Letters

To the Editors:

Stanley Kauffmann in his review of Stephen Becker’s Marshall Field III calls in question the author’s “expertise in the arts” by citing a statement of Mr. Becker on Field’s interest in music: “He may not have known a mordant from a pralltriller.” “Why should he have?” asks Mr. Kauffmann. “A pralltriller is one kind of mordant.”

As one who has been engaged in making performers understand, among other things, the important difference between the two ornaments, it is rather disconcerting to find the confusion fostered in a literary journal, of all places.

To equate the two ornaments is like saying that a question mark is “one kind of” period because they both come at the end of a sentence.

Sol Babitz

Ford Foundation Program of Studies in the Creative Arts

Los Angeles