Levin’s Anne Frank play any good? Was the Broadway Anne Frank play any good? In my view, neither one was a first-rate play, and both belonged, hopelessly, to middlebrow America and its representatives in show biz. If I am right in this, what conclusion should be drawn? That the diary should have been given to one of America’s finest writers to dramatize? Unfortunately America’s finest writers are not dramatists. And is the diary suitable material for drama? Is not any Anne Frank play that might be written likely to lack the power and the persuasiveness of Anne’s own prose? This question is not entirely rhetorical, but I am not going to attempt an answer to it.

Eric Bentley, New York