Literary squabble
Sir: Not being un habitué du beau monde de belles lettres (how's that for franglais?) I am uncertain as to the code duello currently in vogue vis-à-vis literary squabbles. Nonetheless, I had believed such things to be handled otherwise than in the golden age of Tennyson and Swinburne, Whistler and Wilde, or even the silver period of Aldous Huxley and Middleton Murry, Had Leslie Thomas held his peace it might well be that representatives of his two million admirers, doubtless men of the highest discrimination and distinction, literary, moral, and sexual, would have leaped to his defence, and the vile calumnies of Oberon War (for surely to moonlight, this is the original spelling of your reviewer's name, from which all de partures are uncouth variants a would have been set at nought. t
But alas! Mr Thomas has jump his own gun. The mystae of his cul c are properly silent while the g thunders in his own cause, and I there is none to avenge the patron' r sing rebuke of Mr Leach. Perhap E Mr Thomas would do well to pon der another of Mr Waugh's obite dicta published in your magazine and which I took the liberty or entering in my commonplace boo against just such an occasion a this: ' Writers invariably feed the accidie which is an occupations hazard of their profession by reflec ting how unworthy and doltish ar the people who read their books.'
C. N. Gilmor
197 Woodstock Road, Oxford
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