The Popper papers, 18/4/1993 (original) (raw)
letter from Andrew Malcolm to Professor Sir Karl Popper, C.H., 18th April 1993
From: Andrew Malcolm, XXXXX, Brighton
To: Professor Sir Karl Popper
136 Welcomes Road,
Kenley,
Surrey CR8 5HH
18th April 1993
Dear Professor Popper,
My deepest thanks for your telephone call last Saturday and for your views on Making Names. It is an honour to have your criticism of the book at all, never mind your interest in its core idea and inspiration. It is great at last to have discovered someone else to whom my Electra seems to speak as she has spoken to me during these many (20+) dark years, and truly wonderful that that someone should be you. There have been few such others and none, of course, at Oxford, whose critics all liked everything but the play.
I have taken the liberty of summarizing your views in a letter (copy enclosed) to my one serious contact in the newspaper world, Laurence Marks of The Observer. He wrote to me recently saying that he was going to reopen the story (I think with a "Who runs OUP?" angle) and was interested in the news that editor Henry Hardy had, after all that dreadful betrayal, nevertheless written to me reaffirming his faith in the book. I am sure he will also be interested in your opinion and may write to you about it, or perhaps even ask to see you. If he does so, I do hope it will not trouble you unduly; he is a very decent and responsible man and, I think, an excellent journalist.
As I say in my letter to him, I look forward to a careful consideration of your charge of 'moral relativism' or 'apparent moral relativism', but at the moment my mind is both groggy and awhirl with distractions: my eye (and consequent reading) problem, my (first ever) trip to the USA, and a number of more mundane upheavals are conspiring to postpone my proper defence, probably until the end of May. Also, perhaps I should have from you a little more on exactly what you mean by that phrase (I have, of course, your Heraclitian version in The Open Society) and your own evidence for it in Making Names.
Insofar as a moral position at all can be culled from the book or from Cause's views, I thought I had been careful, for the sort of reasons you urge, not to make him a relativist, even though this in some ways apparently goes against his grain (I am thinking of the exchanges on pages 245-250). On the other hand, it may be that in the end your charges will stick and even that I will be happy for some of them to stick: I myself am probably more morally agnostic than Cause and I'm certainly more so now than I was ten years ago. However, my belief all through has been that the power of Electra (and the paradox of its authorship by Cause) would in a peculiarly powerful, accessible way eclipse any earlier inconsistencies, the potentially endless roller-coaster of argument, perhaps even argument itself, and do so in a way that is immune to untutored misinterpretation.
You may here be interested in an early exchange of letters I had with Henry Hardy, in which he wrote (18/3/85): "If we (OUP) have anxieties, they are about the longish slabs of straight science and about the interpolation of the play about Electra in the last chapter...", and I replied (23/3/85): "The remark I found most worrying in your letter was the suggestion that Electra goes on to long. As far as I am concerned, Electra is what the whole book is about. I would axe chapters 1-8 before I axed chapter 9. Chapters 1-8 are in a way just the footnotes to play-text." Alan Ryan later described Electra as being "an unnecessary excrescence".
At risk of sounding like a relativist: one cannot win!
Best regards and, again, my deepest thanks, Andrew Malcolm
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