Over to You, Mr. G. cl)

DE MO wri par hay

AR Mr. GRAVY Or GRONG,

he Editor, who seems a little out of sorts this rning, has just handed me your letter. You te : 'I have been a reader of your excellent ler for several years, but must confess that I .e grown weary of Strix.'

Wh me wa eve by wri bee ine suc the per rem goi cra agr U at hay situ

am sorry to hear this, but not surprised. ether you meant to do so or not, you gratified by using 'but' instead of 'and.' I hope this ; not a slip of the pen. It makes you sound r so slightly disappointed or even taken aback the weekly wave of ennui with which my tings now overwhelm you. Your revulsion has n a gradual growth. No doubt it was an ritable one, but you did not recognise it as Li from the first. Way back, your words imply, .e was a time when, reading my stuff, you -flitted yourself a smile. Perhaps you can still ember that distant Friday morning ,when, ig up on the 8.45, Cooper remar' ,;(1 what a ,hing bore Strix was and old Benchgrass !ed with him. 'Oh I don't know,' you said, link he's quite good, sometimes.' They looked eau oddly. You had the uneasy feeling of ing admitted to a taste which Top People ply did not have; it was as if you had said

that you liked whelks, or admired Diana Dors. Remember?

Perhaps you don't. It was a long time ago. But 1, sentimental fool that I am, like to dream of those vanished days when, alone in the lounge at `Ferndene,' you put your feet up on the pouffe and read through the Spectator, Strix and all, without a single muttered imprecation. The steadily decreasing pleasure I gave you can have been, at its zenith, only mild; but perhaps the memory of it deterred you from calling the Spectator, in that letter to its Editor, 'your other- wise excellent paper.' I like to think that it did.

Enough of these mawkish speculations. The question is : What is to be done about the objec- tion you have lodged? Three individuals are involved : you, the Editor, and 1.

To the Editor you recommend a course of action on which it is difficult, if not improper, for me to comment. Strix, you urge, should be got rid of and 'his place filled by someone more of the calibre of Taper.' Having consulted the dictionary, I should be the first to admit that both in internal diameter and in weight of character, standing, importance the Scourge of

Westminster is streets ahead of Strix; but con- tributors of even half my colleague's calibre cannot be hired as easily as chorus girls for a pantomime, and it may therefore be some time before the Editor is in a position to implement your proposal. This leaves us—you and me— with the responsibility for working put some kind of modus vivendi for an interim period of unforeseeable duration.

You indicate in only general terms the lines on which it might be possible for me to regain your approbation. It is the intermittent references to my private life—my tastes, my hobbies, my home, my children and my pets—which get you down. And not you alone; these matters, you write, 'though no doubt of absorbing interest to perhaps one per cent, of your readers, leave the remaining ninety-nine' per cent, quite unmoved.' You seem to have found particularly obnoxious my revelation of the facts that I possess a 'suit of evening dress' and employ a game-keeper.

I apologise, Mr. Grunz, for the tedium and irritation I have caused you. I assure you that my suit of evening dress is very old; so is my game-keeper. But this grovelling is getting us nowhere. I wish that you had made your require- ments a little clearer.

Supposing you were a professional writer, how, I wonder, would you set about the task of tossing off an essay every week? The world is full of topics far more important and far more fascinat- ing than your own affairs; but could you guarantee to churn out fifty morceaux in a year without making any allusion to those affairs? I believe you would find it difficult.

You might keep your record unblemished for several months, writing lucid, thought-provoking articles about the need for a Channel Tunnel, the future of zinc, the challenge of dry-rot, and the centenary of D. J. Endicott, who invented dog-tickets. But literature has never been satis- factorily insulated from life. Sooner or later a week would come when you would be tempted to hold over 'Redenationalisation : Whither?' and dash off a piece about the laughable mis- understanding which occurred when Cooper bOrrowed your mowing-machine on the evening of the whist-drive. For all your strength of character it would be the thin end of the wedge. Before you knew where you were people with illegible signatures would be writing to the Editor complaining that they had not the slightest wish to read about your bedsocks and • implying that they had no time for people who wore bedsocks,_anyway. So I fear that any promise I gave you to

exclude totally my daily life from my weekly writings would be worthless; and it looks, there- fore, as if I am powerless to assuage the indigna- tion which caUsed you to write to the Editor, and with which I deeply sympathise.

Of the three of us, only you are left in the

hunt for a solution to the problem you have raised. I suggest that the initiative is still yours. If Strix is temporarily irremovable by the Editor and permanently irredeemable by his own efforts, surely the remedy for your sufferings lies in your own hands. These sufferings are after all self- inflicted. To procure instant relief all you need to do is to stop reading the horrid stuff written by

Your obedient servant,

STRIX