Unconscionable
Sir: Several persons of my acquaintance, as it happens on both sides of the Atlantic and old enough to remember my long descrip- tion at the time, in the TLS, of Cyril Con- nolly's last long months of life, in which, on his hospital deathbed, he had stuck quite literally and successfully to his promise of years before: 'I regard it as my duty to cling to consciousness to the last possible moment,' have expressed to me their sur- prise to see in my recent review of a new biography the words 'but for him uncon- sciously long deathbed' (Books, 10 May). What I had in fact written, and the copy as sent now before my eyes confirms it, was `from his unconscionably but far from unconsciously long deathbed'. A rare indeed but nevertheless fearful slip-up by the lovely and by me loved ladies, all so many decades my junior, who man the liter- ary engine-room in Doughty Street.
Alastair Forbes
Château d'Oex, Vaud, Switzerland
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