4 APRIL 1969, Page 27

Enemy in our midst

Sir: Though it's hard to see how what Mr Seymour-Smith (28 March) calls my 'timid, donnish, obtuse .. . academic (albeit American) appreciation' of Wyndham Lewis could even be 'competent as a survey.' I want to make it clear that my book is not at all content to accord Lewis 'a modest place' in the groves of Academe. I don't 'welcome all modern "litera- ture"' and, as stated in the preface to my book and I hope, demonstrated elsewhere, I believe Lewis is an imaginative writer of masterly significance comparable to that of Joyce, Eliot, Yeats and D. H. Lawrence.