THE LILY WHITE BOYS
SIR,—lt's kind of Mr. Levy to attribute the phrase 'sitting on a fortune' to me, but it is, as your other correspondent, Mr. Holmes, says, an immemorial chdstnut; it's the usual way for a prostitute to for- mulate her bewilderment that not all women are prostitutes. I first heard it from Maurice Levinson, the most articulate of our angry young taxi-drivers. Then I put it at the head of my article in Encounter, and then Christopher Logue, not Harry Cookson, put it into The Lily White Boys. It does have a curious appeal. A book of mine was later reviewed in Encounter under the title Sitting on a Time Bomb, and the editor of the same maga- zine has just written and asked me for a piece on the future of socialism to be called Sitting on a Dwindling Fortune.
I wonder where it will appear next.—Yours
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