"THE NAKED AND THE DEAD"
SIR,—A lot of nonsense has been talked and written recently about The Naked and the Dead, and it is distressing to find in England such bour- geois, old-maidenish hypocrisy as has been shown by the Sunday Times and now, alas, by the Spectator, about a book that has already sold, with- out this kind of comment, 150,000 copies in a country not remarkably free from either prejudice or intolerance.
Literary standards in this country are, one knows, appallingly low, but when responsible journals give approval to mildewed cant and self-indul- gent prudery, pandering, as Sir-Alfred Munnings did recently in a different matter, to the vulgarity of mob approval, it is time some kind of protest was made. Your contributor, Janus, should know well enough that the medium of books is writing, and that only criteria relevant to the quality and truth of that medium are important. The sensationalist irrelevancies of Janus's remarks are of the kind that give an exaggerated importance to a serious, though not a great, book. Certainly The Naked and the Dead will become important out of proportion to its real merits if it is judged as a test-case for obscenity. Unfortunately, its "repulsive, filthy, indecent and lewd" qualities are only those which any normal man will find in life, particularly during a war, and I would like to see every sixth-form boy read it, as a shock-absorbing preliminary to his mixing in the affairs
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