SIR,—Mr. Constantine FitzGibbon attributes to me strange remarks e M a
Chelsea pub in November, 1942. I admire his memory and admit it is possible I was then in such a pub; I spent a week's leave from the Army with my brother and Dylan Thomas about that time. But even the combined effects of Chelsea pubs and Dylan would not, I think, have led me to remark that all Americans were Fascists. Certainly it was hardly a political dogma, if I did indulge in such a drunken generalisation. In 1942 I spent much time while stationed at Trowbridge in trying to fraternise with the newly arrived American troops, and had only the friendliest of feelings for them. True, since the 1920s I had, and still have, dire suspicions of the land of the conveyor-belt and extreme mechanisation as the vanguard of stereo- typing and conformist tendencies in our world. My catch-phrase, if ever uttered, was severely one of my own many private divagations and heresies and came from nowhere else than my own temporarily unbridled unconscious. I never heard anyone in the 1930s or the war years call the Americans Fascists, and Mr. FitzGibbon's political superstruc- ture erected on the catch-phrase is ingenious but absolutely baseless, Yours faithfully.
I ACK 1 INDSAY
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