[In the following excerpt, West annotates a letter he wrote to The Atlantic on July 4, 1991, after the magazine refused to publish a positive review of his novel, The Women of Whitechapel and Jack the Ripper.]

When word came that the Atlantic, enthusiastic about my work, had commissioned a long review of The Women of Whitechapel and Jack the Ripper, I was impressed; middle-brow America was getting to grips at last. Some time later I heard from the reviewer, Bill Marx, editor of the Boston Phoenix's Literary Supplement, that he had indeed written the review but that Jack Beatty, senior editor at the Atlantic, had killed it: he could not print an enthusiastic review, he said, of a novel devoted to the chopping up of women. In the mean-time, other reviews had pointed out the novel's severe feminism, most recently applauded by Andrea Dworkin in Ms. It was clear that Beatty and his colleagues hadn't read the novel, but were treating it as if it were by Brett Easton Ellis. The New York Times picked up the tale and published a story in my favor that many other newspapers printed in its entirety. Mr. Marx's phone began to ring, and it became clear that, although he might have no future at the Atlantic, he had a solid one elsewhere. In his letter of rejection, Beatty had actually told him his review was not dull enough for the Atlantic. Meanwhile the novel's author was wondering if they would have printed a negative review. My editor at Random House had told me, with some chagrin, early in May that a short nasty review would be forthcoming in the Atlantic. It seemed that this dull glossy was determined to get me at all costs, either long nasty or short nasty, and dull. Surely they wouldn't print both. In an early conversation with Marx, Beatty had said how much he admired my work; thereafter, presumably, word came down from above, or from outside, and my novel was beyond the pale. About the same time, Time killed a favorable review by R. Z. Sheppard, for reasons unknown.

Being deep-sixed by the Atlantic isn't as useful as being banned in Boston, but it will serve; the book has been selling at a good clip. I am left to wonder at the presence in American culture of the huge backside called puritanism. Trapped between the enervated matrons of National Public Radio, which is as out of touch with modern fiction as you can get, and the newfound hypocrisy of the Atlantic, we lash back as hard as we can. The country is drowning in dullness, cant, and flatulent pietism. The glossies go on printing the pale prose of the warhorses, conning their readers that they are reading the best in American culture, and the readers are too dumb to know to what an extent they're being taken. We shouldn't be surprised, then, if a supposedly respectable magazine pretends to a bogus feminism in order to suppress stylish prose. The age of minimalism is over, it seems, but that of timidity has only just begun.

I append my unpublished letter to the New York Times; declining to publish it, the Times behaved oddly, for some reason samizdating my letter, with my signature painted out, to (I presume) carefully selected people, one of whom sent my letter back to me, with enthusiastic comments in the margin. He thought I had sent it to him, but I hadn't sent copies to anyone. I suppose that's one way of tasting a scandal without getting your tongue burned. One of these days, I gather, all the relevant letters in this disgraceful episode will be gathered up and published. The sad thing is that a proscribed review attracted the attention of only one radio station, in Santa Monica (I discussed with Digby Diehl, literary editor of Playboy), and no TV stations at all. Restriction of freedom to praise (or to damn) is not news, evidently. If that is not the thin end of a pernicious wedge, I don't know wedges. Being beastly to the Ripper is one thing; being beastly to free opinion is quite another, closer to Naziism than to bestiality.

                                           4 July 1991

The Editor

The New York Times

Sir:

In Book Notes (July 3, 1991) Roger Cohen reveals why the Atlantic Monthly decided not to print a review it had commissioned of my recent novel The Women of Whitechapel and Jack the Ripper. The review was enthusiastic, as Mr. Cohen says, but the magazine's senior editor, Jack Beatty, vetoed it because, he said, obviously not having looked at the book, it was "about chopping women up." Since my novel is about an historical event, and not something I trumped up, then I have to conclude that the Atlantic is against reviewing—favorably—any book about a piece of history it finds unpalatable. According to this criterion, it would not allow itself to review favorably any book about, say, Hitler, the Gulag, or the Thirty Years War. In other words, the Atlantic wants a cozy world to deal with, and certainly not serious thinking about the atrocities of our own times, or times previous. This isn't merely schizophrenic, but daffy. I can only think that the magazine would have printed an unfavorable review of my novel because that is what, in the end, it did, commissioning the review from someone else, who, among assorted infelicities and inaccuracies, said that the novel was about two lesbians on a rug.

The Atlantic and its minions stand revealed in all their triviality and pollyanna nastiness. It is amazing to find a magazine that thinks it has to protect readers from the world. What it was really protecting its readers from in this instance was what several reviewers called the book's extreme feminism. When I was a student, the word we applied to such as Beatty was "prig," which we enunciated very carefully, lest in the shuffle of consonants it sounded like a term of abuse less precise. It is astounding to be told that the Atlantic's initial impulse had been to review a book by someone whose work it admired, only to kill the review according to criteria that would not hold up in a kindergarten. So-called political correctness as practiced by Beatty is only bigotry in a new guise; we do not need it and we should denounce it wherever we find it.

Yours,

Paul West