Absent friends
Sir : It may be that the worthy critic, Mr Henry Tube, in the SPECTATOR of 22 March, has never heard of either Strindberg or Ibsen—which might, possibly, account for the surprising quo- tation from John Berryman in his review of 'the week's thicket of Nordic novels':
`Swedes don't exist, Scandinavians in general do not exist, take it from there.'
One cannot help wondering, however, why anyone with such an obvious antipathy to Scan- dinavians should take on the boring job of reviewing their books.
The old British notion of fair play—in this case, unbiased criticism—seems to have got lost in the context; or perhaps Mr Tube does not consider that this, either, 'exists'?
Elspeth Harley Schubert La Garde Freinet, Le Var, France Henry Tube writes: My point was that cer- tain of the novels in question confirmed Mr Berryman's view; in her very natural annoy- ance that the book she translated was not admired, Miss Schubert seems to have over- looked the fact that in the same review I praised another Scandinavian novel, The Black Cliffs by Gunnar Gunnarsson, in the strongest possible terms.
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